So the competition is selling exactly the same products as you? How do you outperform them to become the market leader for your area? Here are seven tips for making your company and your products stand out from the crowd:
Provide Excellent Customer Service
We feel much more loyalty to a company that provides excellent customer service. We’re also much more likely to recommend that company to family and friends. Good customer service means responding quickly to customer enquiries and making your customers feel like people, not numbers. It also means providing a number of ways for your customers to get in touch. Some prefer to make a phone call, others will email and yet more like to get in touch over social media.
Create a Motivated Workforce
When your team are motivated, they provide a better service to your customers. They also work more productively and strive for success, creating better results. In order to motivate your workforce, you need to make them feel valued. Give praise often, allow room for employees to demonstrate their creativity and initiative, and a few employee perks wouldn’t go amiss either.
Offer Top Rate Delivery Options
When customers shop online they’re looking for convenience. They may want an item delivered tomorrow. Or they may want the option to click and collect. Or they may want the cheapest possible delivery price as a trade-off for a slower service. The more delivery options you can offer, the more likely people are to shop with you, rather than the competition.
Build Your Brand
Every day we make consumer choices. When we go to the supermarket, we’re faced with a wide variety of – for instance – tomato sauces. Which one we choose isn’t always down to a comprehensive taste test. It’s down to the brand and our impressions of the company behind it. Your brand is communicated through the colours of your logo, the design of your website, your social media style and your marketing materials. Create a consistent and likeable brand image and customers are much more likely to buy into your hype.
Develop a Great Website and User Experience
We’ve all experienced that feeling of frustration when we land on a poorly designed website. We don’t know where to find what we’re looking for, pages load slowly and the checkout process takes an age. If this sounds like your website, you’ll be losing customers along the way. Regularly test and update your website so it operates as well as it possibly can do. And use Google analytics to find out when and where customers choose to leave your website. It will give an insight into improvements you can make.
Work on your SEO
Having a clearly defined and effective SEO strategy is really important to your business success. If you’re selling exactly the same product as a competitor, you want your website to rank higher in search results for key terms. This means prospective customers come across you first.
Know Your Customers
By having a thorough understanding of your customers – their needs, their budgets, their problems – you can adapt your products to meet their requirements more effectively. You may have the same product as your competitor but do they have an associated app to help customers with installation? Or a five year guarantee should anything go wrong? Or an easy way to upgrade their product when it becomes outdated? Find out what your customers want – through data analytics or old-fashioned questionnaires – and strive to deliver it to them.
You can still make a roaring success of your business even if others are offering the same products. By working on your user experience, providing good customer service and understanding exactly what your customers want, you could soon be leading the pack and boosting your profits.
This is a guest post. Elizabeth Lee is a marketing and logistics expert from Australia. Currently writing on behalf of PACK & SEND, Elizabeth might often be found sharing her strategies and suggestions with business owners and employers. Feel free to follow her at @LelizabethLee86.