How To Make Your Business Stand Out – Five Steps

We’ve worked with businesses whose marketing strategy for standing out in the marketplace was wrong – because they had misidentified the competition. Make sure you know who the real competition is. 

Get going: Note down the three key benefits of choosing your organisation instead of your real competition.

Step 2. Stay unique and don’t get sidetracked by competition

We believe in keeping an eye on competitors (real and perceived), but not obsessing over them. 

Why? Because it’s too easy to become overwhelmed, always reacting to what others are doing and hop from one marketing activity to another, always trying to ‘ke ep up’. 

This actually weakens your market position, as it makes it hard to figure out what your business is about and what it stands for.

Remember: the way your organisation conducts its business is unique and the way your competitors conduct their business is unique to them. 

Your job is to focus most of your energy on making your organisation the best you can, rather than on undermining your competition.

The sporting world helps us understand this. When you compete in any sport, you know there can only be one winner. 

To get ready to win, first, you figure out what training, nutrition and wellness plan works best for you – suits your body, your goals, your way of doing things, your available resources.

Then you look at the competition.

What can you learn from them? 

What do they do that gives them the edge over you? 

Where are their weaknesses that you have strengths in? 

What do you do that is different to them? 

Why is that an advantage?

You can then add to your core plan elements that help you against your competitors.

But these are additions. Not the entire focus.

Get going: List three things about the way you do business or your services that are totally unique to your organisation. 

Note: unique means no-one else does it like that. 

Step 3. Be clear about what you offer

Too many good businesses don’t grow because they’re too muddled about what they offer. 

Businesses typically become unclear about what they offer when they have added more products or services over time. 

Often, it’s in response to marketplace conditions, what competitors are doing, or what customers have asked for. It means your Product Offering can end up looking like a crazy house.

Get going: Create a very clear, pruned back, list of your services and prices. Choose a phrase that covers all of them.

For example, ‘Strategic Marketing Training and Consultancy’ is our ‘cover-all’ phrase about what we offer here at The Marketing Spaces.

Step 4. Know your customer segments

Ensure that you’re offering your customer segments what they want and communicate with them in the way they expect, often based on such demographics like age, profession, location, etc. 

(Need help with your segments? Get started with our ‘Customer Persona’ course)

We can get too hung up on our services and overengineer them – giving customers bells and whistles when they just want a basic version that works really, really well. 

Find out what they want. Do some customer research.

Once you know your products are giving your customer segments what they want and need, check your marketing is right for them.

• How do they like to be communicated with?
• What do they really value about your services?
• What’s the best way to communicate the value you provide?

Build your marketing communications (marcomms) campaigns on this knowledge. 

Get going: Use customer research and feedback to find five phrases your customers use to express what they value about your business.

Step 5. Stand out in your marketplace – the marcomms you need

Now you have all the information you need to decide on your unique market position. 

You know the benefits you offer compared to your competitors. 

You know what customers value. 

You know why you’re unique. 

You know how to communicate with them. 

Pull it together into a marcomms (marketing communications) strategy that encompasses various strategies and tools used by your business to convey the messages and promote its products or services.

There are two key areas of marketing communications you have to make sure you cover:

Evergreen marcomms

Ensure your standout market position is clearly and repeatedly stated across your static marketing communication platforms. These include:

• Website
• Social media profile descriptions
• Other profile descriptions
• Brochures
  
  

Marketing Campaigns

Every single marketing campaign you run must reinforce your standout market position. It has to actively contribute to building up that picture of why what you offer is valuable, unique, and ideal for your customer segments. 

Revisit your next marketing campaign and check that you are very clear in your why choose us message, saying it in different ways throughout the whole campaign.

Get going: Keep your list to hand of why they should choose you. Make it part of checking your marketing that you have at least one element of it in every piece of marketing communication that goes out.