3 Strategies for Lifting Your Business High Above the Competition
When your customers have so many choices, your business must stand out in the crowd. For starters, try doing these three things:
1. Find and work a niche.
It’s far easier to be a big fish if you’re in a little pool. Check out leads groups and chambers of commerce. If there aren’t other businesses like yours, you’ve just become the go-to expert in your field. Look for social media platforms where your competition is not active. Try other geographical areas and cultural communities that your competitors may have neglected. Remember people want your product or service, so make it easy for them to find you.
2. Learn from your competition.
To be one of the options for prospective customers, you need to be at least alongside your competitors, but you want to be the best option. If you are lagging, copying what they do may help you catch up, but is not a winning strategy.
Do some research to see where they are showing up online and what they are doing on those platforms. How do you compare? Don’t be satisfied with being an “also ran.” Whatever your competition is doing, you want to do it just a bit better. Learn from their experiences instead of starting from scratch and build on that.
3. Team up with a complementary business
Coordinating with a complementary business means you can share marketing costs and efforts. Also, each of you has the opportunity to get in front of an audience that you may not have had access to before. The very fact that you support each other is also a sign of “trustworthiness” that means a lot to prospective customers.
Think of Amazon’s “people who bought this, also bought that” reminders. You aren’t competing – there’s room for both of you to make a sale – and you’ve identified a target market that will appreciate what both of you are offering.
Years of data show that most people don’t spend a lot of time comparing. They’ll choose from the first couple of options, so your business needs to be among those first couple. There are many, many ways to increase your visibility, including SEO, paid advertising, and so on. These three strategies are solid, inexpensive starting points that will work with whatever services you add later.
When you are ready to add those services, Sprocket Websites is ready to be your partner. The Sprocket team can help you build a more powerful website, punch up your SEO, and assist in other digital marketing strategies. Just give us a call to discuss all the options for your business.
Photo by Anna Shvets
This article is an update to “3 Ways Your Marketing Can Stand Out in the Crowd” dated 8/3//2015.
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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