What A Marketing USP Is And How To Apply A USP To Specific Content Campaigns For Targeting

why is this important:

tactical, great tool for sales and tackling various market segments, can be immediate, will change-possibly often as product and market adapt, mature and react to competitive pressure

What Is A USP?

It stands for Unique Selling Proposition. It was 'articulated' as a selling tactic by Rosser Reeves at the Ted Bates & Company Advertising Agency in or around the 194s or early 1950s.

Note the key word in the phrase is selling. Is selling a strategic or tactical endeavour? Right, it's tactical and nothing but.

What that should tell you is that we're not talking about outcomes or goals. With a USP the focus has finally moved from how the business does what it does - to how your stuff does what it does. All the focus of any USP is on the product or service, and usually the USP highlights a feature and demonstrates the benefit of that feature.

Note that a USP is a tactical subset of positioning. With any USP, the positioning here occurs in the more populary understood concept of positioning a product in the consumer mind. What Ries and Trout did was expand on the USP to move the concentration of focus from the product (USP) to the mind of the consumer (Ries and Trout "classic" positioning).

I think that's why there's so much confusion about these terms. My hope is that all of my prospects and leads will share a common terminology and we'll have a better understanding of what we're talking about when we meet.

Parity products have the greatest need to employ a USP for differentiation. A great example is where a parity category like telephone service or toothpaste are segmented by demographic and each brand chooses more or less the appeal that seems to most compelling to the target. In my opinion this is a market approach based upon product development that sometimes has nothing to do with creating ideal customers by providing what customers want.

The most beneficial aspect of the USP is using it to create laser-like focus in selling arguments to different customer segments or customer personas. A sales person might have within their territory.

Your sales person is making a sale to Washer-User Guys for 87 million washers. Your items are a higher quality that what they're currently using and are more expensive - though the additional expense is offset by fewer returns and replacements.

Your person can use various USPs as she moves through the buy cycle, from engineering to manufacturing to finance to the C-Suite. Her USP will be product focused on specifications for engineering; be benfit focused on higher qulity and less breakage for manufacturing; be lower cost per unit as expressed through dollarization for finance; and be revenue and cost/margin focused for the C-Suite.

And that brings me back to each component of positioning. As you move lower from the C-Suite to hands-on management, your selling tactics change emphasis and focus from very strategic and long-term to very tactical and short-term here and now. And that's exactly what your content marketing campaigns need to reflect.

There are target audiences and target buying activities that content marketing strategy need to and can be designed to address.

Download the content marketing strategy Executive Atlas containing strategy maps for and directions for positioning, campaign strategies and branded content.