Being a business owner has many ups and downs. It can be a hugely positive experience, giving you everything you could need to live a happy, fulfilled life, but just as easily, it can cause burnout and huge amounts of stress. There is always something to do and always something to consider. Ideally, of course, you’ll want to be a business owner living closer to the happier end of the spectrum than the burned-out one.
One of the issues that business owners have to contend with is competition. There has always been competition in business, and in many ways, this is a positive. When there is competition, you’ll work harder to push your business forward and ensure that you are noticed over and above your rivals. This is good; you might not have pushed so hard without the competition forcing your hand. However, having competition can also be stressful, especially if you find it hard to get ahead of them or you are always anxious about what they’re doing.
If you can utilize a number of different ideas and make sure that your business is different from the rest, this anxiety can be reduced. Although you’ll still need to look at your competition and make sure you are at the front of the pack, if you are different in many ways, this won’t be a stressful thing to do; it will be interesting and useful instead. Your entrepreneurial anxiety will reduce, and you can focus more on your business. With this in mind, here are some ways you can be different in business.
Have More Knowledge
The more knowledge you have on your specific sector or niche and business in general, the more you can stand out in a crowd. In order to impress customers and ensure they buy from you rather than your competitors, you need to prove you’re an expert in your field. There are a number of ways to do this, such as writing explainer blogs, making videos, giving talks and workshops, writing eBooks, or even speaking at conferences, for example, but there is one thing that each of these ideas has in common; you need to have the knowledge to make it work.
Sometimes you can gain knowledge through experience, and many business owners will rely on this. They will have worked somewhere and picked up a lot of information and then used that to create their own business. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it does take time, and in the meantime, your competitors could get ahead of you.
A better option would be to specifically learn business by taking a specialist MBA. In this way, you will learn about business from experts and put your new-found knowledge to good use in your own business. This will ensure you can get far ahead of your competitors who lack this information and don’t have the business qualifications you do. Since you can learn online remotely in your own time, you don’t even have to step back from your business to do it.
Use Your Pricing
If you want to stand out and be noticed, your pricing is a good way to go about it. Think of it this way; if you charge the same as everyone else, how will people differentiate you from everyone else? They won’t easily be able to, which can cause problems with so much competition. You just won’t be noticed, which means you won’t make enough sales to be successful.
Using your pricing can be done in two ways. You can either charge more for your goods and services or less. Both have their pros and cons, so you’ll need to weigh each one up. Charging more, for example, could put people on a budget off using you, but you will make more profit per sale for those who do buy from you. Having low prices will make you a lot more sales, but the profit margins will be lower, and therefore you’ll have to sell a lot more to make any difference.
Then there is the quality. If you’re charging more than someone else for a similar item or a service, the quality of that item or service has to be excellent. If your customers spend a lot of money with you and then realize that they could have got the same (or close enough) from someone else for a lower price because the quality isn’t what they expect for the money, they won’t be happy. They won’t become repeat customers. They won’t give your business a good review and may even tell their friends and family not to buy from you. You’ll soon get a bad reputation.
Even when you have low prices, the quality still needs to be reasonable. You can’t expect people to be happy with substandard products or half-hearted work. Therefore, if you intend to charge low prices, you’ll need to strike a balance between the quality and the cost of whatever it is you’re selling.
Be Focused
When you run a business, you might be tempted to try to grow quickly, and one way to do that is to offer a variety of different products and services to your customers. The problem is, the saying ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ can easily become true here. If you spread your work and your knowledge over a vast array of different items, you’ll never be able to become an expert in one of them – you just won’t have the time.
If you really want to stand out, why not stand out for one thing? Why not choose just one product or service that will be your hero product, the one that people know you for. Choose the item that first made you want to start your business or the one you know most about, and let anything else (assuming you have anything else) sit in the background. If you sell any of those, that’s a bonus, but you should focus on one main product or service to really make a difference.
When you are focused on that one product or service, you can ensure that it becomes the main element of your business and marketing, and you can make sure you know everything there is to know about it and are the expert in your field. Remember, everything else is incidental, at least at the start, so don’t worry too much about other elements – work hard on this one thing you have chosen instead.
When you do this, this will become what your business is known for, and you can play on that, ensuring that it is always different from your competitors.
Listen To Customer Feedback
Another way to stand out and be different is to listen to your customer feedback. Many businesses will receive feedback – positive and negative – from their customers. If they read it at all (as it is tempting to ignore it, especially if it is a complaint), they don’t put any points into action, and they don’t make any changes in their business. They simply go on the way they were. Of course, in some cases, feedback suggesting changes can’t be implemented as it just wouldn’t make sense for the business, but if you never look into the possibilities, you’ll never know.
You can make a big difference in terms of your business and your reputation if you listen to this feedback. In fact, why not ask for it? The more you get, the more likely it is you’ll find some great ideas to work on. When you start a business, you’ll be very much a part of it, which means it can be hard to tell what is working and what isn’t. You might think something is perfect for your business, but your customers don’t like it at all. When you solicit feedback, study it, and then make changes based on it, you can really stand out. You’ll be showing your customers that you appreciate them and that you understand their concerns, and want to make your business better for them.
You could even use that information in your marketing, letting the world know that due to customer feedback, you’ve made some improvements. Remember, although this is a great idea and will certainly make you stand out, you shouldn’t implement every suggestion that comes through – some won’t make sense and could lose you money. Make sure you think carefully about which ideas are worth following up.
Offer Exceptional Customer Service
With so much going on and so much to think about, something that can easily be forgotten by business owners is that without your customers, you wouldn’t have a business. All the time they’re buying from you, that’s great, but what would happen if they stopped? Could your business keep going? If it was just a small number, perhaps so, but if it was a large amount, your business could fail.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that your customers are what keep your business profitable and move it forward, and therefore you need to take care of them. Listening to their feedback ideas is one way to do this, as we’ve already discussed, but another is offering exceptional customer service. If you can go above and beyond for your customer and give them an experience they will be happy with, you can truly stand out. This is especially true if you run an online-only business – these are often rather faceless, and transactions are anonymous. Could you make the process more personalized to stand out?
No matter what kind of business you run, you need to keep the customer in mind at all times. Think about every aspect of your business and how your customers interact with it. Take each step of the sales process from beginning to end and look at how you could improve it for the customer. Once you do that, you’ll find that people want to use your services and buy your products because they feel good when they do.
Address Customer Pain Points
When it comes to giving you ideas about how to stand out and be different in business, we keep coming back to your customers; they really are that important, and so you must address every element of their buying journey.
If you intend to win a customer and keep them returning to you, you need to address their pain points. No matter what they are looking for, whether it’s a necessity or a luxury item, the lack of it will be causing them some kind of pain, either because they need the item to progress in life, because if they don’t have it they feel as though they’re missing out, or anything else in between. Sometimes the customer might not even know exactly what they want, but they know they have a problem that needs to be solved.
With all this in mind, you can see how important it is for you to set your business up in a way that will address your customers’ pain points and give them a solution. If you can help your customers solve their problems, you will be successful, no matter what those problems might be. If you can be different when doing this, your customers will love you, and your competition will get left behind.
Have A Powerful Guarantee
Sometimes it can be hard to get ahead of your competitors because they are well-established and their customers are loyal to them. They don’t want to try something else because they are happy buying where they are buying.
One way to get past this issue and to at least get new customers to try you out is to offer a powerful guarantee. This can be daunting because the more powerful your guarantee, the more it could cost you if things were to go wrong, but this is why you put safeguards in place. You choose products that are of exceptional quality, and your services are professional and carefully carried out. When you hire staff, you must ensure they have the right training and can work to the level your customers are used to. Put all this together, and your big guarantee won’t seem such a potential hazard anymore. Your customers will feel safe buying from you, especially if no one else is offering quite the same level of security.
