These days, there are more businesses being started up then can even be counted, and that means there’s pretty much an endless supply of goods and services available to consumers. While that might be a good thing, it also means that markets are being flooded with various features, solutions, and products. Standing out from the crowd is getting to be harder and harder, simply because the crowd has become so extraordinarily large. However, there are still some strategies you can use which will differentiate your brand from your competitors, and help you to gain a following which will keep your business profitable.
Have a good understanding of what your consumers care about
You might be very good at describing to people what your business does and how it does it, but for the most part, that’s not really relevant to consumers. They don’t really care about what you do or how you do it, they just want to know how it’s going to impact their lives, and whether or not it will bring real value to them. This means that it would be greatly to your benefit to initiate some customer research, so that you can find out all this information and put it to use.
Conduct interviews if necessary with your customer base, and find out how your products help them and what they consider to be the most useful benefits. All the hours that you spend learning about customer needs and desires will help you to create more useful products which will better satisfy your customer base. If you can gain an understanding of how every detail of your product brings value to certain customers, you’ll know exactly what to tweak in order to emphasize those good points, and you’ll know what weaknesses need to be addressed so the product can be made more usable and valuable overall.
Learn the emotional, functional, and technical advantages offered by your business
After having conducted extensive research with your customer base, you’re now in a position to consider all the benefits which your business may offer to your customer base. One way you can sharpen the focus on identifying these benefits is to use a brand pyramid, which is a diagram that will help you to answer basic questions about your business, and what its position is in the overall market.
The functional benefits of your business are comprised of what your customers actually get by purchasing your product or service. These will typically focus on such issues as how a consumer’s life is improved by purchasing your product, or what it can do to solve a need they have. Technical benefits include the attributes and features provided by your product, and it will help to define your mission statement as a company. At this point, technical benefits will have an impact on how your business benefits your customer base, how you will become profitable, and what exactly you’re offering to your customers in the first place.
The emotional benefits are all those features which cause your brand to be differentiated from your competitors. The Stories which you provide to your customer base will hopefully generate emotions which generate an attachment to your company, as opposed to any other business. For example, the benefits offered by your product may cause your customers to feel like a professional athlete, or like a very efficient housewife. The emotional benefits of your product are easy to identify in the interviews or surveys which you conducted among your consumer base, because they will always be preceded by wording such as “It made me feel like…”.
Come up with a simple tagline
Conducting years of research into branding and marketing can be extremely useful, but only if you can boil it down into an expressive tagline which resonates with your target audience. This is not generally an easy thing to do, and it calls for finding just the right words which will express the values of your brand, and which will be memorable to your whole customer base.
When you think about it, it almost seems like an impossible task, because what you’re essentially doing is condensing your whole business down into a single sentence or into three or four words which are representative of your whole operation. And you can’t shoehorn all those values into three or four words artificially – it has to come naturally and it must be truly expressive.
One of the best ways of coming up with a really expressive tagline is to hold brainstorming sessions with a number of your most creative employees, and solicit their input on what might constitute a great tagline. It often happens that some of the most creative and expressive ideas happen outside the confines of the workplace, and come to you in the middle of daily life.
Another good way of developing a strong tagline is to start out with a longer message, and then incrementally eliminate unnecessary words, or words which don’t strengthen the tagline. The way to approach this is to jot down exactly what it is that your business provides to its customers in the way of value, even if that takes an entire paragraph.
Make sure to include the emotional benefits of your products in this writing, because these may end up being the most powerfully persuasive components of your tagline. Then, you should edit this paragraph down to a sentence or two, and then take it a step further and reduce it to just a few words. With what you have left, you should play with the wording until you have just the right combination of expression and appeal, so that you’re left with a strong tagline.
Live out your brand’s values
Even coming up with a great tagline and message which you can convey to your target audience is not enough. You need to actually live out that message, and have everyone in your company believing that this is actually what your brand stands for, and what its mission in life is. With everyone in the company on board living what your tagline and your message to consumers really is, it will become apparent to your target audience that your brand really does stand by its stated mission. The same thing should be reflected in advertising, videos, and all publicly disseminated content about your brand, so consumers can come to truly believe your message, and to develop loyalty to your brand.
