Conventional marketing wisdom will tell you that novelty is the great attention grabber and to go hunt for some sort of innovative uniqueness in your product or service offering.
It’s good advice but with the relentless rise of new (and not so new) products, services and competition, identifying a meaningful USP, can feel beyond your reach.
Frustratingly, this means that no matter how good you are at what you do or how highly regarded by your clients, gaining the recognition you deserve can be a real challenge.
That is of course, if you stick with conventional wisdom.
It’s Time for a New Kind of U.S.P
To gain the attention of your market, you need something that has the power to penetrate the din.
Something that resonates. That demands investigation and exploration.
Something that has power irrespective of channel, budget or brand because it can’t be ignored.
What is that thing?
It’s your Sweet Spot.
Where Do You Shine?
Babe Ruth was one of the greatest players in the history of baseball. Though he was an outstanding pitcher he was best known for his batting skills and ability to hit a home run.
To help scouts identify future greats, Babe Ruth was studied by psychologists to see if they could determine what made him, him.
According to the results, ‘his eyes and ears function more rapidly than those of other players; that his brain records sensations more quickly and transmits its orders to the muscles much faster than does that of the average man. The tests proved that the coordination of eye, brain, nerve system, and muscle is practically perfect, and that the reason he did not acquire his great batting power before the sudden burst at the beginning of the baseball season of 1920, was because, prior to that time, pitching and studying batters disturbed his almost perfect coordination.’
Babe Ruth’s ability was the result of a number of important factors coming together to create a sweet spot.
The same is true of your business.
According to Wikipedia, a Sweet Spot is:
‘The place where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort…’
In business terms, it’s the place where you have the greatest impact on the lives of your clients. Not because of what you do but because of the way you do it.
It’s a combination of your experience, expertise, passion and process.
It’s everything that makes you, uniquely you.
This is a seismic shift.
Instead of feature driven, your USP becomes your unique ability to help a niche overcome their specific problems and achieve the results they want.
It’s powerful because it’s not only distinctive to you but also has real meaning for the people you want to attract.
A Simple Process for Finding Your Sweet Spot
We all have a place or places where we really shine.
Where we consistently smash it out of the park.
To find your Sweet Spot(s) simply ask yourself the following questions:
- What are your greatest achievements and why were they meaningful to your clients’ lives both professionally and personally?
- What was the thinking, systems and processes you used that enabled you to achieve these results?
- What were the specific problems your clients were struggling with and why you so effective at helping to overcome them?
- What caused these problems to manifest and what would happen if they weren’t addressed?
- Who are the people that have these problems, what do they do and where do they work?
What this process allows you to do is focus your thinking.
Instead of trying to attract the largest possible audience, you instead identify a specific group of people that you’re supremely adept at helping and vitally, have clear evidence of doing so.
What’s more, it doesn’t just focus your mind but also your marketing activity into a space where you can shine so brightly that it burns away the fog of noise between you and your market.
Why You Should Integrate Your Sweet Spot with Your Content Strategy
From a marketing perspective this process is a revelation because it gives you compelling hooks from which to develop your content.
Instead of bland generality, you content moves into a place where you can make a real difference.
You fall away from played out principles and focus on real problems and the provision of specialist strategies that really work.
When you do this, your content becomes much more than a marketing activity.
It becomes the beating heart of your business.
It’s the thing that you’re known for.
ATTENTION!
To understand why your Sweet Spot is so powerful for inspiring your content creation, there are a few things you should know about the nature of attention:
- Attention, the process of concentrating on one thing, while disregarding another, is extremely selective. It has to be. Were it not, our minds would likely short-circuit from the continuous stream of sensory input we experience on a daily basis
- There are two types of attention. Stimulus-driven attention, an automatic response to captivating changes in our environment for example a loud noise or sudden movement and goal-driven attention, which we use to filter the things we feel will enable us to move forward with our lives.
- Stimulus-driven factors only have a very short life span, whereas goal-driven factors sustain our attention for much longer.
So if you want to grab your audience’s attention and sustain it, you first have to stop them in their tracks and then follow through with something that really speaks to what they want and more importantly, the things that are holding them back.
This is the reason why compelling content is so powerful at capturing your audience’s attention. It comprises both these elements.
- Strong headlines that demand attention
- Deeply meaningful copy that sustains it
The only question you have to ask yourself now is…
What do you want to be known for?
(I hope that you’ve found the article useful. If you have, I’d love it if you’d share it with your favourite social networks below!)
[…] Creating content that captures your market’s attention is a sound tactic but is far from a small undertaking. […]