An Essential Guide To Making Your Business Stand Out

10 December 2019

You have a great product, great service, great employees. You’re an incredible business, and you know that prospective customers would love you. The only issue is: how do you get them to give you a chance to show off the edge you have over your competitors. How do you stand out?

Strong Branding

A strong brand is often a happy brand. Take a moment and consider, who are we? What do we do that’s different? What’s our personality? If our company was a person, what would they be like? If you can’t answer those questions straight away, you probably need to strengthen your brand. An

Branding is essentially all about how you present yourself to the outside world. Are you a fun, quirky challenger to the established giants? Coolheaded professionals with decades of experience? A bold new innovator, treading where no one has dared to explore before? Does that come across in your logo, in your social media posts, in your site? Does all the material you put out in the world sound like it comes from the same company?

Great branding is the sum of many parts, all working together to create a compelling, cohesive picture of your business. It’s this picture that will influence the final decision of many of your customer base. It’s this picture that will make you stand out in a crowded industry, or make people give you that all-important first chance. Without a strong brand identity, you’re just another company.

Create Engaging Content

Incredible content is a marketing gold mine. Imagine creating advertising materials that not only captured your audience’s attention, but made them actively want to seek it out. That’s what content marketing actually does, but don’t take our word for it. The cost of content marketing is 62% less than traditional efforts and creates three times as many leads. Coca-Cola now spends more money creating content than it does on tv adverts. 72% of marketers think content is significantly more effective than print ads.

It makes sense too. Instead of relentlessly pushing your services down prospective customer’s throats, you’re instead offering them something of value. It’s a much more symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship that consumers are happy to engage in, and one that can give you a definite edge over competitors who are stuck in a more traditional company-customer dynamic.

Improve SEO

Making your business stand out from the crowd is the essence of what search engine optimisation is all about. Say you’re a restaurant, looking for customers. A prospective diner opens their phone browser and searches for restaurants in the area. Being a well-liked option with clear selling points is amazing, but it only works if the diner gets to see you in the first place. With poor SEO, you’ll never appear in their local pack, never be on the frontpage. The vast majority of people are never going to even have you in their list of considerations. It’s here that local SEO becomes vital: although it won’t sell you a prospective client on its own, it will give you the chance to make your pitch to them.

Own Your Mistakes

So own your mistakes. Instead or ignoring them, or even worse fighting with the customer about it, admit when you’re at fault and apologise. Offer them something to make them want to give you a second chance, and address their criticism. Consumers like businesses that do this because it shows that you have a sense of humility and genuine care about what your customers think. They know that you’re not going to be the type of place that turns a blind eye the second that money changes hands. Negative reviews and social media comments are going to be there, whether you engage with them or not, so it’s better to acknowledge them in a way that shows that your customers are being heard.

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