#i was using a cheap pen from the auto store

[angryborzois]

random doodle i suppose

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

The Nirvana Effect

Stephen Jay Morris

9/11/2023

©Scientific Morality

The Early 60’s was an innocent time in America if you were White and middle class. Well, on the surface it looked like that. Every sin was a secret. Superficiality was as phony as a three-dollar bill. You were never allowed to express your true feelings because it was bad optics. Your clothes were a status symbol and so was your car. It was the second decade of the teenager and the first time that age groups were recognized as real people.

During the prior decade, Rock & Roll had burst onto the scene, scaring the adults to high heaven. Dance styles emulated sexual movements in bed. Black singers were sexualizing our pure-as-white-as-snow children.

Then, scandals ruined the music movements. Payola was one of them. Record A&R promoters would bribe disk jockeys to play their records. Jerry Lee Lewis married an underaged girl. Elvis got drafted into the Army. The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly all died in a fatal plane crash.

By 1960, the era of JFK Camelot had taken hold. Rock & Roll was replaced by teen idols—good looking chads with nice pompadours. The fossil fuel industry made millions selling hair tonic to horny, teenage, White boys who wanted to get laid. If you were handsome and could sing, you got an agent who got you a record contract. Then, you had a team of song writers who penned you a hit record. You appeared on teen dance shows and lip synched your hit song. Millions of teenage girls had your picture on their bedroom walls. You had it made! For four years, starting in 1959, teen idols dominated the charts. They ruled the airwaves.

Then, on February 9th, 1964, the Beatles debuted on the Ed Sulivan Show. Afterwards, Franki Avalon, Booby Rydell, and Fabian lost their fame. Some teen idols survived by starring in B movies; others ended up as auto mechanics. One teen idol saved his career by singing a song about an underage girl, “Come Back When You Grow Up, Girl.” For a while, Ephebophilia was a trend in popular music.

All in all, the has-been teen idols blamed their showbiz failure on the Beatles. The Beatles, however, reminded Americans what Rock and Roll was all about. They changed everything about popular music and culture. Long hair replaced slicked-back pompadours. Tennis shoes were replaced by Beatles boots. The Beatles had one Ephebophilia-themed lyric that went, “Well, she was just 17, you know what I mean,…” It was called, “I Saw Her Standing There.” American conservatives claimed the Beatles were after our White, virgin, maidens. Actually—it was the other way around!

Fast forward to the 90’s. The music industry was on top of the Fortune 500. Money and cocaine ruled the decade. The Punk Rock movement fragmented into various sects. Heavy Metal became androgynous; all the metal bands looked like the 70’s New York Dolls. Synthesizers and drum machines dominated the radio airwaves. The Grateful Dead became a traveling hippie band to Gen X goofballs who missed the Summer of Love. College radio stations became popular because commercial radio sucked ass. The so-called Rock stations were playing 70’s Heavy Metal music. Only college radio was the saving grace of real music. Kids knew how fake music had gotten, with the silly clothes and hairdos.

I used to live in Los Angeles, in the Fairfax district. There was a street called Melrose, a two-lane thoroughfare that stretched eastward from West Hollywood to East Hollywood. It had independent store fronts for stuff like plumbing supplies, paint, and carpeting. It also had a few small theaters for actors trying to make it to the big time. Then, suddenly, due to cheap rent, a myriad of shops popped up; trendy shops for the “dedicated followers of fashion.” Before long, the sidewalks became crowded with teens in costumes defined as goth rockers, new romantics, mods, punk rockers, and heavy metal geeks. West Melrose Avenue became a mixture of England’s 1966 Carnaby Street and the Sunset Strip of the same year. I stopped going there.

Everybody became alienated by the superficiality of music. Instead, kids were being drawn to Speed Metal and Hard Core Punk.

Then, up in Aberdeen Washington, a new band appeared. They looked like early 70’s Hippies. They played a mixture of Punk and Heavy Metal. They didn’t give a shit about their appearance. They had no money for nice clothes or haircuts. It was because of this that Rock critics gave them the moniker, “grunge.” They were “Nirvana.” After they hit the scene, like Detroit in the 60’s, Seatle became the new capital of Rock. The Seattle bands took Rock music back to their roots!

Overnight, nobody hung out on Melrose anymore. Glam Rock clubs closed, chicks with dicks bands disappeared, and Techno Pop vanished from radio.  Subsequently, these types all blamed Nirvana. So-called “Alternative Rock” was born. Then, Gangster Rap came crashing into the youth’s consciousness. Grunge took over, as did Speed Core bands. Rock was back! But not to stay; It lasted just 10 years.

A lot of 80’s musicians blamed Nirvana for their unemployment. They have themselves to blame. There is more to Rock and Roll than drug orgies, outlandish outfits, and fancy guitars. It was all about the music. 80’s rock stars wanted glory and fun, but not the hard work of creativity and artistry of the music.

Thank God for the Beatles’ and Nirvana’s revolutions. What will be next?

Big mystery!

[tetedurfarm]

Do you have any advice for getting into keeping rabbits? I was looking into getting a couple for meat production and possibly starting to learn to tan pelts but I don’t want to get confused over all the conflicting info on the internet about wire flooring and such things.

ugh, it’s so frustrating, isn’t it?  with pretty much every other animal you can just google “how to raise x” and get tons of good advice, but the rabbit results are dominated by HRS forums that will crucify you for even mentioning breeding, much less meat production. 

so here’s some points i’ve learned from experience to help you out:

1. wire flooring is not evil.  in fact it’s great.  it’s clean, it’s sanitary, there’s airflow if you use it in a hutch, and if you do it right you won’t have foot problems (unless you’re raising rex or giant breeds, but even then there’s easy fixes like my lattice mats.)

here’s what you’re looking for:  1″x0.5″ grid 16g - 14g wire.  if you order your cages from a manufacturer like Bass Equipment (my preferred cagemaker,) or Klubertanz, this will come standard.  if you make your own cages or buy from a feed store, it’s a bit more hit and miss.  

make sure the half-inch wires are on top when you build your cages, so the weight is distributed properly:

see how the smaller gaps are “on top”?

vs this side.  (shoutout to me having like twenty cages all in pieces in my living room to get these nice reference pics ;p)

i also recommend you get your floors galvanized after weld; they’ll last a long longer that way!

–

2. babysaver wire is called that for a reason.  babysaver is when there’s a 1x0.5 grid near the bottom of a cage.  it’s there to keep kits from falling out of the cage, and helps prevent predators from easily pulling kits out.

this is a cage with babysaver.  it does what it’s meant to.  i use these for my doe cages, and even if a kit gets dragged out of the nest, as long as i find it in time, it’ll survive because it didn’t roll out and get snatched by something off the ground.

vs one without:

i use these for bucks and my growout pens for older kits.  they are cheaper than babysaver cages, but it’s worth the money to keep your babies safe.

–

3. invest in a good pair of j-clip pliers.  even if you buy prefab cages, often times they’re cheaply made and you’ll need to fill in gaps so they don’t fall apart so easily.  it’s also good to keep them around just because, because after a while the clips can get rusty and fall off, and you’ll need to replace them occasionally.

good on left, not so good on right.  the ones on the left cost my about fifteen bucks from my favourite hilariously-named rabbit supply site:  Rabbitnipples.com.  the ones on the right were like $8 at my local feed store.  so a significant markup, but VERY worth it.  the good pliers are more comfortable to hold in your hand, and make much nicer/more secure crimps than the cheap ones.  i often have to crimp clips twice or more with cheap pliers, because of the way they’re shaped:

the good pliers have a solid mouth that make a clean loop with no pointy outy bits.  and they can double as removers if you mess one up!

this is topical because i lost my good pliers and had to order new ones, and in the meantime i built four cages and my palms are so sore/bruised from the cheap pliers.  don’t be like me.

–

4. vets kinda aren’t worth it.  one of the things you’ll see on HRS sites is that vets are ABSOLUTELY necessary.  i don’t hate vets, but they chronically have no idea how to treat rabbits, often making them worse or causing them to die because they administered a med that’s safe for cats but not rabbits.  they also often subscribe to HRS rhetoric that pellets are evil and rabbits should only eat hay and greens, which is…wrong (i’ll get to that in a minute.)  if you can find a good vet it may be worth it for one or two rabbits, but once you get into the double-digits, it’s just not worth it.  exotics vets are expensive, and i can’t afford $50 just for a consult for thirty rabbits.  learn how to treat everyday ailments like sore feet, wounds, abscesses, eye infections, stasis/bloating, and birthing issues on your own.  i suggest joining up with a meat rabbit forum (i like rabbittalk.net,) and going through their articles on rabbit medicine and herbology.  if i can’t fix it myself, that rabbit is soup.  and if a rabbit chronically has health issues, don’t use it as a breeder.  bad immune systems/teeth/feet/etc are hereditary.

–

5. things will die.  get used to it.  with livestock comes deadstock.  if you can’t handle animals dying, including newborn babies, or having to euthanize animals (including newborn babies,) don’t get livestock.  if you can’t look your food in the eye and thank it for its sacrifices, then don’t get livestock.  this is not a place for bleeding hearts.

–

6. don’t breed a new doe by herself.  rabbits are running on hormones only for their first litters, and sometimes they mess it up.  having an experienced doe kindle alongside her that you can foster to gives the new doe’s kits the best chance of survival in case she doesn’t get it quite right.  this ties in with the last point, though - you’re gonna have dead babies.  sometimes you have to make the babies dead yourself, because mama screwed up and the foster already has eight of her own.  not everyone has a n’rithaa who can nurse nineteen and not break a sweat, and the kindest thing to do is pick the strongest and cull the weaker ones so mama doesn’t have so many to feed.

–

7. feed them pellets until you know what you’re doing.  pellets are formulated to be perfect nutrition for rabbits.  they are the healthiest option imo, and definitely the easiest.  it can take a few tries to find a feed that works for you, but they’re generally not too expensive and if your animals keep weight and make babies, then they’re fine.  trying to feed fodder only is expensive, time-consuming, and often ends up with animals not getting enough vitamins that cause bone issues, bloating, and tooth problems.  i am 100% convinced this is at least half of the reason why you see a lot of house rabbits that go into stasis a lot and have bad teeth.  (The other half is they’re always poorly bred byb rabbits, but that’s another conversation.)  fodder can be done well, but unless you really have the time/resources to grow appropriate plants or have a lot of pasture to graze on (and no worms/cocci or other bad things in your soil,) pellets and hay are perfect.  especially if you show.

–

8. if you wanna get into tanning, just get a synth tan, and don’t expect fur rabbits to be an ideal meat producer.  fur doesn’t prime until the animal is about six months old, and typically you’ll be slaughtering them for meat around 12 or 16 weeks.  so if you want to produce fur, either stop caring about the quality of your hides, or get ready to spend more in feed while you grow them to prime.  i know it’s popular to use rabbits as a dual-purpose animal, but you need to set expectations lol.  so far i’ve found rabbits that are half rex produce really nice furs before “prime” age, but they still take longer to grow out than my meat-specific rabbits.  dual purpose really just means “not that great at one or both purposes.”

also just don’t even bother with brain/egg tanning and get you a synth tan like Rittel’s or Trubond.  “natural” tans have too much of a learning curve, require smoking to make them waterproof, and the results are subpar.  synth tans are cheap, easy, usually safe to put down a train if you’re on city water/toss outside if you’re on septic, and will produce a waterproof skin that’ll last forever.  

also alum isn’t a tan.  if you get it wet it’ll start rotting again.  if you wanna make clothes or rugs, use a real tan.  please.  i beg of you.

–

9. auto-water systems are godly but don’t waste your money on expensive ones.  if you don’t know this, i’m disabled, and i like to make things easy on myself so i’m not having to fill 39458639458 bottles a day.  it sucks.  auto-water systems are SUPER convenient because you only have to refill the reservoir every few days and keep an eye on the nipples to make sure they aren’t clogged.

the problem is:  they leak.  all the time.  forever.  when i first got started i used cheap water nipples from amazon and was annoyed at how often they’d start leaking, or were leaking right out of the package.  so i switched to the more expensive Edstrom system that you can order online from places like rabbitnipples.com, bunnyrabbit.com, the bean farm, and bass equipment.  problem is, those leaked just as bad, and the edstrom water nipples cost FIVE DOLLARS EACH.  when half the nipples leak directly out of the box, i’ve just wasted $20+.  at least the ones from amazon are like $20 for a bag of 100.  if they’re all gonna leak anyway, at least i won’t go broke having to replace them all.

–

i can’t think of anything else off top my head so i’mma cap it here.  i’ve been doing this for five years and learned many many things the hard way so hopefully you won’t have to!

[mrfog5]

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[wheeloffortune-design]

i don’t want to support the thread but i just can’t stand people who are all ‘quit your day job to do art! art is more important than everything!!!’

like, first of all, dude only wants one job? weak. come at me with your one job. 

THINGS HAVING A STEADY JOB ALLOWS ME TO DO

- Eat. Pay my rent. Pay my electricity bill. Because over here it’s IMPORTANT to heat your house, y’know. - Actually pay for the materials I use, may it be sketchbooks, pens, Adobe programs. - Pay for my buss pass! So I can get places and not be stuck inside forever! - Provide me with insurance to see the specialists I need to see for my health! - Pay for a gym membership because I can’t sit idle all day long and exercising is important! -  Feed my pets! - Acquire material for my research! It’s not always write write write, sometimes it’s research research research! - Make auto promotion! From having a good online store that sells my art to just being able to go to writer events, and also participating in conventions! Artist Alley tables aren’t cheap, and neither is printing!  - IDK, go see a movie with my siblings once in a while?!? Because being an artist doesn’t mean having to forfeit being a human being?!? 

also dude is mad people accuse him of being privileged but you can’t dissociate his whiteness and his maleness from his success, y’know. 

ARGGGGHHH

[lakelandseo]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[nutrifami]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[bfxenon]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[thanhtuandoan89]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[kjt-lawyers]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[gamebazu]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

https://ift.tt/2TmbDHf

[camerasieunhovn]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[noithatotoaz]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[ductrungnguyen87]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

[epackingvietnam]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[drummcarpentry]

How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC + UGC

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

Website masthead

Website homepage

Website about/mission page

Website contact page

Website location landing pages

Website footer

Website title tags

Website meta description tags

Website Header tags

Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

Blog posts

Email campaigns

Email signatures

Google My Business description

Google Posts

Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

Social media profiles

Social media posts

Digital ad campaigns

Guest post profiles

Storefront or in-store signage

Billboards

Radio and television ad campaigns

Print news campaigns

Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

Business cards

Company vehicles

Employee apparel

Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.