2 Effective Strategies You Can Use To Gain The Competitive Advantage

To gain the competitive advantage it’s crucial to advertise what is unique about your business. Your target audience will do more business with you because of it. There are more than 7.4 billion people on the planet earth today. Many of those people, like you and I, are business owners trying to be more successful than the other.

Why create a competitive advantage?

There’s not one person among all the billions of people out there just like you.

You are special.

Nature can teach us something here about how to build a great business.

It’s called being unique!

If you own a business right now or are building one, pause for a moment and ask yourself what is truly uniquely valuable about your business?

Are you promoting and sharing those uniquely valuable differences with your audience? If not, you should.

While there are many strategies you can take to differentiate your business I’m going to share with you 2 of my best tips today that I’ve learned over the years on how to do that.

Two competitive advantage questions

First though, let me ask you a question…

Do you know the “secret sauce” behind gaining the competitive advantage?

To summarize, it’s all about your business being beneficially different than all the other people selling the same products/services to the same audience.

This takes effort. Usually, allot of effort. But like anything else worthwhile in life those who embrace the struggle to establish differentiation win the game.

It’s not an overnight event for sure. It takes time to get to know your audience and to discover what they want/need most that they will pay for.

Differentiation helps you stick out among the crowd so you don’t blend in with all the other bricks in the wall. I can’t help but think of the psychedelic song from Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in The Wall”.

There’s a catch to making your business different though I found…

You shouldn’t be different just for the sake of being different. Instead, seek to be different because your audience will care about and want to do more business with you because of the uniquely valuable things you do for them. That should be your big business “motivation” behind seeking to be different. What you ultimately implement will actually matter to your audience.

You might innovate something that your competitors don’t even have or aren’t doing at all!

Differentiating your company will help you gain a competitive advantage which will help you stay in business much longer and make you allot more money because you’re serving your audience much better than your competitors.

To gain the competitive advantage in your niche/industry consider these two tips:

1- Is your business “people-centric” instead of “product-centric”?

One of the biggest things you can do to serve your audience better and therefore boost your sales volume is to solve more customer problems in your niche/industry.

To earn big money, you gotta solve big problems. If you’re not aware of the problems/needs/aspirations/goals/dreams/fears of your audience it is critical you gain that knowledge. To share some strategies and tools to come to know your audience better consider these:

• send a survey to your audience
• speak with them directly via phone/live chat and ask probing questions to uncover pain points and aspirations
• use the free Facebook Audience Insight tool found here to gain valuable insights into your audience behavior & interests
• engage with your audience through sharing helping and interactive content on social media
• email valuable and actionable content each week

2- What can you do to improve your customer experience?

Now, this implies you actually know who your competitors are in the first place. Once you have that knowledge it’s much easier to identify how to serve your audience better.

There’s really only 4 possible ways to improve ( Read the book Blue Oceans Strategy ):

1. Increase what matters. Do more of what they care most about and execute it with excellence. Better customer support, pricing, nurturing process, education, shipping, returns, customization, etc..
2. Decrease what doesn’t matter. Do less of what doesn’t matter as much, but still important to your audience.
3. Create what is missing for your audience.  What can you offer that your niche industry has never offer your audience before?
4. Eliminate what’s not helpful to your audience. There will be things that your competitors are doing that your audience simply won’t care if they existed. These things can be done away with to help you focus on the true needs/goals of your audience.

Once you are clear about to offer valuable differentiating factors to your audience you can gain the comptitive advantage. From there be sure to educate your audience about what makes you unique. Get out there and teach them about why you’re different so they can see and appreciate the valuable differences about your business that are all focused on making their life easier and more joyful.

Now that you know my top two tips for helping your business stand out among the crowd it’s time to take action!

If you need help with developing a solid strategy for your business to gain the competitive advantage in your niche industry let’s talk.

For a limited time you can book a free 30 minute strategy call with me right now by clicking here