Whether you have taken a traditional approach to own your business or you have taken a different approach to own a business you still want the same outcome. You want your business to stand head and shoulders above all competitors. You probably are aware of the business failure rates and therefore it is now more important than ever to make your business stand out to ensure its ongoing success.
It takes a long while to build your brand loyalty and for customers to continue to come back to your business time after time. The majority of customers are not instantly loyal. They want to shop around. This means you are constantly in competition in order to get each and every customer to shop at your business. With the market being so competitive this means you have to go to make your business stand out in order to make it successful.
Here are some tried and tested ways to make your business stand out against your competitors.
Top Quality Customer Service
Even if a product or service is of excellent quality, a third of people will choose to take their business elsewhere if they experience bad customer service or have a bad experience with a business that wasn’t resolved satisfactorily.
With such a competitive market, this means that you cannot afford to be losing customers or potential returning customers due to executing poor customer service. You need to be building an ethos within your business structure where customer service is key. When a customer receives good customer service they build trust with that brand and they are more likely to return or recommend the business.
Another aspect of ensuring good quality service is to address any negative reviews. There may be times when the opportunity to resolve an issue face to face cannot be achieved, but a negative review still appears online. If a negative review gets posted it is important that it is addressed and that your business is seen as attempting to resolve the issue. When customers are shopping around, the reviews posted online are influential in encouraging a customer to go with one business or brand over another. By implementing review management you are showing confidence in your business and showing that you hold the value of your customers.
Your Brand Needs To Stand Out
When it comes to business, first impressions count. A person will make a snap decision around a brand based on whether their branding is appealing or not. If the branding grabs their attention great they will explore more surrounding your services or products, however, if your branding is not right they will keep scrolling and bypass the opportunity to see how great your product or service is. Therefore, when it comes to your branding, it is vital that you get it right.
A big part of branding is the colors that you use. When you build up a strong brand reputation the colors alone will increase your brand’s recognition. For this, to work it is important that you continue to use the same colors and be consistent with the coloring and fonts used. This is key in order to make your branding become rememberable and identifiable from a glance. This concept works with your customers subconsciously, the majority of the time people buy without too much thought about which brand they are using, if your branding standouts and becomes memorable they are more likely to continue to subconsciously choose your product over a competitor.
With branding, there are many ways to incorporate your branding into the content that you are sharing. Branding is not only applicable to packaging, logos and your website, it is important when it comes to content that you are sharing to engage your customer audience. Incorporating your branding into your content, images, and videos helps engage your customers in different ways and will help get your brand reaching a wider audience. Whether you are looking to showcase a product, educate or inform using branding within your working relationship with a video production company will help your business be remembered.
Build A Strong Online Presence
The majority of your target consumer base will only find you off web searches. With this in mind, it is vital that you are building a strong online presence and your business can be found easily and ranks higher than your competitors. There are many ways to build a strong online presence:
- SEO – When the majority of your potential customers complete an online search they will choose a company or brand that generally ranks higher and shows near the top of a search engine result. They are unlikely to want to scroll through pages and pages or results. Working on your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is how you will be able to get your site ranking higher than your competitors and become more easily found. There are numerous ways to build your ranking but the key aspect of a good SEO ranking is by building a strong online authority. The more authority you gain the higher you will rank. This authority is gained by you being seen as an expert within your business niche and through the use of key words, backlinks, other sites linking to yours, you will be able to start building on your authority ranking. The use of a blog attached to your site is a wonderful way to be able to address your customer questions, resolve their pain points and not only help your customer but showcase how your service or product can assist too.
- Social Media – The majority of people nowadays log into one form of social media at least once a day but sometimes significantly more. By building a strong social media presence online you will be able to showcase your products, work with influences and gain free advertising by encouraging your customers to tag your business when sharing their own personal stories or post. This not only allows your business to reach even more potential customers but when an individual is sharing your products they are recommending your products or service to their followers. People are more likely to purchase following a recommendation from a trusted source than to just choose a company that they know nothing about.
- Make Your Content Stand Out – Your content is not just one way to showcase your branding but is also how you create relevance and to engage with your target customers. The content that your build and share will demonstrate your knowledge and worth in your niche area. To begin with, the content that you share lets your showcase your experience and expertise to the virtual world. As your audience grows along with your business and brand awareness, people think to come to your business to help them solve problems, therefore generating and creating more leads. The content also allows you to create a ‘voice’ for your brand. This will add to your brand awareness and strengthen your own recognition.
Reward Your Loyal Customers
As a business owner, you want to create a loyal following of customers that will continue to come back and purchase your products or services. In order to build loyalty with customers, you should reward them. Loyalty programs or discounts for subsequent purchases are well known to draw people back to the company again and again.
In the long run, although you are going to lose a little of your profits through any loyalty program that you run, it will pay off in the long term. Once you build up a relationship with your customers and they become loyal not only will they continue coming back and spending but they are also more likely to recommend your business to their friends and family.
The aim with all businesses is not only to attract new customers but ensure that you are keeping the ones that you have already secured. It costs you a lot more in time, effort and resources to attract new customers through your marketing strategy. With existing customers, you have already done the hard part and therefore you do not need to spend as much marketing effort in order to retain them, so it makes sense to invest that elsewhere and reward them for their continued support.
Think About Sustainability
More and more customers are now becoming more conscious about the environment and the part that they can play to support the world in which they live. A way to ensure that you stand out from your competitors is by supporting a cause. A large majority of customers are more likely to support a business that gives back, by using sustainable products, materials, or supports a social or environmental cause than one that doesn’t. They are also willing to pay the price for this.
This increases your brand image as it shows that you are willing to give back and it makes customers happy to support and hand over their hard-earned money knowing that some of it are going to a worthy cause.
