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Show off why you’re different

Stand out, do something a little different

The world is hugely competitive. In business, we are all fighting over a finite number of customers, trying to get them to spend their money with us rather than someone else so we need to think of things that will make us stand out so that a customer chooses us.

 |  James  | 

For online shops, there are only a few ways to stand out. First and most obvious is price. If you can sell the same item that everyone else is selling for £100 cheaper, you will attract more customers. The problem with having such a low price is that your profit margins are also really low. We did use this technique on our mattress site. Years ago we set up a drop shipping site selling mattresses. A number of things were in our favour which meant that we could under cut almost every competitor out there.

Firstly, we already had income from other businesses which meant we were not reliant on sales from the site. We set the site up as a side project to see what would happen and if we could be successful. As we were not reliant on the income, we were able to set our prices so that we only made £10-£40 per sale.

Secondly, we built the web site ourselves and did all of the search engine optimisation work – things that other companies would have spent thousands of pounds on. Because we did not need to spend that money, we were able to sell our mattresses cheaper than others were.

Standing out in retail is difficult. If you are reselling someone else’s products, price is really the only thing that you have available to you to encourage customers to use you rather than anyone else.

For services businesses it is much easier to stand out.

Each year I take my car for its annual check up at a garage that only does MOT tests. They do not do repair work so they have no incentive to fail the car with the aim of making money on bogus repair work. Garages have a poor reputation and lots of people distrust them, thinking that they are just out to make money. A MOT test is pass / fail and if a car fails its test, the garage have to offer a free retest by law.

This is great because garages are actually disincentivised to fail a car. A garage that only offers MOTs is more likely to be trusted and receive more work because of it – they stand out because they are different.

Another example: All of the hairdressers in our area open at 9a.m. and close at 5p.m. This doesn’t make sense to me because most people are at work during those times so they are open when the fewest number of people are likely to be free to make an appointment. Plus, who gets their haircut first thing in the morning?

All of the hairdressers in our town work like that except one. They open at 11a.m. and close at 7p.m. This means that they still catch the people who are not at work but they are open late enough to catch people after work. Because they are the only ones open in the evening, any one who wants a haircut but is at work during the day will go to them.

Standing out if fairly easy to do. For our hosting business we offer telephone support. Most of our competitors don’t because they prefer people to e-mail in their problems. It doesn’t cost us anything more to do this but by offering something that few others do, we attract additional business.

We also offer remote support. Numerous times I have connected to a customer’s computer to set up their e-mail account. We provide help guides but sometimes people get stuck so we just do it for them by connecting to their screen and helping them out. Not only will our customers struggle to find another company that will offer this sort of service and therefore helps ensure that they will stay with us forever, we can also use it to market ourselves to others who are fed up dealing with help guides and struggling through on their own.

For my web site design business, I offer free updates to our customer’s sites. If they want to add a new blog post, they can just e-mail us and we will upload it for them. This frees them from having to get involved with the technicalities of the site and lets them focus on their business. As well as offering something that others don’t, we also reduce the amount of support calls that we have to deal with. If they tried to upload a blog post themselves and got stuck, it would take us much longer on the phone to identify the problem and fix it than it does if we just do the job in the first place. Time saved and happy customers.

The Business Backpack
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