It has never been easier to create marketing content.

With AI tools, social media platforms and an endless supply of templates at our fingertips, small business owners can produce blog posts, emails, videos and social media content faster than ever before. The challenge is that everyone else can too. Scroll through LinkedIn or Instagram and you will quickly start to notice familiar phrases, similar advice and businesses making very similar promises.

“We put our customers first.”

“We are passionate about what we do.”

“We offer a high-quality, personalised service.”

“How do I know if my marketing is actually working?” 

There is nothing necessarily wrong with these statements. The problem is that when everyone is saying the same thing, it becomes increasingly difficult for potential customers to understand why they should choose you vs you competitors. So, how do you stand out in a cluttered digital marketplace without feeling as though you need to reinvent your business, shout louder or constantly chase the latest marketing trend?

The answer often starts with getting clearer about who you are, who you help and what makes your approach different. 

Your unique proposition or USP

Start with what makes you different. If you look at your competitors’ websites and see that they are all talking about experience, quality and excellent customer service then you may wish to focus on something different. Yes these things are important but everyone brings something unique to a working relationship, take some time to work out what that is and focus your messaging on that. Take a step back and consider:

• What do our customers value most about working with us?
• What problems do we solve particularly well?
• What do we do differently from others in our industry?
• What experience do we give our customers?
• What do people regularly thank or recommend us for?
• What do we believe that others in our industry may not?

The best way to understand the answers to some of these questions is to ask your customers, conduct some research.  Perhaps you take more time to explain things to customers, developed a particular way of working or your experience means you can spot problems before they become bigger issues.

These may feel ordinary to you because you do them every day but to your customers, they could be exactly the reason they choose you. 

Be more specific

Be more specific with your messaging, generic AI labelled marketing is easy to ignore. Compare these two statements:

“We provide expert marketing support for businesses.”

To:

“We help time-poor small business owners create practical marketing strategies they can easily implement.”

The second statement provides more detail, we know who the business helps, the challenges they face and what the results might be. Rather than trying to appeal to everyone, think about who you are particularly well placed to help. We often refer to this as niching, whilst it makes lots of sense to help us focus our energies I also have a bit of a love/ hate relationship with this approach.

Let me explain. I think my challenge with this is with the traditional way of being more specific, typically you would choose a particular industry or sector to focus on, if you want to focus on one area that is fine but personally I really enjoy the diversity of working with lots of different organisations. With this in mind we might then niche slightly differently by attitude or mindset, which is more difficult to quantify.

Your experience is your USP

AI is a useful tool and can help you to create a first draft, research ideas or refine a piece of content. But it doesn’t have your years of experience, your customer conversations, industry understanding or judgement. That is where your most valuable content often comes from. Think about:

• The questions your customers ask you every day.
• The mistakes you regularly see people making.
• The advice you give when you meet small business owners face to face.
• The things you wish customers knew before they came to you.
• Your opinions about how your industry could do things better.
• Lessons you have learned from experience.

These are the things that cannot be copied from the latest trending post. Your knowledge and perspective are part of what makes your business different. 

Don’t be afraid to have a point of view

Don’t be afraid to have a clear point of view or a perspective. Standing out doesn’t mean being controversial for the sake of it, but it does mean being prepared to have an opinion.

Perhaps you believe that businesses are wasting too much time trying to be on every social media platform. Maybe you think businesses should spend more time talking to their existing customers rather than constantly chasing new ones. Or perhaps you believe that AI should be used to support good marketing, rather than replace strategic thinking.

Your point of view helps people understand how you think and what it might be like to work with you.

Not everyone will agree with you and that is okay too. Your aim isn’t to appeal to everyone, it is to connect with the people who are most likely to value what you do and who you want to work with. Consistency in your marketing is essential both in frequency and visually, to help you become recognisable and achieve cut through in a very cluttered digital world.

Marketing consistency is key

I talk quite a bit about marketing consistency. Standing out is not always about doing something dramatically different, sometimes, it is simply about being consistent enough for people to remember you. If your message changes every week, it can be difficult for people to understand what you stand for.

What problems do you want people to associate with your business?

What would you like someone to say when they recommend you?

You don’t need to come up with an entirely new message every time you create a social media post or write a blog. In fact, repetition is really important, the know, like trust model comes into play here and we know that people need to hear about us 5-7 times before they are more likely to reach out and wish to work with us.

Your audience is not paying as much attention to your marketing as you think and with the algorithms and spam folders in place they are likely to only see a small percentage of what you share. Repeating your key messages in different ways helps to build recognition and reinforce what you want to be known for. Using stories to help explain a particular principle or situation can be a really powerful way to do this.

You don’t have to do more, just do it better. Before adding more to your marketing to-do list, ask yourself whether your existing message is clear enough. Do people immediately understand:

• Who you help?
• What problem you solve?
• Why your approach is valuable?
• What makes you different?
• What should they do next?

Tell more stories

Think about the customers you have helped, the challenges you have overcome or the lessons you have learned along the way. You don’t always need a dramatic success story, even a simple example can make your marketing more relatable.

For example:

• A conversation that changed how you approach your work.
• A common customer problem and how you helped solve it.
• A mistake you made and what you learned from it.
• Something you noticed happening in your industry.
• The reason you changed the way you offer a particular service.

Stories bring personality and experience into your marketing and personality is something that is becoming increasingly important as more content starts to sound the same. You don’t have to create more you may need to say things better.  When marketing isn’t delivering the results you hoped for, the natural reaction is often to do more, post more often, join another platform, write another blog or create another email.

Healthy marketing habits to help you stand out

Marketing can feel overwhelming for many. I was in a client conversation recently and we were talking about healthy habits to help us create impactful marketing and to help us be consistent so I thought it would be helpful to share them here too. Here are a few to consider:

1.Make time to listen. Pay attention to the questions your customers are asking during your meetings or at networking events. Perhaps also conduct some simple research to understand more about the language they use so you can weave that into your content and over time you can create a bank of genuinely useful marketing ideas.

2. Set aside time each week to implement your marketing. Little and often is easier, rather than thinking you need to spend a whole day working on your marketing, set aside an hour a couple of times to tick a few things off you to do list.

3. Batch prepare and repurpose content. I work with my clients to help them be as time efficient as possible. We often start by writing a blog article which forms the basis of our content focus for the month. From the blog we then take teaser snippets of the content across into email and social media marketing activity.

4. Spend less time chasing every trend. You do not need to be everywhere or react to every new marketing trend. Choose the channels and activities that are most relevant to your customers and focus on doing those well. A clear strategy is usually more effective than constantly chasing the next shiny object.

5.  Create before you consume. It is easy to spend an hour scrolling through LinkedIn or Instagram and come away feeling that everyone else is doing marketing better than you. Try creating your own content before consuming everyone else’s. It is good to know what your competitors are doing, it can spark an idea, but it is also important to define your pathway first.

6. Review what is working. Set aside time each month to look at your marketing performance and try to understand what is and is not working. Alongside our stats we can also review what content our audience is engaging with, what questions people are asking and what our reviews are telling us.

Final thoughts

Standing out doesn’t necessarily mean being louder, constantly reinventing your brand or coming up with a completely new idea every week. Often, it comes down to being clearer about who you are, who you help and why your approach matters, being specific, sharing your experience and telling stories. 

If you would like some help gaining some clarity and getting started in creating your marketing roadmap, please get in touch to see how we can help