Standing Out in a Crowded Market – How to Differentiate Yourself When Every Angle is Taken
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Stand Out with Strategic Design with BrandWell Designs
Discover Your Brand Positioning Inside The Branding Business School
Explore the art of standing out in an overcrowded market with Victoria as she shares insights from her journey with BrandWell Designs, helping numerous business owners overcome the challenge of brand differentiation. Uncover the secrets to strategic design and brand clarity, emphasizing the importance of understanding your audience and identifying what makes you unique before diving into the visual elements of your brand. Learn how a well-defined internal brand can guide your external branding efforts, ultimately leading to pricing power and long-term success, even in competitive industries.
Craft compelling brand stories and establish niches that truly resonate with your audience. Victoria discusses a three-step approach to building an authentic brand narrative, defining your niche, and communicating the transformation you offer. Using real-world examples she highlights how focusing on the specific problems you solve can differentiate your services effectively. Additionally, explore the power of client feedback and creating a unique brand identity by developing signature offers or frameworks that set your business apart. Tune in to discover actionable steps for defining your brand's transformation and making your mark in the market. If you’re struggling to stand out in a saturated market, you’re not going to want to miss this episode.
Strategic Design at Play
Have you ever landed on a website and immediately felt like, “yes! This is for me!”? That wasn’t an accident. That was strategic design at play, from the colors to the messaging, to the layout of that site, every element was chosen to make you feel something. Over the last six years, Victoria and her team at BrandWell have had the privilege of working with about a thousand small business owners, primarily female service providers, helping them build powerful, conversion-driven brands and websites through strategic design. Branding without strategy is just design, and while design alone might look pretty, design with strategy is what moves people to action.
The Mistake Business Owners Often Make
Business owners often jump straight into the fun stuff, the design and the visuals, without doing the foundational brand work first. The matter of fact is that your external brand, the logos, colors, and website, should be a reflection of the internal brand, which is your mission, your positioning, your values and your audience. You can’t be strategic with your brand if you don’t know first who you’re speaking to and what sets you apart. Differentiation isn’t just important, it’s the most critical first step!
This mistake that business owners often make is the exact reason why Victoria created The Branding Business School, her course that she offers complimentary to all clients of BrandWell, because she believes that the foundational brand work that you do is going to make a difference in the outcome of your visual brand identity. When you can put them all together, and they’re working harmoniously together, that’s when you have the brand with pricing power.
Every Industry is Saturated - How to Stand Out
The truth is, every industry is saturated, and yet there is always room for you. Your business is more than just the service that you provide. It’s the combination of your story, your experiences, your perspective, and the way you solve problems. It’s unique to you and your personality. People don’t just buy services, they buy from people that they connect with. Follow the steps below to learn how you can stand out in your saturated industry!
Step One: Own Your Brand Story
People connect with stories, not services. The brands that stick out in our minds are the ones with a strong why behind what they do.
Action Step: Write out your brand story and then try and condense it into two or three sentences that you can utilize in your social media, on your website, in your marketing, and memorize it. Here’s a formula for you to follow:
What inspired you to start your business? This is going to connect emotionally with your audience.
Who do you serve and why do you help them? This is going to define your niche and it’s going to clarify your expertise. You have to niche down and declare what your expertise is in if you ever want to be seen as the go-to.
What transformation or impact do you create? This will establish why your work matters.
Step Two: Niching Down
Instead of choosing a niche based on industry, you can also choose a niche based on a specific problem that you solve. Ask yourself what is the biggest pain point that my clients face. They can have so many differences and nuances in their personalities and businesses, but something has tied them together and linked them back to you. What is that pain point that made them hire you? Then ask yourself, how do I solve that pain point better than anybody else for these specific people? This is where it may come down to niching down more, whether that’s age range, or gender, or maybe a specific location.
How are you approaching this service a little bit differently than all the other people in your industry? If figuring out your signature approach is always the thing that trips you up, it could be that you’re just copying the people that you admire. Sometimes, in order to really understand our differentiators, we need to stop looking at what everyone else is doing and just do it the way that we are skilled to do it or the way we would have wanted somebody to do it with us when we had an experience with the service that we now provide.
A quick tip to determine this is to listen to the feedback of your customers. What are they raving about when it comes to their experience working with you? What are they complaining about on that initial sales call? Almost always, clients will share their negative past experiences and this can really help you figure out how you’re different.
Action Step: Define the exact type of transformation that you want to provide and then highlight that in your messaging. Stop selling the service, start selling the outcome of that service.
Step Three: Create a Signature Offer or Framework
This step is similar to how you have a signature approach, but it’s more specific. You want to make sure that you have a signature framework, or a process or method, that will add perceived value to the services that you’re selling. Create something that’s unique to you, even if you’re teaching things that other people are already teaching. Nobody’s going to teach it quite like the way you will, so give it a clever name and make it your signature offer.
Action Step: Write down your step-by-step approach and give it a name that’s easy to remember.
Step Four: Let Your Personality Shine
Your brand personality is what makes people feel like they know you before they even work with you. Here are some tangible ways to infuse your personality into your brand:
Your Brand Voice: Do you speak like you or are you trying to sound a certain way?
Your Brand Visuals: Are the colors, fonts, and imagery a reflection of your brand’s vibe?
Through Your Content: Are you sharing your personal thoughts, values, and humor?
Action Step: Audit your brand voice. Does your content sound like you or does it sound like everybody else in your industry?
Create Your Own Lane
In a saturated market, the goal is not to compete. The goal is to create your own lane. When you focus too much on the competition, you honestly start blending in faster than if you ignored the competition all together. Highlight your differentiators, not your similarities to other people who are offering similar services. You don’t have to be the best in your industry, but you do need to be memorable.
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Key Quotes
“In a saturated market, the goal is not to compete. The goal is to create your own lane.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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