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What Makes Your Business Stand Out From the Crowd?

Written by: Stephen Feswick

Article Overview: Fitting in with all the others is NOT the best strategy to stand out from your competitors. You must identify basic truths that can be said about your business alone. These statements are both defendable and dependable.

What Makes Your Business Stand Out From the Crowd?

What makes your business stand out from the crowd?

What makes your business unique? What can be said about your business that cannot be said about any other competitor?

The answers to those questions do not come easily. If fact, because it is so hard to identify what makes a business unique, most business owners never seek the answer. No where is this more apparent than in the local yellow pages.

Just try and find a yellow page advertiser with a single stated attribute that cannot also be stated truthfully by a competitor. Most ads contain platitudes; the kind of trite, forgetful statements that make them invisible to prospects and current customers.

Here's a simple test.

Fill in the blanks with your company name in the following statements.

At (insert company name here), we provide excellent customer service.

Shop (insert company name here). We're locally owned and operated.

At (insert company name here) we have the best warranty in the

business.

Come shop at (insert company name here). We're the friendliest store in

town.

The staff at (insert company name here) has over (insert number here)

years of experience.

You can't beat the low prices at (insert company name here)!

Examine the statements you make in your current advertising and compare them to those statements above. If the features stated in your advertising resemble these statements, they can be made by any other business, resulting in advertising that is filled with platitudes, meaningless statements that do not serve you.

In fact, your customer's unconscious brain will recognize such statements as platitudes; valueless statements that it determines don't deserve to be noticed by the conscious mind at all. Unconscious mental filters will never alert the conscious mind and the ad goes entirely unnoticed, resulting in a waste of your hard earned advertising budget.

In order to stand out, to create advertising that is noticed by your prospect in a favourable light, it is essential that you find elements unique to your business and construct your message on that unique foundation.

These statements can not be said truthfully by any other business - they uniquely describe your business only, in a memorable fashion.

These unique statements can often be found in the stories told about your company – stories containing valuable nuggets of truth that only you can claim ownership of.

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Article Tags: marketing, small business, small business marketing



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