Do you have a lot of competitors, and are having trouble setting your business apart from the rest? Your potential customers are waiting to see some selling point that defines you as the better choice of all the options for your product or service. There are a few key strategies that you can use to start gaining the advantage over your competitors.
1. Superior Customer Service
Excellent customer support cannot be over-emphasized, and it is exactly the thing that turns out to be the Achilles’ heel of many businesses. The unfortunate tendency is to provide customer service that is barely sufficient, only to show that you have some level of support to appease your customers, and this is 180 degrees wrong.
It cannot be a peripheral aspect of your business to which you don’t devote much attention; people will give you their business over a competitor, solely for your level of customer support.
2. Easy-to-Understand Product
You may have a better product than all of your competitors, but if the advantages are not clear to people who may buy from you, then they will quickly give up and take their business elsewhere.
What you want to do is clearly define what’s great about your product or service, which means no lengthy descriptions of features (you can provide this upon request), presenting a simple, clean layout on your website and all media, and a generally uncomplicated product.
3. Strong Web Presence
Depending on your field of business, the majority of your competitors may not have a good web presence, and this is the perfect opportunity to set yourself apart. A large portion of your customers will either find you, or buy from you online.
If you have a user-friendly, highly functional web presence—including a great website, online content, and social media campaign—you will have a massive advantage over competing businesses who don’t have it.
4. No Compromising on Quality
Before you add any strategy to marketing your product or service, the product itself should be of the highest quality that you can make it. No matter how hard you sell it, even though you can make a great deal of sales through good marketing and advertising, what keeps customers coming back and telling their friends about you is simply having a quality product.
This has been the most basic principle of doing good business for a long time, and it is still important today.
5. Hire a Forward-Thinking Team
The people who work for you are the lifeblood of your business. It’s easy to hire people who can simply perform a function to make ends meet right now; however, bringing in a team who understands how to help your company to stay relevant and viable as you progress is far more valuable.
Not only will those kind of employees be more productive, but they will add value to your business instead of just meeting expectations.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.