How to Create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) + Examples

Identify Your Target Audience

It’s important to first choose and understand the audience segment you want to target with your USP. That way you can pick a differentiator they want and write it in a way that speaks to their interests and values. To form a solid understanding of your audience, create a customer profile that highlights your existing or target audience’s demographics, cognitive attributes, pain points, and more.

Here are the seven steps for creating a customer profile: 

1. Select a Group of Customers to Profile: Pick a segment of your current or target audience to profile. It’s often smart to profile audiences for different products and services separately.
2. Pick Your Customer Profile Categories: Include demographics, psychographics, behavior, firmographics, and/or geographics, plus any industry-specific categories, to get intel that will help you sell and market to your buyers.
3. Gather Demographic and Firmographic Data: Uncover common socioeconomic traits, plus business-related data points if you’re a B2B seller.
4. Study Your Customer Base’s Behavior: Do research to figure out how your current or target customers usually learn about, buy, and use your product or ones like it.
5. Compile and Analyze Psychographics: Use surveys, focus groups, or other strategies to understand customers’ common values, interests, beliefs, and other cognitive attributes.
6. Collect Geographics and Technographics: Understand where your customers live or work, plus which tools they use and how if you’re with a B2B business.
7. Build a Buyer Persona: Build a categorical description of a single individual who would be an ideal buyer, including their motivations, fears, challenges, and more. 

A completed customer profile will give you plenty of intel to work with as you write your USP. Plus, you can use that profile to create your buyer persona. Having this document close by can help you write your USP, since you can pretend you’re writing it directly to them, which can keep you focused on making the language interesting to your audience.

Find Common Buyer Frustrations With Your Industry

It’s time to start gathering research data so you can choose the most unique and desirable value proposition to communicate. Often, a good place to start is with frustrations your buyers in your industry typically have with your competition. They might have pain points with the buying process, price, durability, or other factors that you can address in your USP.

Below are the main ways to uncover common customer frustrations: 

• Send Out a Survey: Send a survey to people who fit your customer profile description and ask them what they wish was different about your industry.
• Talk to Your Team: Ask other sales reps if they’ve heard any customer complaints about the competition during discovery or sales calls.
• Go Through Your Notes: Review your CRM call notes to spot any frustrations your leads and customers seem to mention frequently.
• Read Industry Publications: Read research papers and articles that clue you into the unmet needs of potential buyers in your niche.
• Look at Review Sites: Check out your competition’s Google and Facebook reviews and look over industry-specific review sites to find complaints often cited against your competitors. For example, G2 is great for finding software reviews. 

As an example, perhaps NYC renters are fed up with poor service from their rental management companies. If a property manager was known for their exceptional service, that’d make a great value proposition for their USP. Challenging industry norms that people dislike is a great way to spark interest in potential leads and gain their trust. 

Conduct Interviews With Current Customers or Ideal Buyers

If you're having trouble thinking of ways you differ from the competition, just ask your customers. They’ll happily tell you why they chose you over the competition, and their answers can clue you into your most valuable key differentiator. If you’re a new company and don’t have customers just yet, you can still interview potential buyers in your niche.

Regardless, follow these steps to conduct interviews:

1. Set Up Interviews With Happy Customers: Schedule at least 10 interviews with your happiest customers or people who fit your customer profile. These are the types of customers you’ll want to attract with your USP.
2. Engage in Small Talk: Open the conversation with some small talk to get everyone in a good mood and strengthen your relationship.
3. Ask Questions That Help You Write Your USP: Ask them why they chose you, what their favorite benefits are, what you helped them accomplish, what pains you removed, and more.
4. Thank Them for Their Time: Lastly, close out the call with a thank you. If they’re your customer, ask if there’s anything you can do for them. 

After engaging in these interviews, you might find that a lot of your customers said your software was the most customizable tool they’ve come across. That’s great material for a USP. Conducting interviews is a reliable approach for finding long-lasting value or unique feature value propositions.  

Investigate Your Competitor’s Products & Services

Another way to find a differentiating value proposition is by reviewing your competitors’ comparable products or services and looking for any gaps in their offerings. A CRM software company might discover that all of its competitors make users pay for a valuable feature they offer in their free plan. Communicating that lowest-priced value proposition could be their USP.

Pick Your Two Most Intriguing Value Propositions

Once you’ve gathered your data, decide on one or two value propositions that are most unique to your business and the most valuable to your target audience. We say two because some businesses combine them into one USP. For example, the Pipedrive example we called out above highlights that it’s easy to use and built especially for salespeople:

Remember, the value proposition(s) you choose should be something your customers strongly desire and your competition does poorly or not at all. Next, you’ll turn this into two rough first drafts that you can test against each other. 

Craft First Drafts of Your USP

Now that you have your value proposition, write out two rough first drafts, each expressing the value proposition in a different way. That way you can test them against each other later on. There are some best practices you can keep in mind that will guide you in this attempt.

Here is a framework for crafting your USP:

• Keep It to 4-8 Words: You only have so much time to grab the attention of your buyers, so stick to a few words. If you have to go over in the first draft, you can trim it down in the next step.
• Use a Strong Action Word: Sometimes it’s good to start it with a verb indicating what your customers get to do — e.g., “try on five pairs at home.”
• Express Your Value Proposition: Make sure you either explicitly state your value proposition (“most durable belt out there”) or implicitly state it (“your grandkids will wear it”). Often, inferring the value will create a more memorable USP.
• Use an 8th Grade Vocabulary: Avoid using big, flashy words that risk confusing your audience. Stick to basic words that are short and punchy and have fewer syllables.  

Don’t worry about being perfect. Just get your thoughts on the page. Because the first attempt will likely lack the zing a USP should have, it’s best to edit these first drafts in the next step and add some flair for memorability. 

Revise Your Drafts Into Memorable Copy

Now edit your rough drafts to create two short and memorable final USPs. Also, try to capture your brand’s voice in the final drafts. One of the best ways to gain inspiration for your USP is to expose yourself to other exceptional USPs. Study them and figure out why they work. Then apply those principles to your own. Later on, we offer examples and share takeaways that explain their success. 

A/B Test Your USPs

Once you’ve written two functional USPs, test them against one another using an A/B testing process. That means you’ll split your ad campaign or email marketing audience into two and each will receive a different USP. Whichever performs better will be the USP you use going forward. Typically, better performance means higher conversion rates on the ads or web pages that host your USP. 

Here are some steps to follow to test your USP: 

1. Create Variations: For example, make two landing pages for the same product that are the same in every way except for the USP.
2. Split Your Audience: Evenly and randomly split traffic to the page or advertisement.
3. Track the Metrics: Often, the metric you’ll want to track is conversions, as this will tell you if your USP is successful.
4. Pick the Winner: Choose the better performing USP. 

Even after you’ve landed on a USP, it’s important to test it against other USPs from time to time. Or, you could simply tweak a few words and see if it performs better. That way you’ll always be moving towards optimization. For more, check out The Traffic Company’s beginner guide to A/B testing.

Build Out Your Sales Pitch

Your USP should be included in your sales pitch so that prospects understand why you’re better than the competition. A sales pitch is a one- to two-minute value explanation that salespeople give to leads in an effort to convert them into customers. In the sales pitch, your USP will take a sentence form rather than the slogan form it assumes in your advertisements.

Here’s an example of a sales pitch with the USP: “Unlike other {Your Company Type}, we offer {Unique Value Proposition}, so our customers {Avoid/Receive} {Pain or Benefit}.” For more on sales pitches, read our guide on how to create and deliver a sales pitch. 

Add Your USP to Your Website & Ad Copy

Place your USP front and center on ads and web pages that need to sell your solution to the customer. That’s often the home page, product or service page, and landing pages. Often, companies will make it the headline of these pages or advertisements. Take a look at what your competition is doing for some ideas of where to put your USP. When you’re on the fence about adding it, it’s best to err on the side of inclusion. Show that winning phrase off.