I want to sell you a piece of carbon (the same material graphite is made from) that has been hardened under high temperatures under extreme weight. It won’t help you accomplish any tasks, can be reproduced synthetically and it will cost you more than your months paycheck. In fact, I’ll charge you a year’s paycheck for a big piece.
Interested?
Tiffany billboard
The reason why you should buy that piece of carbon is beautifully illustrated in this Tiffany poster. It is positioned across the Goldman Sachs offices in New York. Every day when a rich banker exits his office at dusk he is reminded that even a busy man like him can get a woman to look at him like that.
Of course I don’t sell you a piece of carbon. I don’t even sell you a beautifully cut diamond. I sell you the promise that the poster holds, a beautiful story. One where you are happy, special and where you are loved.
Now you know why you should buy a Tiffany diamond.
But why should anyone buy your product? And why should they not buy it from your competitor?
Chances are you already are special and remarkable in what you do , but do you communicate this to your customers at the moment they are making their purchase decision? Or perhaps there is something that the market is hot for and could give you a flood of customers, but you aren’t aware of?
Ask yourself a couple of simple questions
- What do you do? More importantly, what do you do exceptionally well? When you look at your competitors, what do you excel in. What do they excel in? Make a list.
- Who are your customers? What do they want, what do they need? We’ve blogged before on how you can find your target audience. Match their wants and needs to the things you could provide exceptionally well. That will be your niche. You will clearly message the things you do better than anybody else, and you will message it to the people who need that difference the most.
- Change the way you do business. Change everything about your business to dominate your niche. Build a profile of your customer that clearly tells you where they hang out, what they read, what they notice. Use this knowledge to advertise where your audience will see your advert, and message your unique benefit clearly, so that they understand they need to check out your business.
If you engage in this type of thinking, you can change the rules of the game. Even a small company can take a big market share from a big company, because you don’t fight them on their turf, but on a turf they haven’t even considered yet.
Marketers who want to sound smart call this ‘developing a unique selling proposition’. That is a fancy term for finding out what people want (that others perhaps overlooked) and how you can deliver on one of their needs in a way that is uniquely yours. You do this every day in many ways: for your spouse, your friends and now for a wider community of clients…
