The 2 Hardest Questions for Any Small Business
What is your point of difference?
Consumers are inundated with options and alternatives to your business every day. Whether it be physical shop fronts they see as they drive around town or the hundreds of advertising messages delivered online. In such a cluttered and competitive space, it’s imperative that your message stands out.
You need to stand for something, and that something needs to be meaningful to your potential customers. It has to meet a need or a want better than anyone else in your business. You can’t just be good at customer service if you are in the service industry. You can’t just have the freshest ingredients if you are in the food industry. You have to work hard to make sure that you stand out.
Take some time out to work on your business instead of in your business to get clarity on what you want to be
famous for and how are you going to deliver it on a consistent and affordable basis to your customers.
To determine your unique point of difference ask yourself the following;
What does your business do better than anyone else?
What makes you stand out in a crowd?
Why should a customer come to you instead of your competitor?
Who is your customer?
This is one of the most important things to consider, because if you are not talking to your customers in a way that’s meaningful to them on a consistent basis, someone else will be, and that someone else will probably be your competitor.
So many businesses try to be all things to all people. We regularly hear, “we target anyone with a wallet”, but the danger in trying to talk to everyone, is that you can often end up talking to no one. This is dangerous in small business, and because we appreciate that marketing budgets can be limited, we need to be very smart with what we do and in particular who we are targeting.
To define who your customer is start by spending some time on thinking exactly who is it that needs your product. Get specific; is it a mum with two kids, is it a dad straight off the work site. Think about their lifestyle and spending habits; what time of day are they coming in to your business?
The clearer the picture you can draw of your customer, then the better you can articulate a message which will engage with them.
These are not easy questions to answer, but ironically we find that not enough businesses spend enough time trying to work this out. That’s why we need to know who it is we are trying to engage with because your advertising needs to suit your customer.
