Helping Your Products to Stand Out from the Competition
When you set up a small business, you spend so much time, effort, and money coming up with your own products. You go through all sorts of design, development, and manufacturing processes before you even have a final product that you can hold in your own two hands! So, after pouring so much into something, you’re going to want to ensure that it truly stands out from the competition. If it doesn’t, you’ll quickly find yourself losing customers (and thus profit) to other businesses in the field. Now, it is admittedly difficult to stand out from the crowd when customers nowadays have such easy access to seemingly endless alternatives on the internet. However, there are several things that you can do in order to shine. Here are a few to consider.
Competitive Pricing
First things first, let’s focus on pricing. After all, the price tag attached to any product holds a lot of influencer over whether a consumer purchases an item or not. If your product is completely unique, you are largely in complete control of your own pricing. However, it’s when competitors have similar products on offer that pricing really does have to become competitive, and at the end of the day, no matter how unique your product may be, you’re likely to come along imitations at some point or another. So, you want a price that falls below competitors’ prices, but still allows you to make a profit. This is where a competition based pricing strategy can come into play. However, be careful. You need to make sure you don’t depreciate perceived value of your product too significantly – this can also work to your disadvantage, as too low a price can make your product seem undesirable.
Effective Advertising
Another great way to ensure that your products are viewed and purchased before the competition even has a look in could be effective, targeted advertising. If customers don’t know to search for your specific brand, they will often search general terms and keywords into a search engine. However, if they’ve already seen what they want and know who you are and where your stock is supplied, they’re more likely to come directly to you, bypassing other options out there. Online advertising is pretty simple to operate. You can use advertising through search engines (such as Google’s Adwords Service), or use pay per click agencies. Pay per click (or PPC) marketing agencies put your adverts out there for people to see, but instead of paying out a flat rate, you only have to cough up for the number of people who click on the ads and are redirected to your site. This means you are literally only paying for what you get in return!
There are, of course, plenty more ways to help your products to stand out from their competition. However, these are two of the easiest to implement and most productive methods of the bunch. So, try to incorporate them into your business plan as soon as possible!
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Hi, I'm Kelly O'Donnell.