Define Your Difference - It Makes Your Business Stand Out

Written on July 6, 2007 by Amanda M. Gladden

Carefully defining your business and your differentiation will help you to understand what your business is, what the business does, and what makes your business different.

Not too many business owners take the time to answer these core questions about their business. However, knowing the answers to these very important questions are essential to creating:

strong brand identity
focused messaging and
effective marketing materials

Having these 3 essentials will make a stronger impression on your target audience, allowing you to stand out from the rest. Once you stand out, your target audience will be more likely to remember you when they have a need for your products or services.

Think of your competition and how they communicate about and market their business. So many small business owners are out promoting their businesses before clearly defining what they do, what type of company they are and what makes them different, that if you have these elements in place, you’ll outshine your competition.

In order to define what makes your business different, you need to determine the characteristics of your business.

What is your business
- What is your business all about? What is your mission, and what are your values? -

What Do You Do
- What are the unique services and/or products that you offer?

Study, compare and contrast your business with the competition.

Who Is Your Competition
- Who offers the same or similar services or products as you?
- Who are you consistently quoting your service against, or competing with for shelf space?
- These are your closest competitors, the ones with which you should be most concerned in the definition process.

What Makes You Different
- How are you different from those competitors?
- Do you have a specific area of specialty, either in the industry that you serve, problem that you solve, or the service/product that you provide?
- Do you serve a certain geographic area?
- Be sure to avoid the differentiators “better,” “faster,” and “cheaper”. These terms are either too subjective or too difficult to maintain as your business grows and matures.
- Your differentiators should stay with you for the life of your business.

Plan For Your Best Customers

Who You Can Best Help
- Determine who makes up your target market. It’s best to determine both their demographics-facts like age, race, sex, occupation-and their psychographics-their motivations, hobbies, desires, and other factors that make up their personality.

Determine the Best Way to Reach Them
- Once you know who you want to help, the next step is to determine how to let them know that you can help them.
- This means determining how to market your business and which types of media are best to get your message out.

Which Differentiators Will Compel Them
- Creating differentiators will also help your target clients to identify with you.
- If you tell them that you specialize in their industry and their problem, then they’re much more likely to hire you.
Defining Your Difference by answering all of these questions allows you to thoroughly understand your business and to better communicate with your customers. When you are specific about what you do differently from your competition, customers can easily identify you as the most appropriate business to meet their needs. It truly simplifies your marketing, promotional, and passive income processes.

By defining what makes your company different prior to creating your brand and marketing materials, you ensure that your branding and marketing efforts make you stand out from your competition immediately, since your target client understands what you do and more importantly, what you can do for him or her.

About The Author

Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. Her “Define Your Difference Branding Workbook” will help you with your brand definition, the most important step in the brand identity design process. http://www.elf-design.com/products-define.html