The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits

HOW TO USE YOUR USP TO CREATE A SUCCESSFUL ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

The best promotional copy focuses on one Big Idea and one Big Promise.

The Big Idea is the main idea you’re going to use to sell your product. It comes from your USP. If the USP is strong, the Big Idea will also be strong—and it will contain a Big Promise.

You make the promise at the beginning of the copy. And with the rest of the copy, you prove that you can deliver what you said you would.

The entire process looks like this:

• You make a list of every feature of your product that you can think of.
• You make a separate list of every possible benefit those features can provide.
• You identify a rising trend in your market—a trend that is just beginning.
• You then ask yourself: “Which of my product benefits could tie into that trend?” And you turn those benefits into potential USPs.
• You pick the strongest ones—the USPs that are most likely to resonate with your prospective customers.
• For each of those strong USPs, you come up with a Big Idea.
• For each of those Big Ideas, you create one or several headlines that express a Big Promise.
• You then make a list of all the possible specific claims you can make that are related to the Big Promise.
• For every claim, you make sure you have proof to back it up. If you can’t back it up, you get rid of it.
• You write at least two versions of your promotion—each version expressing a different Big Idea—and you test them.
• You take the version that works best and roll it out.

Once you have ...