When you’re a small business owner, there are times when the scale of larger businesses can overwhelm you. Right now, you might be wondering what you have that will make potential customers choose your brand over another. This particular factor is a business differentiator and helps consumers in the market to identify and differentiate it from other brands.
Differentiating your company from the rest is an integral part of developing a brand, and it has become even more difficult in recent years, as it is not only enough to be better than others; you need to be different. You may not have realized it yet, but being a small business is a differentiator in itself, you need to take advantage of it and market it enough. Here’s how you can identify your small business differentiators.
Analyze your competition
Finding your differentiators starts with learning what makes your competitors different. You need to maintain a neutral position and evaluate your competitor to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. What are you offering? What do they do better than you? How do you treat your customers?
Once you answer these questions, you will discover your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your own. At this point, you can decide whether you want to change the direction of your business to make it better than your competitors or to market an aspect of your brand that already exists.
Get familiar with the customer experience
One benefit of owning a small business is having personally experienced the life of an average consumer. Knowing the shortcomings of the customer experience of a large-scale company, you know what to build on in your own company. However, when working on differentiators, it’s time to start from scratch, so you need to map out the various aspects of being a customer. What do they value? What dissuades them from buying?
You need to work on ways to raise consumer awareness of a need that your business can meet. Only after a consumer realizes they need something will they look for brands that can provide a solution. You need to assess how your target demographic makes purchasing decisions and whether or not your brand aligns with that thought process.
The wrong approach is to focus solely on your product because that is not what customers emphasize when they buy a product. The best way is to tackle different aspects of the customer experience and develop them all.
Know your strengths
The first and foremost strength of being a small business is giving customers the care they need. Since you don’t manage branches everywhere, you can afford to take care of a minimal customer base.
Apart from that, each business has its strengths compared to other brands. It could be your great marketing, your customer loyalty programs, or your customer service approach. Also, a small business operates on securities, so they understand the needs and requirements of the average person.
Get involved in the community
The community you operate in should be your focus when expanding your reach. By having an impact on your community, your brand automatically earns a reputation among the other brands in the area. People in your district will be in favor of supporting your brand as it will have a positive influence on their community.
The importance of having differentiators
It is true that the brand always needs differentiators that give them a competitive advantage for commercial rivals, but your brand needs them more as a small business. This is because large companies can already offer better prices due to cheaper manufacturing practices and access to raw materials at lower costs.
Therefore, having a fixed market differentiator will help consumers choose your brand despite the difference between what you and the larger brands can offer. However, having a differentiator is not only necessary to differentiate your brand from the rest. By knowing what you can do better than other companies, you will have a clear vision of what to focus on when planning a marketing campaign.
A well-planned and targeted marketing effort will help you retain customers and increase your promotion rates to people outside of your community. Without a strong differentiator, you won’t be able to compete head-on with others.
At the same time, you must uphold the values of honesty and transparency by refraining from overloading your brand’s profile. By vouching for being better than the competition at “everything,” you risk losing valuable customers. That’s why; you need to test all of your differentiators to see if they are true, provable, and relevant.
Only market things about your brands that you think are true, and to gain the trust of your audience, you need to prove it; either through ‘look inside our shop’ schemes or quality testing. Lastly, your differentiators must be relevant. Customers will not consider an aspect of your brand that they do not care about or that does not benefit them. To conclude, you should reflect on the personality of your band and find something about your small business that sets it apart from the rest.