Many of your own customers are browsing the products, services, and prices of your competitors. They want to get the best value for the money they spend. To avoid losing customers, you must find ways to carve a distinct competitive advantage. Doing so enables you to set your company apart from the rest of the competition. It strengthens your branding, customer top of mind position, and can potentially boost profits.
How do you create an actionable competitive positioning strategy?
Increase Your Price
One of the ways to grow your business while also improving your competitive advantage is to increase the prices of your products and services. May would take the opposite approach of reducing prices to grab the attention of potential customers. However, there is value in going against the trend. Increasing your prices might attract a group of customers that want higher pricing for better value. These customers are willing to pay more for better overall quality.
You need to justify the higher prices with add-ons, more features, increased customer service, better support, return and exchange or refund policies just to name a few. These additions provide your customers with higher value.
Boost Your Online Presence
Create an effective competitive positioning strategy by increasing your online presence. It’s not always about selling, it’s also about offering value to your audience. Leverage the social media platforms and forums your target market frequents to build authority and gain the respect of industry peers. Videos engage your audience more compared to long-form content. Create a video covering topics that are relevant to your market. Conduct social listening to know more about your audience and the problems they often encounter. Address these through the content you publish on your social media pages. Repurpose topics and recreate them using different mediums such as graphics, articles, content pillars, infographics, and others. All these allow you to grow your online presence and build a strong brand.
Do Speaking Engagements
Another way to raise the profile of your business is to participate in speaking engagements in your niche. This allows you to build authority in your industry and reach a wide audience. This provides you with an opportunity to improve your branding or at least make your target audience aware of your company. Industry events and conferences allow you to showcase your knowledge about pertinent topics that resonate with your target audience.
Use Data to Your Advantage
Customers are more likely to buy products or use the services of a company that backs up their claims with data. Statistical evidence shows your credibility in your niche. Proven results attract potential customers that are likely to convert. Collect data about your customers and closest competitors. Group the data into sets that you can use to build authority. You can also use these sets to compare your brand with the competition. Use the right survey protocols so that you can be objective when showing your data to customers.
Simply publishing and displaying data on your website and social media pages isn’t enough. Weave a story around your numbers so that it grabs the attention of your audience and elicits an emotional response. Identify a topic and problems your customers might be facing. Collect data about these and create a suitable and relevant narrative. The most effective medium to tell your story is video. The latter allows you to use tone of voice and emotions more effectively.
Carve a Niche
Your competitive positioning strategy will become more effective when you carve a niche. Focus on a specific interest of your audience to distinguish your brand from the rest. Collect data from your target market to achieve this objective. Send out surveys, read comments and feedback posted on your social media pages, assess reviews about your products and services, and review the engagement of your blog posts, videos, infographics, and other forms of content.
After data analysis, you can start getting insights into how you can create a niche for your audience. You’ll know more about the topics they’re interested in, the types of content that grabs their attention, and the platforms they often use. Create a specific and relatable persona that embodies the values, interests, and demographics of your audience. Doing so enables you to connect with your audience and strengthen your position in the niche you created.
Identify Useful Technology
Identify technology you can use for the growth and branding of your business. Choose tools that can simplify some of the tasks your employees do such as scheduling social media posts, live chat for customers that have questions, automated responses for simple queries, keyword and data mining, and others. These make your team more efficient and productive because they can automate some of the work you delegate to them. You can easily gather and group data which you can use to develop your marketing and content strategies. These provide you with a competitive advantage that gives your business plenty of opportunities to overtake your competitors.
Invest in Your Customers
Invest in your customers to improve your competitive positioning strategy. Give your customers plenty of reasons to keep choosing your brand. Provide them with value whenever you launch products or introduce a new service. Offer exclusive discounts or early access to items. These encourage them to sign up for your newsletter or website membership. Improve your company’s service and update the skills of your staff that deal directly with customers. Hone their soft skills and implement policies about returns, refunds, and exchanges.
It’s not always about making a sales pitch. Produce quality and relevant content to keep your customers engaged and interested in your brand. Put a human side to your corporate image. Achieve this with photos or videos showcasing your company’s values and culture.
These are some of the best practices you can implement to achieve your objective of gaining a competitive advantage. The latter provides you with an edge over your competitors and an important niche in the minds of your target market.
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