What Makes Your Business Different from the Competition?

By Brooke Preston, Manta Contributor

These easy tips will help you attract your ideal customer by focusing on the things that make you different from everyone else.

What sets your business apart? In marketing jargon, this is also known as finding your “unique value proposition.”

In a nutshell, this helpful concept seeks to define what you offer customers that your competitors don’t, and how you can solve your customers’ problems or improve their lives better than any other business.

Determining your unique value proposition (and getting it down on paper) is a useful part of developing a business plan that will consistently inform your marketing strategy and tactics.

To help you get started, we asked strategy expert Alyssa Gasca, founder and owner of SPARK Executive Solutions, for her insights. She and her team have helped some of the nation’s leading businesses with strategic planning and coaching. Here are Gasca’s easy-to-implement tips on defining your business’s unique value proposition:

• Ask Around. Ask your clients if they would refer your business to friends, and what they would say about your product or service. These insights will help you figure out what customers appreciate most about your business.

• Find Your Intersection. Focus your unique value proposition on the intersection of three things:

What you do best.

What your ideal clients value (and will pay for).

What you love to do.

Once you’ve defined what makes your products or services unique, you’ll have a clearer idea of how to market them to customers and how to beat your competitors.