4 Ways to Outsmart Your Competition

By Maria Lebed

As electronic music veterans Depeche Mode once sang, it’s a competitive world. Everything counts in large amounts.

And every entrepreneur at one point in his or her career will ask, how do I make my business stand out from the crowd? Just offering a great product or service isn't good enough because that’s what my competition is doing -- well, most of them. How am I going to convince users to choose my product among the many others out there, and how am I going to make an impression on customers to keep them coming back?

Marketers have come up with a gazillion different ways to deliver exclusive offers to customers. The truth is, most of these solutions, such as extensive service plans with many “ifs” and “buts,” or bonus offers that go with a product, have either very questionable value for the customer or are too complicated to understand. Very few people are interested in the latter. We all want things that are quick and easy.

I believe in simplicity. In order to be different and to stand apart, entrepreneurs don’t necessarily need to complicate things. Instead we can make things simpler. Somehow we often miss the simplest and the most obvious solutions that will bring us the best results. The following are four simple and effective ideas to stand out from the crowd. And while these methods may sound easy, to execute them requires as much work and attention to detail as any other tool. The goal is to imprint your company’s image and website into the memory of your clients.

1. Appeal to the customer's mind with text.

Today's online business world lacks simplicity greatly. Creating a simple, clear, and direct message explaining your product or service is one of the shortest and most cost-effective ways to beat the competition. The other week I was researching a certain customer service software and landed on a website that had an offer that seemed to be related to my search query. However, after reading the home page and the product overview and watching the demo, I still could not comprehend what this tool was designed to do. All I saw and heard was that it helps you grow sales faster, it delivers an amazing service, it will build customer loyalty, and so on. These are all great things, yet a whole bunch of customer service apps could boast these same benefits, right? Why not just straight out say what parts of my daily routine this app is going to touch?

In most cases I end up leaving a site like this because it takes too much time for me to determine whether it’s a fit or not. This is just a one-off example, but the Internet is loaded with similar service or product introductions. In today’s world where everybody is in a rush, you could stand out by simply saving the customer time to get acquainted with your product and demonstrating the maximum benefits of  your service.

It will take some time and testing to find the right words that appeal to people and that are understandable to multiple people who are not familiar with your service. There are no great costs associated with doing this, and you only have to do this once. Let me assure you, this investment pays off in spades. While your competitors will be losing prospects due to overly complicated sales pitches, you will be collecting those same prospects with your simple and direct communication.

2. Appeal to the visual sense with imagery.

Images play a big part in creating an impression and making a person remember a company and its website. So what are most companies doing these days? Copying each other’s layouts. While this may be a good way to start if you don’t have any creative ideas, in the end what you get is looking like somebody else and also inheriting all the mistakes that somebody else has done with their design. I wonder why so called carousels spread so quickly when market research clearly shows that they are difficult for readers to perceive and understand -- they are true conversion killers. It must be for no other reason than designers having been instructed to “come up with something like they have."

To stand out from the crowd, you’ve got to have your own identity. It does not necessarily have to be complex. There is no need to turn your website into an art gallery, but if you simply go with the flow and create same designs in black and white and red without any distinguishable elements, you will only bury your website among the others. This is especially true if your content does not surpass in quality the content of your competition.

Now, I really like this black/white/red combination -- it looks very stylish indeed. But why not add to it something special -- a sign or a picture -- apart from the logo text, which would immediately make the customer recognize your website? For most websites, unfortunately, the individual elements that are added are insufficient to make the site memorable to the user.

Another problem that I am constantly encountering and which also takes away from the clarity and simplicity of a website is images accompanying text messages. More often than not, they are not telling any story. They don’t add anything to the text to create a visual perception of the product or service in the customer’s mind. At best they are just nice and pleasant images, but that is not enough. Images need to work for you. From my own experience, I know how hard it is to pick an image and how it's even harder to come up with one that conveys without words  what you're trying to say. But if you put enough effort into coming up with relevant and pleasant graphics to go along with your text, you're one step further to being unique and different.

I know this may sound more like website optimization, but in my opinion you don’t have to invent complicated schemes to set your business apart. Utilize simple tools to their fullest potential and you will see great differences.

3. Appeal to emotions with best-in-class customer service.

This is probably one of the most powerful ways to declare your uniqueness and value. It sounds simple enough; however, it is also one of the most difficult things to do.

What is so difficult about offering great customer service? In reality, achieving perfection in this one area is almost impossible. Why is it so? Because it involves a great deal of human element. And where humans are involved, complexity is bound to happen.

You cannot do customer service alone. There will be other people. You will have to make sure each person delivers the best performance, and believe me, it is not easy. People are not machines, and it is not possible to program them to produce the same output at all times. Despite this complexity, with sufficient patience and dedication you can still manage this area pretty well and create a customer-centric organization and 99 percent customer satisfaction rate.

What are tools you can use to make this happen? You have to make it easy, both for the service agents and the customers. If your reps are overwhelmed with work and their workflow is not efficient, they will fail to deliver great service. If your customers are subjected to long phone queues every time they have an issue, they will fail to be pleased with your service. You have to make meeting points and communication seamless and easy.

One tool I can suggest is adding live chat as a customer service channel. Live chat technology has grown big in the online world. With its simplicity and the many different tools which make business and client interactions more effective, it beats out other communication channels. According to a recent survey, 57 percent of customers consider live chat one of the most important features a website can offer. However, the most important element in customer service is the people, and not the tools. So your focus should be on training your agents and growing a strong team of professionals dedicated to what they do. There lies your chance to make a difference in your customers’ experience: be remembered for great service.

4. Establish yourself as an authority by providing extraordinary value and educating your potential clients.

Today marketers are becoming more and more part of the crowd. The concept of value slowly but consistently undermines the concept of traditional marketing where the emphasis is on advertising your product.

There is a great illustration to this idea. Take the example of technology startup Buffer that has grown a user base to over 100,000 by just doing content marketing. The idea behind Buffer's marketing is to help its target audience, pretty much anyone who uses social media, to grow their businesses. The company is on a journey together with its clients. And if you take a look at Buffer's blog, it’s a piece of jewelry to any social media user.

You may ask, okay, it’s much simpler to find something to blog about if your audience is large with broad interests. What if my niche of potential customers is really narrow?

In a recent post on how to market a "boring" industry, Neil Patel tells about the time he worked for a life insurance company and brainstormed  the idea “19 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Death,” a post that went viral and helped the company move from the fifth to third spot on Google. This is a perfect example of the strategy to produce content that links your business with your target audience. With Patel's example, after the company earned a good reputation, when people had any concerns about death, they knew whom to turn to.

Being part of  a boring industry in this sense is even simpler because you won't be addressing clients' issues on a daily basis. You need to produce evergreen content that people can refer to when they have a need.

Final Words

These were my four ideas on how you can stand apart in the business world without having to lower the cost of your product or entice users with any bonus offers. I hope you find these ideas useful and  you'll try to implement them into your practice. You don’t have to strive to achieve excellence in all areas at once. Users will remember you if you do one or two things differently, and that creates your unique business face. So pick one strategy that appeals the most to you, that's inline with your entrepreneurial nature, and get going.