Rosser Reeves was an American advertising executive from the 1950s, who changed the way the world thought about advertising. He had a style of writing sales copy that drew people in and made them think about themselves rather than the product.
He's credited to many tag lines that are still well known today, like "it melts in your mouth, not in your hands."
His view of marketing was that you always need to state your "Unique Selling Proposition," or USP. He coined that phrase which so many online marketer use today without understanding where it came from or what it actually means. Reeves' philosophy was to state your USP over and over again until people remember you for it.
Now that ranking for keywords is a thing of the past you might want to consider how you can apply your own USP to your online marketing, and to your website. Of course before you can even do that, you need to come up with that USP.
I'll admit that it's a little strange to try and figure out how a jewelry store, which sells such a wide verity of goods and services, could come up with a Unique Selling Proposition. How could a jewelry store have a single, unique, tag line that portrays the entire store?
You can't.
In reality, you should think of a USP that applies to every service you provide, or every product line, or every category of jewelry. I know that sounds like a lot, so let's start with yourself...
What are you good at? Seriously, where is your passion? I know many jewelers that would jump up and say "custom rings" right away, but many of those jewelers are only saying that because that's where their high margins come from.
Think about it for a moment... What is it about your job, your career, and the reason that you became a jeweler in the first place that makes you the happiest every day? Is it helping young adults discover jewelry? Is it seeing the smiles when someone picks up their finished engagement ring? Is it simply helping people pick out the right beads to create a unique bracelet?
How can you articulate what makes you happy about being a jeweler?
Let's do an exercise together that will help you figure out your first USP and how you can use it in online and offline marketing. You're going to actually have to do this; don't just think it.
1. Write down, in as many words as it takes, the single most important thing that makes you happy about being a jeweler. Actually do this.
2. How does what you wrote relate to your customers? When you feel happy how do you think they feel about that specific situation? Now write that down.
3. The customer's point of view is more important than yours. So, think about their point of view for a while until you can figure out a way to say it in fewer words.
4. Minimize the number of words it takes until you can get it under 140 characters, the size of a Tweet.
What you should have is something that could work as your unique selling proposition for that service that gives you the most satisfaction about being a jeweler.
Please don't think that you can do this in a single sitting. Finding the right words is more difficult than you think so don't be afraid to talk this over with your family and others who work in the jewelry store with you. The whole process could take weeks just to come up with a good way to say this single USP.
That single USP would then be the focus of a full marketing campaign for offline ads and online ads including newspaper, direct mail, AdWords, billboards, emails, and the headline on your website. Don't call your advertiser just yet, because you still have more work to do before you're ready.
During the long process of minimizing your unique selling proposition into a sound bite headline you probably wrote a lot of other thoughts and notes down. Don't throw those away because those will be new seed material for your website.
The headline and your USP are good to draw people in, but once you've got them interested you need to give them something more. Back in the 50s, Rosser Revees would expect people to visit your store and look around, but today those people are going to look to your website first.
Using those notes and seed material you wrote down you now need to expand upon each as a blog post or a page. Each note could be used to fully describe one aspect of that single service that you are passionate about. This process should eventually lead to at least 2 new pages added to your website, but I'm willing to be that you're going to have enough notes for more than 5 pages of contest or blogs.
Don't worry too much about specific keywords as you go through this content building process. You can't write anything about your business without using important keywords that relate to it. Don't think about them, just use them naturally.
If you follow this process closely, you will actually be creating a set of pages focused around a single topic that your website will rank for, rather than focusing on keyword ranking. But let's put aside the thoughts of ranking and get back to marketing...
Once you have the content written and added to your website it's safe to launch the official marketing campaign. Place the newspaper ad, send out those post cards, record the radio ad, and launch the AdWords campaign. Every one of those ads should lead customers back to those pages on your website.
Let me be very clear: Those ads should not lead people to your website home page, but rather to the service description pages on your site. People who are interested in your USP will want to immediately read more about it, which is why those website content pages are so important. Let them discover the rest of your website later, on their own, without coaxing to do so.
I haven't given you any guidance for creating any of those ads, just the USP headline and the "support" material for the website. No doubt that you're going to need an advertising specialist to make the artwork for the ads.
As I said earlier, this entire USP discovery and content creation process was to help you discover and concisely articulate your passion and how customers feel because of it. Once you've gone through this process once, you will need to go through it again for every other service or product line that you want to promote.
Marketing should not be a competition between individual online and offline efforts. It's time to unify your marketing approach and treat your entire online identity as part of your marketing plan.
