On Monday, we started one of the most crucial processes in your success: Crafting your Unique Selling Proposition - AKA Competitive Advantage, Positioning or Sales Message.

If you didn't brainstorm the NEED your enterprise fulfills and the COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE, go back and do it now: Finding Your Competitive Advantage. If you've got good answers to those two topics, let's press ahead.

Finding Your Uniqueness

If you know what NEED you solve for your potential audience, and you know what your COMPETITORS offer against that need, now you can decide YOUR unique strength.

Your competitive advantage will be strongest if you can:

• find a need that isn't being fulfilled

• Or find a need that can be fulfilled demonstrably better

• Some enterprises succeed by creating a need that the public didn't know it had

Looking at the list of three pains your audience has and your list of competitors, now try this exercise: Look for the hole.

Where is there a gap between what the public needs (a pain) and what your competitors offer? That's your sweet spot. That's where you can position yourself uniquely.

It can be something totally new: a product guaranteed to cure baldness.

It can be something better, faster, easier or cheaper than other alternatives: a product that grows hair 30% faster than Rogaine.

It can be a product that uniquely combines several benefits not offered together before: a product that works like Rogaine but that also conditions and thickens the hair you already have.

One of the secrets to establishing uniqueness today, with the Internet and world economy, is to find a small, under-served niche and dominate it. Become a specialist for a defined segment of the population: a product made for left-handed people, a dating service for introverts.

It needn't be a uniqueness that no one else can offer, though that's always good. It simply must be a uniqueness that no one else is claiming or promoting.

Of course, it must be a uniqueness that people care about (go back to our discussing of pain.) Making bacon-flavored mouthwash may not be a uniqueness anyone wants.

Brainstorm on that for a while and try as many variations as you can come up with - always keeping in mind that it has to be something your enterprise can live with and live up to.

On Friday, we put all of this together and craft your brand promise - the succinct and memorable statement of what you offer.

Join us then, or subscribe to Smart Marketing On Any Budget by email or RSS feed and I'll send the next article right to you. It's all free, why not go ahead?

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