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Differentiation Strategies That Will Make Your Business Stand Out

John O’Hara
Originally Published: 23 January 2025
Last Updated: 24 January 2025

How do you make your business stand out when everybody is doing the same thing? Differentiation. Develop a differentiation strategy that gets a clear message in front of the right customers.

The squeaky wheel, they say, gets the grease. For customers to choose you over another business, you have to squeak a little. You have to stand out from your competitors. How do you do that when everybody in your industry is selling similar or identical products to the same groups of clients? Through differentiation.

Differentiation is about demonstrating to customers what makes you the right choice for them. It involves identifying who your ideal customer is and creating marketing campaigns that appeal to their needs.

Differentiation isn’t random. It’s not a matter of picking some attribute you see lacking in your competitors and making that your brand. Differentiation has to be strategic, rooted in market research, competitive intelligence, and a thorough analysis of your own business’s strengths. From there, you can develop an ideal customer profile and focus all of your marketing on reaching customers that fit the profile.

Ineffective Differentiation Strategies

Price

When consumers turn to, say, Walmart or Amazon, it’s not because they’re looking for the highest-quality products or best customer service. What matters to most Walmart or Amazon shoppers is price. If low prices helped these two companies become the behemoths they are today, why doesn’t everybody do it? These companies have massive supply chains and infrastructure that allow them to offer the lowest prices. The average retailer could never compete with them in this regard. If a lower-priced competitor did emerge, these companies could probably afford to reduce their prices and profit margins further, just long enough to put their competitors out of business.

The same is true for B2B organizations. Unless you already operate your own supply chain and have the biggest market share in your field, you probably won’t be able to compete on price. Even if you’ve developed or adopted a new method that allows you to manufacture or distribute parts or products at a lower cost, that advantage won’t last long.

Features

You might have a unique, revolutionary feature today, but if it is a success, in a year, two years, maybe even six months, everybody’s products will boast the same feature, leaving you with a not-so-unique selling point. Just look at OpenAI’s ChatGPT. When the company released their chatbot in late 2022, they were the only game in town. Now, every tech company has their own large language model: Google has Gemini, Microsoft has Copilot, Anthropic has Claude, Meta has Llama. They’re all more or less the same thing, based on the same technology, trained on the same data, yielding similar results. A successful feature will quickly be copied, sending you back to the drawing board.

Effective Differentiation Strategies

Longevity and Tradition

While that unique feature won’t remain unique for long, you can still boast about being the first one to it. If that’s what’s important to your customers, market around your position as a leader, an innovator, a trendsetter. Sure, everyone has those same features now, but you got there first, and it’s that tradition of innovation that makes you different to this day.

Customer Experience

Customer experience does not begin or end with a knowledgeable, helpful sales team and easy-to-use website. Those are baseline expectations today. To create a differentiation strategy based on customer experience, analyze every touchpoint a customer has with your business and businesses like yours and identify places where you can make the process even more efficient and engaging.

A well-organized website, contact forms that are easy to find, easy access to product catalogs and quotes, quick and convenient checkout, and transparent shipping information are all important parts of the customer experience. If you recognize where your customers struggle along their customer journey and develop ways to address those pain points, you can create an effective differentiation strategy around customer experience.

Don’t forget what happens after a sale, either. If you can be there for your customers to help with installation, training, troubleshooting, and repair in a way that other companies cannot, you can differentiate around that.

Branding

Branding isn’t just for big businesses. Many small businesses make their service their brand. If you sell accounting services and your brand is “we sell accounting services,” there’s nothing to differentiate you from another accountant in the eyes of potential customers. If you sell office supplies and you don’t put much thought into branding beyond “we sell office supplies,” you’re the same as every other office supply store. This sameness could be driven by fear: if everyone is doing it this way, there must be a reason for it, and if I try to stand out, I could end up alienating potential customers.

That way of thinking is a classic case of trying to appeal to everyone and ending up appealing to no one. If you understand who your customers are, what they need, and how you can best serve them, your branding won’t alienate your ideal customers, the ones who will love what you do and establish long-lasting relationships. Rather than drive potential leads away, you’ll send a clear message to the right leads that you are the business for them.

Branding is an effective vehicle for differentiation because it is about the customer as much as it is about the seller. Rather than saying “we have the lowest price” or “we have a unique feature” or even “we have the best customer service,” branding says “you are this type of person, and so are we,” “you have these types of problems, and we know how to solve them this way,” or “you run your business based on these principles, and we do business the same way.” Of course, that appeal has to be authentic. You can’t pretend to be something you’re not!

Our hypothetical accounting services business has to be more than “we do accounting.” If “we take the pain out of business accounting,” they’re differentiated. If that office supply firm says “we put the fun in functional,” they’re appealing to every pen and post-it note junkie out there.

Small Differences Can Make a Difference

In retail, consumers have so much choice and they aren’t often experts on the product they are buying, so differentiation has to be big and obvious. In B2B, your customers are knowledgeable about what they are looking for and usually know exactly what they need. In B2C, differentiation strategies need to be big and obvious. In B2B, you can more subtly appeal to your customers’ pain points to stand out from the crowd.

Differentiation Is an Ongoing Process

No matter what kind of differentiation strategy you decide on, it’s important to continually improve upon it. If you want to be known as an innovative company, you have to constantly innovate. If you want to be known as the company with the easiest sales process, you have to stay on top of the latest technological developments that allow fast and easy sales.

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