When you’re a small business owner, there are times when the scale of larger businesses can overwhelm you. Right now, you may be wondering what it is about you that will make potential customers choose your brand over another. This particular factor is a business differentiator and helps consumers in the market to identify and differentiate it from other brands.

Differentiating your company from the rest is an integral part of building a brand, and it has become even more difficult in recent years, as it is not enough to be better than others; you need to be different. You may not have realized it yet, but being a small business is a differentiator in itself, you need to take advantage of it and market it enough. This is how you can identify the differentiators of your small business.

Analyze your competition

Finding your differentiators starts with learning what makes your competitors different. You must maintain a neutral position and evaluate your competitor to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. What are you offering? What do they do better than you? How do they treat their customers?

Once you answer these questions, you will discover their strengths and weaknesses, as well as your own. At this point, you can decide whether you want to change the direction of your business to make it better than your competitors or market an aspect of your brand that already exists.

Be familiar with the customer experience

One benefit of being a small business owner is having first-hand experience of the life of an average consumer. Knowing the shortcomings of the customer experience of a large-scale company, he knows what to develop in his own company. However, when working on differentiators, it’s time to start scratching, so you need to map out the various aspects of being a customer. What do they value? What deters them from buying?

You need to work on ways to create consumer awareness of a need that your company can fill. Only after a consumer realizes that he needs something will he look for brands that can provide a solution. You need to assess how your target demographic makes purchasing decisions and whether or not your brand aligns with that thought process.

The wrong approach is to focus solely on your product because that’s not what customers emphasize when they buy a product. The best way is to address different aspects of the customer experience and build on all of them.

know your strengths

The first and foremost strength of being a small business is giving customers the care they need. Since you’re not running branches everywhere, you can afford to take care of a minimal customer base.

Apart from that, each business has its strengths compared to other brands. It could be their amazing marketing, their customer loyalty programs, or their approach to customer service. Also, a small business operates on values, so they understand the needs and requirements of the average person.

Get involved in the community

The community you operate in should be your focus when expanding your reach. By making an impact in your community, your brand automatically gains a reputation among the other brands in the area. People in your district will be in favor of supporting your brand as it will have a positive influence on their community.

The importance of having differentiators

It’s true that every brand needs differentiators that give them a competitive edge against business rivals, but your brand needs it more as a small business. This is because large companies are already able to offer better prices due to cheaper manufacturing practices and access to lower-cost raw materials.

So having a fixed market differentiator will help consumers choose your brand despite the difference between what you and the bigger brands have to offer. However, having a differentiator is not only necessary to differentiate your brand from the rest. By knowing what you can do better than other companies, you’ll have a clear view of what to focus on when planning a marketing campaign.

A well-planned and targeted marketing effort will help you retain customers and increase your promotion rates to people outside of your community. Without a strong differentiator, you won’t be able to compete with others head-on.

At the same time, you must uphold the values ​​of honesty and transparency by refraining from overloading your brand profile. By certifying that you are better than the competition at ‘everything’, you risk losing valuable customers. That’s why; you need to test all your differentiators to see if they are true, testable, and relevant.

Only market things about your brands that you believe to be true, and to gain the trust of your audience, you need to prove it; either through ‘look inside our shop’ schemes or quality testing. Lastly, your differentiators must be relevant. Customers won’t consider an aspect of your brand that they don’t care about or that doesn’t benefit them. To conclude, you need to reflect on the personality of your band and find something about your small business that sets it apart from the rest.