Determining what makes your business different is one of the most fundamental marketing decisions you need to make. If you are unable to decide what it is that makes your business different, then you cannot expect your customers to know either! You will be leaving their purchase decision up to whatever takes their fancy at the time, and you will be helping your competitors appear more attractive.
What Makes Your Business Different?
When you think about it, very few businesses are one-of-a-kind, and chances are you operate in an industry where you have competitors offering similar products and services. To make your business stand out in the eyes of your target customers, you need to pinpoint what makes your business different and connect this to their needs and desires.
To find out what makes your business stand out from the crowd, ask yourself some key questions:
- What does our business do better than anyone else?
- What do your staff say about what make you different and why they work for you?
- What do our customers say to you when you ask them why they chose us or what they like best about you?
- Which of these things that make us different do our customers value most?
- What does our SWOT Analysis tell us about what makes us different?
- What are your competitors doing and what do they think makes them different?
What’s unique about you?
Pinpointing your uniqueness can take some soul-searching and creativity, especially when you have lots of competitors.
Take a good hard look at:
- What do you do? – Your products and services
- How do you do business? – Is there something special, unusual, or significant about the way you do business?
- Who are your ideal customers? – Where are they located, how old are they, what are their interests, how much do they earn? Can you target customers that your competitors are not focusing on? Targeting a specific niche in the market can be a powerful point of difference.
- What do your customers want that your competitors are not offering? – List the benefits that customers derive from you.
Use all your marketing tools
It is not just your product or service that makes you different. There are seven marketing tools in your toolkit. Think of them as 7 levers you can pull to make your business stand out from the crowd.
These seven tools are often referred to as your Marketing Mix and are:
- Price
- Promotions
- Place (location and distribution)
- Product/ service
- Physical facilities
- Personnel
- Process
It may be that you can adjust one of these, several or even create a unique combination of these to make a compelling difference that your customers will truly value. Remember you want to create points of difference that are difficult for your competition to copy and differences that you expect to work for a long time. Finding your points of difference is not a quick job – it takes research and accurate information to get it right.
Just saying excellent quality and service is not enough. Be much more specific, use numbers where possible and promote it consistently. Make it the fundamental core of your marketing.