Starting a small business is the easiest thing to do but executing strategies and making it profitable is where the entire challenge lies. Businesses need to find ways to stand out from the crowd of competitors in order to enjoy effortless flow of clients.
Startups no doubt are witness to larger companies investing tons of money into their marketing strategy and branding and don’t have the means to compete at that level. But that shouldn’t be deter you from competing for your slice of the pie.
Here are five ways to distinguish your small business from the rest of the crowd.
Have a Superb Customer Service
Your customer care is the engine of your small business. Aim to create a superb service for each client. And don’t stop there, find out how your top competitors are treating customers and how well they invest in making their customer care work effortlessly. Ask your team, what are they doing that you aren’t doing, how can your services be made friendlier and more balanced for prospective clients.
If possible, sign up for their product testing and run a thorough research on how their customer care will handle your self-imposed problems you throw at them.
Solve Problems Your Competitors Aren’t Solving
Businesses basically exist to solve problems of potential clients. Your small business should be checkmated around that line to know how well you’re solving the problems.
The best yardstick to use is to know how well your competitors are pushing or investing to solve your ideal customers problems.
When you’ve checked and gotten rich data back from your extensive research, you can decide how best to take over the market. From your research, you should be able to develop a strategy for solving the problems your competitors aren’t solving. The research you’ll do in your niche will enable you see gaps in the market and to see where your competitors are having lapses.
Fill up those lapses by producing a better product or a product that specifically answers the questions that no competitors were formerly answering. The more you present a product as a solution were your competitors haven’t entered yet, the more revenue and market share you cut out.
Niche Down Your Target Market
It’s naturally not a good thing for a small business to start out in a crowded market. In some markets, they’re top dogs there who have literally taken over the market.
But taking on the whole market may not be the best strategy. Instead of focusing on the market as a whole, find a subset of your market to focus your energies there and let your brand be the top dog there.
You may end up eating a smaller pie, but it’s better to than fighting the big competitors for a share of the big round pie. Locate that big market, and don’t just stop there; go further and try to take over other little sub-niche around it.
Brand Yourself Differently
The best way to stay memorable is to go against the crowd. Your small business is probably not the first business offering what you’re trying to present to your market.
There are literally thousands, if not millions who want to also partake of the overall market share in your niche. What will differentiate you from others is branding yourself differently.
This takes time. Branding takes time to build into a potential customer mind. So there is a need to go the extra mile. Do stuff your competitors don’t want to do.
Design your business so uniquely that it steps your brand out. Your brand mustn’t be known to blend into the crowd of other businesses. Strive to find everything possible that will make your business unique and different in everywhere.
From your logo and the font texts of your website, to the alignment of your company do it all differently. When you go against the crowd it’s always harder. But that is basically how success happens.
It takes hardness to succeed in business. For your small business to stand the test of time, it will undergo series of tough times. I implore you, let that period be a time of branding yourself and making your business unique.
When you invest in branding, your customers will value you and keep coming back for repeat business.
Focus More on Deliberate Innovation
Brands die when they stop innovating. Some create epic products that go viral and then go to rest on the success of just that product. Business has no resting place. Innovating in business is simply striving to outwork and outperform your previous products.
You should develop a company culture of always trying to get better than where your company is at every moment. Innovating can’t really happen until you start asking the right questions. I have found out that questions – especially thoughtful questions – are one of the core ways to force your business to stay innovative.
Check your services and compare them with that of your competitors. If they’re literally on same page, what you need do is heighten the services and surpass them at something.
Don’t stop there, compare your products to that of your competitors and check if you’re on same page with them. Your goal is to increase and be above them in something.
The more you strive to go above them in innovation, the higher market share you’ll naturally get in your niche.
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