Causing Your Brand to Stand Out From the Competition

If you want to succeed in business using social media, you need to get people to notice you and your brand. It is especially important if you have a product or service that is not as unique.

It usually takes some time before social media efforts start to pay off. It takes time, effort, and a lot of patience. It also takes guts. If you want your brand to become outrageously successful (and thus beat out the competition), it will probably not be enough to just quietly follow along your chosen business path. You will need to take your efforts to the next level and really push the boundaries of your social media marketing strategy. The absolute first thing that you have to do before you consider anything else is to make sure that you clearly understand why your brand and offerings are worth your customers’ time, attention, and extra money. There are several approaches that you can take to do this:

• Provoke: On your journey to pushing the envelope, you should be sure to come up with subjects that other business owners are afraid to broach. Of course, you must remember to exercise some discretion; however, if your topics are titillating, unconventional, and exciting, other people will take a great deal of interest in you and your business and will want to learn more and more about you.  The best that you can hope for is that your content goes viral. The more exciting your content, the more people will take an interest in it. Your goal is to offer your target audience content that they will not be able to find anywhere else. People love hot topics. Not only should you offer provocative content but you also need to make sure that the content enhances your brand and gets people to want to be involved with it.
   
• Go slow: The best way to create buzz for your product is to make sure that you maintain an air of mystery (even if it is just a little) at all times. You will be successful if you hold back to some extent. Never give it all away at once. If you give everything away at once, what will there be for people to anticipate and look forward to? The anticipation is half of the excitement.
   
• Connect with people directly: If you are trying to establish your brand in a really big way through social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, your approach must be proactive. You need to connect with people directly and consistently. You can’t just sit at your desk in your office and expect that everyone and everything that you want will come to you. You need to go out and start to establish relationships and you need to connect with people on a very human level. If; however, your brand has already been established, you will have an easier time convincing people to take an interest in what you are offering. You should bear that in mind when you are considering how much is involved (time and effort) when it comes to cultivating and establishing those business relationships. You need to try and identify the top influencers in your niche or industry. Those people will prove to be absolutely critical to the success of your business.
   
• Follow your competitors closely: If you follow your competitors closely, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do everything that they do when it comes to your marketing strategy. However, if you feel that you are not having a tremendous amount of success with your business, it is even more important to study what your competitors are doing and do your best to outdo them. By all means, try your best to out-perform your competition at every possible opportunity. It is critical that you worry about how your business is doing as a result of your online efforts and it is equally critical that you keep a close watch on what other competitive businesses are doing also.

Conclusion

Common sense tells you that if what you are offering is the same as what everyone else is offering, you won’t have much of a chance of success. The only way to obtain an edge is to give your offerings a new and exciting spin, a spin that only you offer. You need to make sure that your story is really unique and that people are able to relate to it emotionally.  It is also a really good idea to keep your communication approach as simple and honest as possible.  If you can succeed at doing  all of that, you will become successful beyond your wildest dreams.

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