by Tony Vidler 
Your fingerprint is a unique identifier. Nobody else has the same one as you. Your uniqueness extends beyond having a separately identifiable set of finger prints though.
Yet so many professionals struggle to identify their uniqueness and present that to the market.
To create truly effective personal marketing in professional services you have to be able to articulate your uniqueness. What it is that makes you different, and simultaneously, provides reasons for why people should do business with you.
In a veritable sea of professionals who have the same, or better perhaps, technical competency, why should anyone choose you? Simply having a different fingerprint is not sufficient – Just being unique is not enough.
Every adviser is unique in some way….yet many financial advisers struggle to identify what it is. Until you can identify what is different about you, you cannot begin to use that as a point of difference for your marketing. The main mistake made by many who are trying to work out their value proposition, or unique selling proposition, is the tendency to ignore this elementary step and jump straight to the toughest part. They try to immediately create a clever set of words that will look good in the marketing literature without first understanding why anybody should choose them.
In other words, advisers struggle to define their value proposition because they haven’t thought through the two key questions first:
1. what is it about you that is different to begin with?
2. how do clients benefit (what outcome do they get?) from you being different?
“You being different” is not so much about whatever qirks you have (and we all have quirks), but how you DO things differently, or THINK differently…and it is not necessarily one single thing you are looking for. It is the combination of what is different, and how you do different, and how you think different that adds p to your uniqueness. To get to the right set of words that accurately identify what is unique, in a way that makes sense and presents value to your target market, requires some introspection to begin with then.
Thatfirst step is actually little more than a brainstorming exercise….it is simply grabbing and collecting the things you can identify that are different. That is all: just the differences. It doesn’t matter at this point whether those differences create value that matters to clients or not….you just have to understand what it is about you that is different to other people.
Your history and experiences, skills and training, values and attitudes, passions and peeves….they are all areas where you are potentially different to other people. Identify them, and capture them.
The second step is identifying and understanding how clients gain from what you do. Not what the market does….not what compound interest and time do for them….but what you do. Advisers provide or create more convenience, greater clarity, more free time, certainty and assurance…..so many things that clients value because these types of outcomes actually improve clients lives.
When you have identified the things that are different about you, and also identified the value that you create for clients it becomes a much easier exercise to create a unique position.
After all, while there may be 7 billion people on the planet, there is nobody else quite like you, who does things the way you do, and helps create better lives for their clients. There is your uniqueness, and it is as individual as your fingerprint.
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