How to effectively communicate your Unique Selling Point?

With over 183,000 registered charities in the UK[1], getting noticed by potential supporters, volunteers, and donors is becoming increasingly difficult.

Naturally, you want them to pick your charity, but how are you going to make this happen?

You can supercharge your branding and marketing efforts by having a well-defined, customer-centric Unique Selling Point, also known as USP. I like to think of a USP as being your organisation’s ‘superpower’.

“A Unique Selling Point is a feature or characteristic of a product or service that distinguishes it from others of a similar nature and makes it more appealing.”

It’s important for your organisation to define exactly what it is that makes you unique. To help you do this, read our blog on How to define your USP.

With your USP identified, that’s the hard part done, right?

Well…not exactly.

Your next challenge is, how do you effectively communicate your USP? Here are a few suggestions:

• Your USP should form the basis for all your marketing messages. It’s the core message that you want to convey to your audience to clearly explain who you are and motivate people to respond. Use your USP as a guide to create your marketing messages and content.
• You can use your USP as a headline, slogan, straplineline, or elevator pitch to communicate what makes you different to your audiences.
• Carefully select the optimum channels to share your USP messaging and formats e.g., images, podcasts, content and videos. A multi-channel approach is a great way to re-enforce what it is that makes your charity unique.
• Incorporate your USP into your website (home and about us pages a must!), social media, email campaigns, ads, brochures, and presentations.
• Demonstrate your USP with testimonials, case studies and storytelling videos involving your supporters, volunteers, donors and beneficiaries, and even influencer marketing.

We may assume everyone knows what our ‘superpower’ is but more often than not, they actually don’t. The goal is to make your charitable organisations USP visible, consistent, and persuasive across your channels.

If you need help defining your USP or integrating it into your communications plan, please get in touch.

Thank you very much to our guest blogger Jacquie Hudson, Marketing Consultant for this blog. We have worked with Jacquie for a long time across many projects. If you need help defining your USP or integrating it into your communications plan, please contact us or contact Jacquie directly.

 

[1] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/sector-data/sector-overview 05/09/2023