Often, small business owners will ask about powerful marketing strategies. These methods start before one develops their advertising, direct mail, web sites, referrals or blogs. Your business needs to uncover and communicate a way in which your business is different from every other business (competition) that says they do what you do. You’ve got to get out of the commodity business. You’ve got to stake your claim on a simple idea or position in the minds of your prospective clients. Most Asian businesses compete on price. We need to look at differentiation. Stand Out from the competition.
Ways to differentiate:
Let’s look at a number of tried and true ways to claim a unique point of difference.
Product
Can you offer a product that is so unique or even trendy that your business is associated with that offering? Or, can you extend a product and offer a valuable service to make the product more useful to the customer.
Service
Same goes for a service. Many times this can be the packaging of a service as a product. Consulting is often delivered on an hourly basis. Packaging a consulting engagement based on an outcome, with defined deliverables and fixed package price is a very effective way to differentiate a service offering. Don’t forget to give the service a powerful name!
Market Niche
Carve out an industry or two and become the most dominant player serving that industry. A really nice bonus to this approach is you can usually raise your prices dramatically when you specialize in this manner.
Offer
Can you become known by an offer you make? There’s an accountant that offer his tax preparation clients a 100% refund on their preparation fee when they refer four new clients. They are the 100% refund tax guys.
Solve a Problem
Is there something that prospects in your market fear or seem to believe is universal for what you do? If so, focus on communicating how you have the answer. Painless dentistry for example. There’s a remodeling contractor who found that what his clients appreciated the most was the way his crews cleaned up at the end of the day. He began to promote the fact that he owned more ShopVacs then any other remodeling contractor on the planet.
Message of Value
Many times there are things that you do that don’t get communicated. Extra that you provide or services you think should be included. Your positioning might just rest in more effectively communicating what you do. There’s an office furniture dealer that has adopted the message – We Make Your Business More Valuable – to communicate all the things they bring to the party. Now, everything they do is focused on delivering on that statement. Everyone else in the industry sells furniture.
Unique Habit
There’s a financial planner who has his client’s car detailed right out in his parking lot when they come in for their annual review. They can’t help but rave to their friends about this unique touch.
Guarantee
Can you offer a guarantee so strong that no one else in your industry would dream of doing it. This one frightens some people but, you probably guarantee your work anyway, you just don’t say so. Come out and boldly announce that you guarantee results and watch what happens!
Customer Service
Everyone knows the story of over the top customer service provided by Nordstrom’s Create your own over the top customer response system and word of mouth advertising will flow liberally. One of the greatest ways to kick this off is to over deliver on your first customer contact. Give them something more than you promised, give them a gift, give them a related service for free.
Against the Competition
Many times you can create your category niche by looking for holes in the offerings of your competitors. If every one in industry fails to address a certain problem, boldly grab on to solving that problem and use your competition as the point of difference.
Clues to Uncovering Your Difference
Look at your current clients. What common elements exist among your best clients? Interview your clients. See if they can tell you why they chose to work with, why they stay, why they refer? Study your competitors more closely. What do they do that you could do better, what don’t they offer they you could, how do they position themselves?
Communicate the difference
Once you find your chosen strategy or combination of strategies to differentiate your business, all of your advertising and promotion should be centered around shouting about that difference.
Commit to it, stay at it and resist the temptation to wander off in the next new direction. Building a brand takes time and patience. The payoff, however, is what differentiates the winners from the losers in this big marketing game.
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