Being ahead of the competition is a must do for any business. Without differentiating yourself from them and without positioning yourself ahead of similar companies in your industry, you will never grow a business. Sure, it turns running a company into a race but that’s exactly what it means to be in business.
Differentiating yourself from your competition is as important for you as providing great customer service, selling or marketing. Otherwise no one will be able to tell you apart from the others, and, that is not a great place to be in the business world.
There are many things that people do to stand out amongst their peers, some work better than others. In this post I will show you what has worked tremendously well for me.
1. Sending a regular email with a tip relating to what you do. Someone once said that the best way to be remembered is by offering something. Your clients can’t tell you and your competition apart, you can but to them, it is all the same. But, they can clearly tell who is offering them the most. Send your clients a weekly tip that will help them run their businesses better, or improve any other aspect of their work that your services or products relate to.
2. Open your doors for your clients. Just like teachers give away their time to their students, you can do the same with your clients. Let them come into your office without any appointment and discuss the problem they have with you. Don’t charge for this but watch how the word about your business spreads.
3. Run regular training sessions for your clients. Nothing works better than socializing. So, bring your clients together for few hours once a month and offer them presentations that can help them grow their businesses. You can deliver those yourself or invite guest speakers.
I can guarantee that none of your competitors do anything like that, and since you are providing a great value to your clients, the word about it will spread and thus you will differentiate yourself from your competition. With style.
How to Quickly Build Your Email List
Building an email list is probably one of the most crucial things, after writing great marketing copy and SEO that you should be focusing on with your business. An email list allows you to sell directly to the people interested in what you are offering, and what’s more important, many of those people truly believe in you and you don’t need to gain their trust anymore. The mere fact that they have subscribed means that at least the seeds of that trust have already been planted.
It takes a lot of hard work to break through the noise of the internet that each one of us experiences everyday. It takes a determination to write great content that people will want to read, share and most importantly, want more of.
The good news is that there are certain things you can do to build an email list and convince people to subscribe. Interested in finding out what they are? Read on.
How to Quickly Build an Email List
I will assume here that you already have great content on your site and regular visitors. If not, work on those things first before you start building an email list. You will not succeed without website traffic and the content that will make people go “Wow”. If you have both, then work on the following things:
Make Your Opt in Box Prominent
Your visitors will not subscribe if they don’t find the opt in box, fact.Have your subscribe box on top of your sidebar, or even above your posts like I do on my other site, https://knowyourbusinesssec.blogspot.com/
TIP: Ignore popups, they may have worked years ago but today they provide only a distraction.
Try to collect email addresses from individual posts
Apart from having the box prominent on the home page and sidebar, make sure that people landing on a specific post on your site can also subscribe. Have a subscribe box underneath your posts, or even inside in the copy if it fits there.
Give them a reason to subscribe
“why should I subscribe?” is the most common question people ask themselves before signing up. Naturally we want to protect ourselves from spam and sales crap. Make sure that you give your users a good enticement to subscribe. This could simply be the advice you will be sharing with them, or maybe a free ebook they will receive once they join your email list.
Don’t expect things to move fast
I know that the internet is filled with success stories of people who built their email lists super quick. Most of it is just a lie created to extract some cash out of your pocket. In reality list building takes time and you just have to be patient, increase the traffic to your site and write great content.
How to Promote Your Business with Style – A Visual Marketing Book Review
These days all marketing is visual, fact. Promotional imagery plays a major role in our world, influencing how we perceive things, how we feel and what our motives for actions are. Moreover, it also affects our buying decisions and it is an already known fact that unless you present yourself in a modern and mind-blowing manner, you might not have much luck in sales.
Having said all that, it is often hard, especially for a small business owner to imagine how she could present her company in an engaging way. To build buzz and awareness of what she does and to win the hearts of her audience.
Last year, my friend Anita Campbell (of SmallBizTrends and BizSugar fame) together with David Langton published what I consider the ultimate guide and inspiration in the world of visual marketing. Entitled “Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design” their book brings examples of some of the finest solutions that grab our attention.
By all accounts, beautiful photography is the absolute highlight of the book. Each project featured has been presented with practically every detail and you can really marvel at the quality of the images. My only problem with it is that they are all black and white, which I personally think takes away a bit from at least some more color reliant projects. This is a small issue though that didn’t change much in the overall experience of the book.
Having said all that, “Visual Marketing” is not just about images. The authors spent a great deal of time describing each project, providing background info for each example, including case studies and even discussing results a particular campaign has brought.
Is “Visual Marketing” a book for everyone? I’d say so. No matter whether you work online, like me or run an offline business, you will find plenty of great inspiration in the book.
You can purchase the book from all major online retailers like Amazon, Barnes&Noble or 800CEORead (NOT affiliate links)
Oh, and before you ask, my personal favorite project from the book is by far a brochure created for a sound engineering firm GGRP in a shape of a small, cardboard record that you can actually play!
Differentiating yourself from your competition is as important for you as providing great customer service, selling or marketing. Otherwise no one will be able to tell you apart from the others, and, that is not a great place to be in the business world.
There are many things that people do to stand out amongst their peers, some work better than others. In this post I will show you what has worked tremendously well for me.
1. Sending a regular email with a tip relating to what you do. Someone once said that the best way to be remembered is by offering something. Your clients can’t tell you and your competition apart, you can but to them, it is all the same. But, they can clearly tell who is offering them the most. Send your clients a weekly tip that will help them run their businesses better, or improve any other aspect of their work that your services or products relate to.
2. Open your doors for your clients. Just like teachers give away their time to their students, you can do the same with your clients. Let them come into your office without any appointment and discuss the problem they have with you. Don’t charge for this but watch how the word about your business spreads.
3. Run regular training sessions for your clients. Nothing works better than socializing. So, bring your clients together for few hours once a month and offer them presentations that can help them grow their businesses. You can deliver those yourself or invite guest speakers.
I can guarantee that none of your competitors do anything like that, and since you are providing a great value to your clients, the word about it will spread and thus you will differentiate yourself from your competition. With style.
How to Quickly Build Your Email List
Building an email list is probably one of the most crucial things, after writing great marketing copy and SEO that you should be focusing on with your business. An email list allows you to sell directly to the people interested in what you are offering, and what’s more important, many of those people truly believe in you and you don’t need to gain their trust anymore. The mere fact that they have subscribed means that at least the seeds of that trust have already been planted.
It takes a lot of hard work to break through the noise of the internet that each one of us experiences everyday. It takes a determination to write great content that people will want to read, share and most importantly, want more of.
The good news is that there are certain things you can do to build an email list and convince people to subscribe. Interested in finding out what they are? Read on.
How to Quickly Build an Email List
I will assume here that you already have great content on your site and regular visitors. If not, work on those things first before you start building an email list. You will not succeed without website traffic and the content that will make people go “Wow”. If you have both, then work on the following things:
Make Your Opt in Box Prominent
Your visitors will not subscribe if they don’t find the opt in box, fact.Have your subscribe box on top of your sidebar, or even above your posts like I do on my other site, https://knowyourbusinesssec.blogspot.com/
TIP: Ignore popups, they may have worked years ago but today they provide only a distraction.
Try to collect email addresses from individual posts
Apart from having the box prominent on the home page and sidebar, make sure that people landing on a specific post on your site can also subscribe. Have a subscribe box underneath your posts, or even inside in the copy if it fits there.
Give them a reason to subscribe
“why should I subscribe?” is the most common question people ask themselves before signing up. Naturally we want to protect ourselves from spam and sales crap. Make sure that you give your users a good enticement to subscribe. This could simply be the advice you will be sharing with them, or maybe a free ebook they will receive once they join your email list.
Don’t expect things to move fast
I know that the internet is filled with success stories of people who built their email lists super quick. Most of it is just a lie created to extract some cash out of your pocket. In reality list building takes time and you just have to be patient, increase the traffic to your site and write great content.
How to Promote Your Business with Style – A Visual Marketing Book Review
These days all marketing is visual, fact. Promotional imagery plays a major role in our world, influencing how we perceive things, how we feel and what our motives for actions are. Moreover, it also affects our buying decisions and it is an already known fact that unless you present yourself in a modern and mind-blowing manner, you might not have much luck in sales.
Having said all that, it is often hard, especially for a small business owner to imagine how she could present her company in an engaging way. To build buzz and awareness of what she does and to win the hearts of her audience.
Last year, my friend Anita Campbell (of SmallBizTrends and BizSugar fame) together with David Langton published what I consider the ultimate guide and inspiration in the world of visual marketing. Entitled “Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design” their book brings examples of some of the finest solutions that grab our attention.
By all accounts, beautiful photography is the absolute highlight of the book. Each project featured has been presented with practically every detail and you can really marvel at the quality of the images. My only problem with it is that they are all black and white, which I personally think takes away a bit from at least some more color reliant projects. This is a small issue though that didn’t change much in the overall experience of the book.
Having said all that, “Visual Marketing” is not just about images. The authors spent a great deal of time describing each project, providing background info for each example, including case studies and even discussing results a particular campaign has brought.
Is “Visual Marketing” a book for everyone? I’d say so. No matter whether you work online, like me or run an offline business, you will find plenty of great inspiration in the book.
You can purchase the book from all major online retailers like Amazon, Barnes&Noble or 800CEORead (NOT affiliate links)
Oh, and before you ask, my personal favorite project from the book is by far a brochure created for a sound engineering firm GGRP in a shape of a small, cardboard record that you can actually play!