Yaro is a serial entrepreneur, blogger, podcaster, angel investor and digital nomad.
Differentiation.
It’s one of the most powerful marketing tools.
To be different is a perception, which means it is malleable.
It can be influenced – this is why we study marketing, to learn how to influence people to purchase our products and services.
The internet is so big you will have competition no matter what you sell.
You can ‘niche down’ to help reduce the amount of competition, but there will always be comparables for your customers to consider.
The purpose of differentiation is to make your product or service the superior choice to a specific group of people.
When someone has a need, they go looking to buy a solution.
A search online will bring up options, and then ads will start popping up for all kinds of similar products or services.
Your offer exists within this chaos.
In order to get the sale you need to be different, and thus ‘best choice’ for a certain group of people.
Over my career as an entrepreneur I leaned heavily into this concept.
When I was 20 years old and registered my first company – BetterEdit.com – I strategized what would make my service agency different.
There were already hundreds of editing and proofreading options available online and most were competing on price or reputation.
I had no reputation and I didn’t want to compete on price, I knew that was a race to the bottom and my profit margins would disappear.
I decided to niche down to focus on student document editing – essays and thesis.
This immediately made us polarizing.
If you wanted a non-student document proofread, we’d never get the sale.
If you were a student, we stood out as a tailored solution.
Making this choice to specialize impacted all of our marketing.
- Our advertising was targeted only at students
- Our website copy was written entirely to speak to students
- We focused on student needs like getting better grades
- As we got student customers, we highlighted them as testimonials
We could also charge a premium price because turnaround time is hugely important to students who write papers last minute. We offered speedier service for a higher cost.
Years later after becoming a content creator and building an education business behind my personal brand, I realized my industry was becoming much more crowded.
New bloggers, podcasters, youtubers and social media influencers were popping up covering the same topic I was – making money online.
You can probably relate to this today – competition is fierce!
Again I had to differentiate.
My strategy focused on using my personal brand, the results of my previous students and a system I taught using just two tools:
- Blog
- Email sequences
My offer appealed to people who preferred to write, and who wanted to sell education products like courses, membership sites and ebooks.
I built an entire launch campaign off the back of just one concept – The Blog Sales Funnel – which was an attempt to stand out and be different.
Today my current company InboxDone.com, another services agency, is also clearly differentiated.
It was built that way from day one, even before we had any clients.
We already had a system that we used in my businesses to delegate email to specialist assistants.
We took this specific need (breaking free from email) and built a highly specialized executive assistant agency around it.
All of our website copy, ad campaigns, content, client testimonials – everything is built around what makes us different from other virtual assistant agencies (and there a lot of them out there!).
Differentiation is the most important first step in your marketing strategy.
It is such a guiding force for everything you do.
Who you target, referred to as an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), is a reflection of what your differentiation strategy is.
Over time you will learn more about your ICP, which will inform how you continue to refine your differentiation.
It’s a constant process of calibration, a word you may recall I like.
Stay different.
Yaro
