In this week’s video I walk you through a simple exercise for differentiating your product (even if you don’t feel different).
Because there’s a problem I see often.
You have a great product.
People love it.
It get’s results. Solves a big problem.
The trouble is, when you look at your competitors you feel like your product isn’t much different. You feel like a “me too” player stuck in a crowded market.
I get it. Standing out can be tricky these days.
That’s why I want to give you the perfect solution for differentiating (even if you don’t feel different).
This week’s video walks you through an amazing (yet simple) exercise that will help you differentiate from everyone else.
Video Transcript:
How do you differentiate when you don’t feel different? Let’s talk about it. A lot of people will want to differentiate themselves in the market and rightfully so. If you’ve been following for any amount of time, you know that I talk a lot about novelty and using newness as an element of your advertising and marketing. But what do you do if you’re not different? How do you differentiate if you’re not different? And what most people try to do is, they look at the market, they go external and they look what their competitors are saying and doing. And they try to say and do the same thing, but say it in a different way. And what ends up happening is the message gets convoluted. The message gets complicated. It doesn’t hit your customer in an impactful way. It just gets forgotten.
Or people try and get gimmicky. Right? And they just try to get attention for the sake of getting attention. There’s really no differentiation that carries any substance. And those are ineffective ways to differentiate. And so the way that you differentiate, even if you don’t feel like you’re different, is you look at what you’re doing and compare it to your competitors and you pull out what they’re not talking about. Right? This comes from a concept that Eugene Schwartz laid out in his book, Breakthrough Advertising. He talks about the solution to the unique lies only in itself. The solution to the unique lies only in itself. That’s so good. Right? What that means is for you to find what’s unique, for you to find what differentiates you, you have to look inside your product. You have to look inside your service. You have to look inside your business. And I’ll go one step further and say, you have to look inside with the awareness of what exists externally.
So, that means you need to know what your competition is talking about. You need to know what your customers are experiencing and consuming on a day-to-day basis and you bring that awareness inside your business when you are looking at your product, you’re looking at your service, you’re looking at the features and what it provides. And then you pick out what is unique and not being talked about in the market. Right? And so I want to bring you in and show you a practical way that gives you a visual of exactly what I mean. So let’s hop into the iPad and I’ll show you how to do that.
Cool. So everybody’s product has a spectrum of features and benefits. Right? Things that are included in what you have to offer. And the problem is most people look at this spectrum and they say, well, these four or five things that my product or service provides are the same as everybody else. Right? So what I want to show you is this is how to think about what you offer compared to what your competitors and what the market is talking about and how you can identify the elements that you can use in your marketing message and the way you talk about it, that differentiate you. Even if you feel like you aren’t that different. Right? And so let’s say you have this set of five different features. There’s A, B, C, D, and E. So let’s say if you are a neobank, a new bank, right? There’s money transfers, there’s high yield savings accounts. There’s a debit card. There’s, peer-to-peer transfers. All these different things that it does. Right?
Or if, let’s say you are a marketing consultant. Right? You provide SEO services, you provide PPC services and you do all these different things and you look, and you’re like, well, our competition kind of does all of that. Right? And so what you do is you look at the market, you understand what it is that they’re talking about and you identify, you say, okay, our market is primarily talking about A, C and D. Right? That’s really what the market, in terms of our target customer, is hearing on a regular basis. But what nobody’s talking about are these elements, right, of this product. Nobody’s talking about B, nobody’s talking about D. And they’re elements in, really, everybody’s product, but nobody’s talking about them. So then these become what you use to differentiate. And you highlight them and you tie those to the biggest dreams and desires of your market. And that’s how you differentiate, because then you come in and you’re the only one that’s talking about these elements of the product.
And that’s how you do it. Right? You look at the elements of your product that nobody else is talking about. And you highlight those. Right?
One of the best examples of this, it’s a classic story. Some of you might’ve heard it before, is Claude Hopkins. One of the greatest copywriters of all time. He wrote a great book called Scientific Advertising. And he has a famous story where Schlitz Beer hired him to come in and do their advertising. Schlitz was an established brand, but their market share was slipping. They were falling behind their competitors and they couldn’t figure out why. So Eugene Schwartz went through his process. He went to their distillery, where they make the beer and interviewed the owners, he interviewed the founders, had conversations and he asked for a tour. And they bring him through a tour of the distillery and he sees this amazingly intricate process of making beer.
He’s like, this is fascinating. This multi-step process, this high level of craftsmanship going into making this beer. And he says, this is your ad. This is what you need to be talking about. The owners, the founders, look at him and go, what are you talking about? This is just how beer is made. This is what everybody’s doing. He goes, yes, but nobody is talking about it. None of your competitors, none of the other brands are talking about this process. Right? And so what Claude Hopkins did is he took those elements, he built a marketing campaign, an advertising campaign around it. And that helped Schlitz differentiate. Even though under the hood, the owners, the founders, the creators, the manager didn’t feel like they were different. Right?
So go ahead, look inside your product with the awareness of what your market is currently hearing, what your competitors are currently talking about. Bring that awareness, take a look inside and you’re going to find opportunities to differentiate, even if don’t feel like you’re different.
Go get it.