Today’s market is already saturated. Given this environment, it has now been more important that we effectively reach out to attract more customers to our product or service.  Nothing attracts customers more than being different among the rest of the competition.

Do you happen to know what you have that your peers don’t? Are there benefits in choosing you among all the other providers? These are some of the most important questions to ask when you’re trying to differentiate yourself in a very saturated market. Below are some ideas that can help you answer these questions.

Telling your customers what you can do for them

One very important part of standing out is explicitly telling your customers how they would benefit from getting your products or services. One common mistake that most business owners make is that when they present, they only stick to the features and forget the benefits entirely.

Benefits basically answer the question behind every customer’s mind: “What’s in it for me?” If you can include the benefits in your marketing strategies, believe me, you will get more customers. Instead of writing that your business “provides quality accounting services for small and medium business,” you can also put in some benefits in the mix. With benefits in mind, you can now explicitly tell your customers that your business can “reduce tax expenses, therefore increasing profits and increasing efficiency.”

Avoid generic terms

Generic terms like quality, efficiency, or professional applies to all business. In marketing your product or service, stay away from these terms as much as possible. Instead of differentiating yourself from the rest of the competition, you’d be falling into the trap of being ‘one of them.’ Come up with a creative business proposition that you don’t normally see in competitors. It would even be better if you can come up with taglines and quips that you’ve created on your own.

Unique is Beautiful

In packaging your product or service, make sure that you identify the unique features and benefits of your product and make them your product’s crowning accessory. Moreover, ensure that your product has a different look from cheaper or more inferior products. If there’s a little bit of similarity between your packaging and a competitors’, make sure to change yours. Be creative and innovative in packaging your products as this might be the characteristic that makes your product jump out of the shelf when placed among the competition.

 It’s a Numbers Game

In promoting your product or service, always remember that it’s a numbers game. If your number of satisfied customers greatly outnumber the competition’s, then make sure you capitalize on that fact. Furthermore, publishing factual numbers available for your customers to view ensure that there’s transparency and your business has nothing to hide, therefore trustworthy.

Maximize the Potential of your Website

Keeping your website updated is another strategy that you can deploy in differentiating yourself from the others. No website updates mean that there is no business. You certainly don’t want your customers to think that your business is already closed. What you want to do is keep your customers coming back to your site because of very relevant and updated content on your site.

Research your Customers

The best way to differentiate your product from the rest is making them more targeted to a particular niche. You can get this information by asking your customers why they purchase from you and take note of their answers. You can also ask your customers as to why they chose your product among all the others. In finding out the reason for this, you can capitalize on it as your differentiating factor, and use that piece of customer data to attract more customers.

Don’t forget to Ask yourself

You’ve been looking at everything from all angles, revisiting your marketing, critiquing your product look, and interviewing your customers personally. Never forget the input of another important stakeholder in your business: you! Never forget to ask yourself the question of what sets you apart from your competitors. Your point-of-view also counts when it comes to finding out what separates your products and services from the rest of the pack.

Non-profit organizations,  sporting clubs, or sometimes enterprises will all benefit from getting financial backing from a sponsor. But, How exactly is sponsorship attracted?

When we talk about sponsorship, usually sports come in to mind. Let’s take a look at motorsports. Money is the number one driver for any motorsport. Getting into a great team is quite easy, provided that you can rake in an amount of about fifty thousand to eighty thousand dollars for the season. Unless you have this money on-hand, it means that in order to participate in a competition,  you would need to get financial backing from as sponsor.

Challenge is, getting a sponsorship isn’t quite a walk in the park; especially with today’s economic environment. Nevertheless, getting sponsorships are still quite feasible; and possible whether it’s for sport clubs, new businesses, or the like. I’d like to share with you some tips on how to get you those sponsors.

Being Proactive and Persistent

If this is your first time to consider getting a sponsorship, then most probably you’ll find it quite hard to approach. Let me share a motorsport analogy with you. Let’s say a car driver is a no-show on the starting grid during race day. This means that a race win will never come, no matter what happens.  The same thing goes for garnering sponsorships. If you’re not offering any proposals, then might as well forget any deals. In short, being proactive and persistent is the key to obtaining sponsorships.

Another important thing to consider is that getting sponsorships will always be a numbers game. You will always have the odds of closing a deal stacked against you. You will get lots and lots of rejections, but this is expected. What you can do on your end is to make sure that your success rate goes higher.

Return of Investment

Of course, similar to any other deal, your sponsors will expect something in return. In order to clearly present the return of your partner’s investment, you would need to present very clear plans on how to deliver value-add to your partner’s business. These strategies then become your proposal’s focus for appeal.

You can also consider some factors in coming up with those value-add plans. First consideration is that you always need to have tangible value-add to a partner’s business. You need to explicitly show that your partnership will bring certain benefits to both parties. Next, you can personalize your value-add plans to address the partner’s concerns like increase in customers, brand recognition, or increased sales.

Another consideration that you need to take note of is that can your team actually deliver the partner’s requirements? If you can deliver all the promises, make sure that you have detailed plans on how you’re going to achieve those goals.

Another important part of presenting the benefits of a partnership with a potential sponsor is to present a realistic return of investment to the partner. Very vague and general statements like generate more sales, attract more customers, or increase your margin won’t do.  You need to answer how you’re going to help them attain their goals as their partner.

Lastly, you would also need to consider evaluating the success of the sponsorship opportunity. In presenting your proposal, make sure to indicate what key metrics you will be using to measure the success of the partnership. These can be in different forms like website traffic, online sales, or in-arena sales, etc.

Always keep your promises

Most importantly, when engaging in sponsorship deals, always make sure that you keep your end of the deal. Not doing so would not only affect your integrity, but also will make you lose that sponsorship you worked so hard for. Not only that, since there was a bad experience conducting business with you, potential and future sponsorships with other providers might not even materialize.

Advertising and marketing in all its forms burns so much cash. Unfortunately, for all its being expensive, there is even no way to trace which parts of the campaign are making the real impact to the target audience.

All these so called communications strategy seem like a hundred arrows shot at random until one hits the target; the problem is no one will ever know whose shaft hit the bull’s eye. There’s a sad side about any forms of advertisement, sad but worth pondering: no one really gives any thought whether the ads are posted or not or whether they are effective or whatsoever. No one really cares. It is understandable if the target audience is already indifferent to the various marketing communications strategy because to tell the truth, they could not already tell which ones to believe. The target audience are already saturated with hundreds if not thousands of advertisements every day; they are no longer delighted by its presence. Rather they maybe get pissed because it has become an unwelcome interruption with their routine which they consider to be far essential than anything you could ever offer.

The point here however is not to give up utterly all efforts of marketing communications nor you cease to strategize. What you need to do is to polish whatever it is you’ve got, make it simple and do it in a way that actively engages your target audience. The strength of your message will certainly matter; the other half of the whole thing is how you convey that message. So here are some of the steps that may help you say what you want to say the best way.

• Make it brief – Anything you want to say, things that could really get the attention of your audience, compress and say it in 3 seconds. Make it simple and concise without actually losing the essence of your message. So you may have to be just creative enough to do this. It may be difficult for a while but when you already start going, everything else is a piece of cake. When people already start buying into your tag lines, that’s the time you pull them over to one side and spill everything you got with all the specifics and details.
• Establish your principle – what makes a good advertiser from a bad advertiser is principle. A good advertiser knows what matters to him. Your principle will see you through when you are confronted by hard decisions.
• Be specific– ambiguity does not play well in advertising. When you say things, say it in plain language. There is nothing to gain if you let things hung by the thread. Your target audience will appreciate your clarity when you are specific at all times.

Advertising is already hard enough; make your life simple by enforcing your clarity with your target audience.

Viral Marketing may have already influenced you in so many other ways without you knowing it even exists. You do not know its entirety and how it works. Below are some tips that will make you understand the composition of viral marketing campaigns and how to apply it to your advantage.

Viral marketing works exactly in the same way biological virus does. It lets you spread the context of a product advertisement in as easy as flu is spread by sneezing. Viral marketing saturates a greater mass of people thus increasing its probability of making a sale whatsoever. It works powerfully because it spreads more likely in a form of byword chain; basically a heightened word of mouth advertisement. The principles of this kind of marketing are fundamentally the same with both small and big businesses, and that is to spread it using the people’s interconnected social profile as its medium. Below are some of the simple steps to follow when you want to start your own viral marketing campaigns.

Make your tag line brief yet catchy

Since more likely than not the products name come out even in the most ordinary conversations, it ensures advertising breakthrough. You must be creative enough to make and state your tag line/lines which contain the entire message about the product. The infamous line of Nike “Just do it” is exactly one of the best examples of viral marketing campaigns out there. It is concise yet it catches the interest of everyone, man or woman, young and old. It is so easy to remember that you keep repeating it you almost thought you are singing it.

Establish your status

Viral Marketing campaign is heavily dependent upon the name and reputation of a certain product. A poor service and sub standard products stifle the fun and speeds up the demise of your business. Viral Marketing reaches an unbelievable number of potential targets. Now if you have never been careful in taking good care of your legacy, then you will utterly bring the business down. The word spreads like wild fire whether it’s good or ill intentioned.

Offer incentives

Incentives can do a lot of things; for one, it gets people to talk about your business. Simple incentives will even do, such as books and any other useful stuff.

Give away free stuffs

People love freebies. It is one of the oldest tricks really. But no matter how old this trick is, it still works, and it works wonderfully.

Be resourceful

Viral marketing campaign is a battle of resources. The good thing is, in the advent of technology, resources are now accessible. Most of viral marketing today take form in the web, which actually gives you the idea that you can tap to the resources of any affiliate programs. You can even send emails using some of the free email directories. Lastly, take advantage of the popularity of the social media networks, and use it to your advantage.

Tapping the powerful grip of viral marketing campaign is one of the best ways to hit it big, so learn its anatomy, study how it really works.

Whatever business you’re involved in, whether it’s a brick and mortar shop or an online virtual store, we bet you that there are a thousand more businesses just like yours. In an environment where the only rule is survival of the fittest; and the atmosphere is where individuals are jockeying for position for every square inch of the market, there is always that pressing need to identify what separates you from the rest of the pack.  You’ve got to prove that you’re a cut above the rest!

Adapt a Selling Mindset

Any successful sales person will tell you that products sell because of benefits. All products have their own selling points; but without any clear-cut value-add, it’s assured that they’ll only gather dust on a shelf.  It’s the exact same thing for your business.

In adapting a selling mindset, there are three acronyms that you should always remember: F.A.B.; Features, Advantages, and Benefits.  The old sales adage goes, “features tell, benefits sell.”  Features tell your customers what you do; benefits, on the other hand, tell your customers what’s in it for them. Don’t make a mistake of sticking with your product’s features

Always make sure that it’s explicitly known how your product or service will benefit your customers. Instead of telling your customers that you “provide human resource consultancy services,” you can add benefits into the mix by telling them that your company “provides human resource consultancy services to ensure employee productivity, maximize workforce potential, and increase organizational performance.”

Create your own Identity

Given the plethora of similar products and services, you’ve got to be creative in crafting your own identity. Even the biggest and universally known brand names spend millions of dollars a year just to make sure that they are known and their presence felt.

In establishing your own identity, it is not necessary to spend lots of money doing so. You can just start out with small things. Maybe you can reconsider the packaging or the design of your product to look more of a ‘winner.’ You might also want to rethink your company logo or your website/blog to better appeal to your target market. Think of the ‘Swoosh,’ the sexy-curved bottle, or the Prancing Horse, and you’ll get what I mean.

Use Numbers to your advantage

Another way to catch attention is to provide the numbers . Treat your business like it is publicly traded. Share how many satisfied customers you’ve had or how many customers have actually been helped by your product. Remember that “Burgers Served…6B” sign? It tells the customers that business is good.

Update, update, update

If your business has a website/blog, a Twitter, or a Facebook account ; always make sure that content is updated; ideally, on a daily basis. No one wants to follow a  “dead stick.” No website or social media updates equate to customers assuming your business already went belly-up. Furthermore, when updating, make sure to come up with very interesting content as well; craft something that will get your readers to buy your product and service.

Consistently get Feedback

Nothing beats feedback from a customer; whether good or bad. Feedback gives you a real feel of how your business is viewed by the people whom you aim to please.  You can personally do an after sales call to the customer after a few days to find out how he or she finds the product. You can also send out a customer satisfaction email once a sale has been made. These practices, might take you a little bit of time at the start, but will give you long term benefits, especially in product and service improvement department.