Differentiating Your Business and establishing a strong brand is crucial for success. If you can’t differentiate your business from other similar businesses and brands, ultimately you will lose ground on the competition. For local businesses, competition can be very fierce within a small sandbox, so highlighting your unique qualities is the only way to thrive. 

Do you know what makes you different, unique, and more desirable than the alternatives? Every business, whether it is a carpet cleaning company, or a high flying tech startup, has certain traits that make it special.  We need to understand how to put your unique offerings and character front and center.

Do you want to discover yours or just confirm what you already know?

It’s time to answer some questions about your business. 

Every business (literally) has something that makes them special or they wouldn’t be around.  We just need to know what it is. Is that the process we are going to help them work through?]

This process usually starts with identifying competitors (alternate solutions) and understanding what they think their unique benefits/offerings are as well.

When we are doing positioning (you know, the technical term from school, we also need to make sure that it is defensible.  So, for example, if we are going to say we are the cheapest, then there better be a structural reason why we are cheaper, which prevents others from just dropping their prices and blowing us away.

Ask Your Customers

What is the number one thing your customers/clients praise you for?

It could be the quality of the products you sell, it could be the speed of service or the quality of customer support they receive. You might think your leading quality is service, but actually, the number one thing customers praise you for is the product itself. This might not even be a simple question to answer, especially if you’re a start-up. Collecting official customer feedback can help you with this kind of thing. 

If you’re thinking, ‘how can I collect customer feedback’ a good way is to incentivize customers; offer them a discount on their next order, or enter them into a giveaway. Alternatively, simply start asking them if they will leave a review or answer some questions after purchase or interaction. If you don’t ask you often won’t get! However, keep in mind that the number of people asking for feedback these days is VERY high, so most people just don’t respond. You need to find ways to encourage people that are different, novel, or unique.

Specialize

If you focus on a niche vs the mass market for your industry you can become a specialist in that area and differentiate yourself this way. You might argue this has pros and cons, but if you choose the right niche it could be the driving force for your business. 

We just need to make sure (a) the niche is big enough to support us, and (b) it is sustainable.  With that said, there is a lot out there on “the long tail”. In other words, if we can pull together enough smaller (lightly contested) niches, then we can create an overall market model that is both powerful and cost-effective.

For example, if someone is looking for high-end luxury real estate, they are far more likely to go to a real estate agent who is a high-end specialist. In this case, the specialist could lose out on other areas of the market, but should attract more of the business for the luxury market. If that laser focus results in a higher close rate and greater sales overall, then that can be a powerful formula for success.  By the way, this formula can work in other ways too. You could also choose to specialize on finding homes for young families on a budget. The margin on each sale may not be as high, but if there are more opportunities, and you can close more sales, this might be every bit just as lucrative.

You can segment on the region, transaction size, community, ethnicity, income, or a thousand other variables.  You can even combine them in unique ways. You just need to be the best at what you do and be able to back it up.

Bring Your Values into It

It’s 2019 and people love brands with real values that align with their own. It’s a very successful way to stand-out and it can attract like-minded individuals. If you are a business owner with a passion for zero waste, you can introduce this into your operations, and then let people know you are passionate about this. It could be that there are others who share this passion and want to support you.  If you’re keen to help disadvantaged children in poor areas of the globe, consider donating a percentage of your profits to this cause. You can build an entire business around your mission and you will soon learn that customers like brands who care about something other than just profits. 

Innovate

Take an existing type of business and make it better by innovating a process or product. There are so many businesses that exist because of this. You don’t need to come up with a completely new idea that’s never been done before to be successful. You can simply take something that already works well and you can make it better and unique. 

There is new to the world, new to the industry, or new to the firm.

You can take something that exists and make it better.  You can adopt something from another firm or industry. Some people work on process innovations to reduce costs.  But, it is totally legit to use innovation to create differentiation and competitive advantage – as long as it is defensible…

The reality is, businesses just fade away if they don’t solve problems in a unique way. Even the simplest of businesses exist to solve some kind of problem, be that small or substantial. If you can solve that problem better than someone else, more efficiently or with a better customer experience you will stand the test of time. 

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.

Local business marketing is more specialized and requires a different approach than selling to the masses. Of course, we would always recommend a targeted approach to marketing on any scale (large or small).  Local marketing also requires a more personal touch and process. We hope these tips will put you on the right path to grow your own local business marketing success. 

Connect with Other Local Businesses

There is always a cross-over or connection you can make with another local business that will benefit your own business. For example, if you sell Mother and baby classes, consider connecting with baby retailers in the area, or other related businesses. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, there is always a potential partner who wants to reach the same customers in a complimentary way. 

The relationship could be something as simple as offering reciprocal links on your website, or exchanging flyers, or even displaying business cards at both businesses. However, it could also develop into something more substantial, a true partnership or some kind of collaboration on a product, event, or package. The possibilities are endless and this can give you a helpful kickstart if you’re a new business too. 

Sort out Local Listings

Google Local is a really important type of listing to master. Utilize this to your advantage; keep the listing up to date, and add all of the relevant information. Upload multiple photos, make the most of this feature, and showcase your best bits. You should add a contact number, email address and a correct address. Google reviews will also display with your listing, so if you can find a way to encourage customers to leave reviews here (or even incentivize them to do so), your listing will stand out even more. 

Google local is the most important listing service, but you need to engage with other local listings too to really maximize your local exposure. The majority of these services are free so there is no harm in signing up for as many as you can. Bing, Yelp, Yellow Pages; you can find an extensive list here. 

Local Facebook/Instagram Adverts

When it comes to social media adverts and local targeting, the best platform to use is the Facebook ads manager. This is an integrated part of Facebook Business. This tool can help you run social media adverts on Facebook, Instagram or both simultaneously. The local area targeting is very powerful and, of course, you can also couple this with interest-based targeting to drive your message home. These types of ads give you full control over your budget and provide in-depth stats that can help you make decisions on further investment or tweaks that need to be made to each campaign. You can start with a small budget and build on this over time, you don’t need to spend big to get results. 

When in doubt test.  Put together a couple of ads. Target a couple of different audiences. Then monitor your stats closely to see what works. Spend bigger on the campaigns that work. Redirect funds from less effective campaigns to new experiments that may help you uncover other hidden gems. Effective advertising, online or offline, requires testing and experimentation.

Direct Mail Campaigns

One of the most effective ways to reach a highly targeted local audience is through direct mail campaigns. Direct make cuts through the clutter (especially online) and delivers a message directly to your audience.  Direct mail is highly trusted, more digestible than online adverts, inexpensive, and quick to make an impact. It is a common misconception that direct mail will take you a long time to get set-up and organized. Not to brag, but Zairmail created the concept of short-run hybrid mail (“electronic-to-postal mail”) with the US Post Office back in 1999… Just upload your list, upload your document, and approve an online proof, … we take it from there.  You are in the mail!

We get it right out (same day mailing available) and we track delivery as well.

We know what we’re talking about when it comes to mail. 

We have seen how the online world has changed direct response marketing for the better, giving direct mail even more power than it had before! If you need more information check out our latest article, ‘building a local brand with direct mail’ which covers all of the reasons why direct mail brings a host of benefits to any local business. 

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.