(This article was first published in The Times of India.)

Isn’t it cool when you tweak a popular acronym into something completely different? The USP here doesn’t stand for Unique Selling Proposition, even though it very well could. 

As a content writer, every piece of content you create should have a unique selling proposition. And to do that, there’s a different USP that your content should have.

Your content should be:

  • Useful
  • Shareable
  • Productive 

Your content should be useful

I realise this may sound duh, but oftentimes we miss doing the most basic things. When you’re creating a piece of content, you should ensure that it will be useful to your readers. 

The best way to do this is to ensure it is not superficial. Try to add levels to your content that give it depth. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers and try to answer the questions that would come to their mind. Your content becomes useful when it solves your readers’ problems and gives them definite takeaways. 

Your content should be shareable

We’re now at a stage in content marketing where tracking metrics like pageviews and sessions is just not enough. We’ve to measure shares.

Great pieces of content get shared. People take pride in sharing things they like and find useful. To make your content shareable, you have to make it useful. You can make it entertaining by adding humour to it. Shareability eventually helps you as well because it increases your organic reach. 

Your content should be productive

If you’re creating content for a company or a brand, you’re creating it for some specific purpose. It could be to build the brand, to generate leads, get traffic, signups, whatever.

Defining the purpose of your content will help you make it productive to achieve your goals. For example if your purpose is signups and your content doesn’t have well-defined CTAs, then it is not helping you meet your objectives. It’s not enough to just create; you’ve to also figure out why you’re creating.

This is essentially the USP that every piece of content should have. I spoke more about this and more about content marketing in Top of the Funnel – a show by Pepper Content.