Differentiate Yourself From Your Competitors Without Spending a Dime

by Michael Tao in Business on July 5th, 2010

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Lately, Vancouver is seeing an influx of small businesses. Specifically in Yaletown, where more and more specialty businesses are opening. Here’s a quick and easy strategy to set your business apart from the competition.

When we hear the word ‘competition’, our natural instinct is to feel fear and anxiety. When competitors pop up, our tendency is to do a promotion or lower the price of your service.

While these are good tactics at first, they are not a way to create sustainable clientele. Lowering your price may work for a short period of time, but eventually, as a business owner, you’ll want to raise your prices back to their original rates.

This creates a problem because you don’t want to drive away your clients. It’s always harder to raise prices than it is to lower them.

Basics never change

Customer Service As a small business, you don’t have the capital to throw into a huge marketing campaign. But, defining your business core, focusing on what your business is about, that is free, and invaluable.

Work on improving what you already have – refine your customer service, go that extra mile; do things that set you apart from your competition that don’t cost much money.

Making a client feel welcome and being attentive to their needs will make them come back.

Creating a returning client is valuable because they will help promote you through word of mouth, something much more valuable than a $20,000 marketing campaign that doesn’t affect your clients at all.

Marketing is not a department!

One misconception is that marketing is a department. IT is a department. Finance is a department. But marketing isn’t.

Marketing is your receptionist, your assistant, your intern, anyone who interacts with the public. Focus on how your employees represent themselves and your company to the public.

Stop lying! We can see right through it!

Many businesses have Mission Statements. They hang them proudly so that their clients and other members of the public can see them. The problem with this is that people don’t connect to the words that they see.

Rather they connect to the experience they have with your business. These mission statements show that a company has a philosophy for what they do – but how much do they actually live by it? How much should they live by it? 80% of the time? 100%?

Everytime you up your game with your customer service, that’s the best marketing and PR you could ever invest in.

Focus on the basics because the basics never change.