Differentiating Your Business From The Competition Is More Important Than You Think

It’s very easy to ‘rest on our laurels’ when it comes to defining what our business does and how it presents itself. This is because in some areas, you may be the only business offering a particular service. There’s no real need for a hefty advertising budget if you’re the only shoe shop in a five-mile radius, for instance.

However, with online deliveries, social media, and the modern economy, it might be that taking things for granted in this way is no longer acceptable. On top of this, the moment competition comes around, failing to innovate or stand out can herald the death knell of our brand’s popularity.

Differentiating your brand is more important than you think. But how can you do this without artifice? After all, even totally-online brands making use of all the modern conveniences are starting to sound alike, from the promise of quality they all give to how zany or silly they’re happy to be on social media in order to ‘humanize’ themselves, sometimes it feels as though goodwill cannot be generated as easily as it once was, and in a field where everyone is trying to stand out, no one ever can.

In this post, we’ll seek to simplify all of those impressions by coming back to some worthwhile and necessary principles:

Develop & Unify Your Brand Purpose

It’s important to focus on the purpose of your brand. What is it here to accomplish outside of generating revenue? What are your values? What focus do you have? What is it that unifies your team? For some firms, this is not easy to figure out. For others, it’s their raison d’etre. You can view this post to see how the best advertising brands consider purpose and its utility in the wider market.

Thoroughly Understand The Value You Bring

It’s important to consider the value your brand truly brings. Not only in terms of expanding your bottom line, but in how you’re actively trying to improve the experience of your users or audience. This might simply mean refining the packaging of your products to use less plastics, or developing a smartphone app where you have more control over its coding; so that features can be offered which may not be available while visiting your website through a smartphone web browser. These measures really do make a difference.

Keep Consistent, Direct & Simple In Your Messaging

It’s important to remain direct, simple and consistent in your messaging. Brands that break through the need to be overly slick or too smart about their marketing can often be seen as more sincere. Case in point, it’s hard to remember artful fragrance advertisements that we saw ten years ago, but many of us can remember radio jingles from our childhood. Does this mean you should be limited to one and not the other? Perhaps not, but in a world where every firm is trying to outdo the next, being direct and respectful of your audience’s time can seem more respectful than you might have thought.

With this advice, we hope you can differentiate your business from the competition; in this light by valuing your own strengths and allowing them to shine instead of presenting yourself in a new brand uniform with nothing substantive developed in order to back that up.