NEWS

Six steps to create your business point of difference

In this article, I'm going to talk about six key steps for you to take to help you to stand out from your competition and give your marketing the best chance of success. Lets go through what those six steps are.

First Step that I want you to take is to have a think about what it is that your clients and customers are saying about you. Why is that important? There's a couple of reasons, one, it allows you to think about what it is that you're great at and what are the things that you can improve on. The second thing it does by thinking about the ways that your clients and customers describe you, you can use those descriptive words in content going forward, whether it's for social media, website copy, those types of things. It'll give you more ammunition when you're writing that content or when you're giving a brief to a copywriter.

Second thing I want you to think about is your business goals. Why is that important? Well firstly goals are important to set a plan in place to help you get there, the other key reason is that the business goal approach can often be reflective of the marketing approach, for example if your business goals are aggressive then chances are your marketing approach needs to follow suit and be aggressive also.

The third key step I want you to have a think about, and this is regardless of whether a new business or a startup business, if you're a startup business think about what it looks like in 12 months time or what it could look like from now. Think about where it is that your current revenue and sales opportunities are coming from, what marketing is working, what's not, are you measuring that and really make note of where those opportunities are coming from. It allows you to think about what's working, what's not and what can be tweaked.

Fourth thing I want you to think about is your competition, this is the critical part, if you don't know who your competition is, how can you possibly stand out? When you think about the competition consider three key items:

• One: Who is there target audience?
• Two: What is their service or product offering?
• Three: Where do they actually provide that service offering? Is it a suburb base, is it national, or is it international?

They're the three things I want you to think about when you think about who your competition is.

Fifth key item is to think about who is your ideal audience. Are they the right audience for you? Is that where your business is heading? It's really important that you define your audience and get it right because what you don't want is if you are doing marketing, there is a wasted opportunity if you're investing time, money or energy speaking to an audience that doesn't relate to you and that is not a needs match. You want people, when they come across your business or brand if it's your ideal audience and you are marketing to them, you want them to think yes, this is the business that I'm after and this is the business that I want to buy from.

The sixth key step I want you to think about is, what is your service or product offering focus, and how does that again compare to the competition? It's so important as a business that you really focus on specialising on something, being expert in  something, that specialisation is really key. Now once you think about your own ideal audience in step five and you're offering step six, compare that to step four, your competition and start to have a think about where is it that your audience, your offering and your location can differ to the competition. Create a bit of a matrix and see where that point of difference can differ to the competition. 

Watch a video here to learn more. If you want to get a start on your marketing, contact one of our team today.