I met Rajkumar Jonnalla through Cathy Stucker’s Blogger LinkUp. He had an intriguing article that can offer introverts some comfortable ways of standing out from the competition.
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It doesn’t matter what is the size of your business and how much money you have invested in it you can’t afford to ignore the importance of standing out from the rest of your competitors for making it successful. In the current market scenario where competition increases every moment and marketing costs are going high, your business won’t be able to survive for a longer period of time if you are doing the same thing which thousands of your competitors are doing.
Time and again, I see that most of the business owners act more introverted when it comes to stand out from the others. Why? There are two main reasons behind this –
1. Laziness because it is always easy to follow someone instead of trying something else. For the most part introverts prefer creativity instead of following others so the laziness might come from something else.
2. Fear of failure in implementing new ideas because of which most of the people prefer to stick with traditional methods. Introvert tendencies can often keep us stuck in the idea creation phase and then that keeps them stuck.
I know. You must be thinking of how to make your business look unique. But before that I want to clear some myths. Presenting your business in a unique way is not rocket science and don’t need a huge marketing budget (at least according to me). Also, you should not expect overnight results because it takes time to get noticed depending on the amount of your efforts.
What follows next are the few effective tips which can help you to make your business look unique so that your business can easily stand out from the rest of crowd.
Use personalized approach – Don’t treat your customers only as medium to earn money. Customers are also human beings (At least, most of them). Like all other human beings they also like to get flattered. They become happy when they know that they are being heard or when somebody gives importance to their opinions. Always use personalized approach for your customers. Send them greeting cards on their birthdays, ask for their feedback, send them discount coupons on festivals even when they didn’t asked about them so that they don’t forget you whenever they need to buy anything.
Help when they need – Your customers won’t remember what products you sell and at what prices, the only thing they would remember is the experience they get. Make your experience as pleasant as possible by providing them with the information and things they need whenever possible. Nor does it improve your relationships with them but will also establish you as the expert in your niche.
Accept your faults – Nobody is perfect but what irritates a customer the most is when a business owner doesn’t accept his/her fault and start giving lame excuses. If you have done a mistake or don’t have skills to perform job successfully then accept it upfront.
Make yourself accessible – Provide as many channels of communication as possible to your customers to contact you. Join all the popular social media sites, forums and everything else where your customers spend most of their time. The more ways you will provide to your customers to contact you, the easier it will be for your customers to find you and the more they will buy from you.
Try to do things differently – Whether it is something big like designing a whole website, designing your office, implementing marketing strategy or small but important actions like packaging, shipping or just billing. You need to do things differently to stand out from the others and to get the attention you deserve. Unique visual appearance influence the consumer decisions most of the times. Doing everything in a different style will give you a winning edge against your competitors.
Rajkumar Jonnalla is working for Fortepromo Promotional Products that help companies to promote their brand in market.