“Great minds think alike” isn’t as helpful a saying as it may at first seem. But how about “Great minds don’t think alike” – might that have more potential to help you identify your USP, recognise your strengths and stand out from the crowd?
It’s time to check in on what makes you and your business unique – starting with celebrating how brilliant it is that great minds don’t think alike!
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In today’s video, I’m going to be talking about why if you’re great, you’re not thinking like everyone else – and how that can be brilliant for your business.
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What Defines a Great Mind?
“Great minds think alike” – if you really think about this common saying, it doesn’t make any sense. If great minds all thought alike, wouldn’t everyone with a great mind be coming up with the same ideas?
I would argue that great minds don’t think alike. Great minds are able to conjure up wonderfully novel, new, and unique ideas that other people haven’t thought of before.
Think Novel, New and Unique – and Don’t Compete on Price!
In marketing, the novel, the new, and the unique is what’s going to make you stand out from the crowd. And these qualities give your business, your products, and your services an edge that customers are willing to pay extra for.
If you aren’t talking about what makes you unique from your competitors, there’s a good chance you’ll end up competing on price to at least help you stand out in one appealing way. But competing on price sucks! And once you start competing on price, it becomes a race to the bottom. You start on a slow downward spiral, lowering and lowering your price until you’re no longer profitable and your business becomes unviable.
If all that differentiates you is competing on price, it can literally suck the lifeblood from your business.
Find Your Unique Selling Point
If this all feels a little worrying, I recommend you consider Step 2 of my five-step approach to creating a marketing strategy for your business. Step 2 is all about defining your unique selling point (USP). It’s important! You need to figure out what makes you and your business unique. You need to differentiate yourself from your competitors so that you stand out in the best possible ways – ways that don’t involve pricing your offering under its true value.
Stop looking at your competitors and copying what they do; instead, start seeing what they’re not doing. Look at the negative space around what they’re offering – what is missing, and where is there an opportunity for you to set yourself apart from the crowd?
Communicate Your USP
In my video What is a USP, I suggest that an ideal combination of factors contributes to your USP:
- What you do well.
- What your customer actually wants.
- What your competitors do not do well.
Now, I’m adding an extra element to this final point. Ask yourself, “What are your competitors not talking about?” Whether your competitors are doing things well or not, they may not be talking about it – and that’s a green light for you to start talking about what you do so well.
That’s what marketing is all about – communication. It’s about being able to tell people, “This is what we do, and it’s amazing!” It’s time to shine a light on what makes you unique.
Experience your Own Light-bulb Moment
For some people, discovering what they are not talking about and should be sharing is a revelation. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a great conversation with someone about their business, and they suddenly realise they haven’t been sharing the things that make them unique on their website. It’s a true light-bulb moment – a point at which their marketing strategies start to fall into place.
If you don’t understand what your unique selling point is or you’re not sure that the selling points you’re using are all that unique, please do get in touch. I love helping people experience that light-bulb moment when they realise, “Oh, this is what we should be talking about!”