How do you stand out and differentiate from your competition?

It's a tricky question to answer and there's rarely a quick win, but there are loads of things you can do to help answer this question and build a stronger business. Over time lots of little wow factors will help you sidestep the competition and stand out from the rest.

For me...one way to stand out as a creative agency was to create www.storycube.co.uk with my co-founder Robbie Dale. This is our formula to help entrepreneurs inspire, pitch and sell with ease.

We "productised" and "packaged" our experience and expertise over the years helping brands grow and turned this into a mixture of an online course, 1-2-1 coaching, workshops and strategic consultancy. The results have been more opportunities, more creative projects, more interesting clients and what we all want...more sales! 

Here are some tips in this short article to help you stand out too...

1) Case Studies: Create detailed case studies of your top success stories and make a video which includes your customer to really bring this to life. You might only need 2-3, so invest in them to see other similar customers come knocking on your door. How can you improve your case studies to attract the customers you want?

2) Thought Leadership: Be the expert, go as niche as possible with your offer, create systems and process and be the best in your field. If you don't have Intellectual Property, something you can call your own, you're always going to be "just another fish". The more you focus on this, the better your offer gets and the more you're known for doing one thing really well! What are you the best at or what can you become the best at in the future?

3) Testimonials: Get real reviews and testimonials from ALL happy clients and make this public on sites like Google and Trustpilot or other relevant sites. Social proof is so powerful and will help convince those sitting on the fence. Who have given your best review and who do you want to add?

4) Killer Statistics: Share key statistics, the actual numbers, about your product or service e.g. Net Promoter Score, number of customers, projects completed, the impact of your product/service, sales stats etc. The bite-sized details will help you stand out and will help prospect remember your wow factors.

5) Your Philosophy: What's your way of doing things, your vision, values, culture and mission? This can be a great differentiating factor, as customers often make emotionally led decisions when choosing your organisation over another. And of course how can you back this up with evidence like winning awards, getting press coverage, striking strategic partnerships etc?

Those are just a few ideas but hopefully you can see they are relevant for any business, whether product or service, or B2B or B2C. What you do it one thing, how you do it, how you communicate this and why you're better than the competition makes all the difference in sales and marketing!

Thanks for reading.

Michael Murdoch

CEO of The House and Story Cube.

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More information...

If you're like to find out more, check out the online course at www.storycube.co.uk or book onto one of our workshops at The British Library.

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Bonus material...