HOW ABOUT TRYING TO CREATE THAT KILLER USP FOR YOUR INSTITUTION?

If you really want people to not just know about your academic institution but would also love to be a part of the academic program, you should be able to carefully outline your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) which would is to make your institution stand out as the best among other institutions.

Whatever business plan you are drafting out for your institution must contain a USP,  this is because a USP can give a great deal of clarity to your business model, what your company does and why you do it. It can define your business and most important business goals in just a sentence.

A USP is one of the fundamental pieces of any solid marketing that makes your business unique and valuable to your target market and thus will help you to get the desired attention that you wish for. A successful USP can be used as your institution’s slogan. I am going to provide a step-by-step process you can use in creating a USP that will help you make the most of your marketing and business planning activities.

KNOW AND DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE.

This should be the first thing you should do even when drafting out a marketing plan, because you cannot know what exactly you want to do without knowing your audience. Therefore when trying to define your target audience, you should be a specific as possible. Try to know what they like, how they like it and when they want it. You should also know what your competition is offering them and why they go to them.

STATE THE PROBLEMS YOU WANT TO SOLVE

From the knowledge of what your competition offers your target audience you should be able to state what problem you want to be able to solve for your audience. You should ask yourself this question,‘what is the individual need or challenge they face that your business can solve for them?’

LIST YOUR BIGGEST BENEFITS

List the important benefits that a client has benefited from you which they could not get from someone else. These benefits should explain why your services are important to them and why they would choose you over another provider.

MAKE YOUR PROMISE

A big part of a successful USP is making a pledge to your clients. While this can be implied instead of spelled out in your USP, write down this promise you make to your clients in this step.

COMBINE AND CONCLUDE

Once you are through with the steps above, you should gather the information you got from them and combine it. While doing that, you would notice that there is a recurring idea that comes to mind: try to make a sentence out of that idea, and you have your USP simply stated and ready to be used.