What is your competitive advantage?

A competitive advantage is something you have that your competitor doesn’t, it is a reason for someone to visit your website instead of someone else’s. This criteria could be one of the following:

1. Unique selling point (USP)
Having a unique selling point is one of the most important things in business, it means you offer something different from everyone else. For example if you held a patent on a certain design of a product that nobody else had.

Another USP could be that you specialise in one product and nobody else does this, for example you may be the only store in the world that only sells spoons, but you have every different kind of spoon that anyone could ever want.

Having a unique selling point makes advertising much easier, for example you could state at the top of your website “The world’s largest supplier of spoons” or something similar to gain peoples interest.

2. Reputation
This is everything in business, if you are a new start-up company it can be tough to establish, especially on the internet where people have to know where you are before they visit your website. It’s easier if you’re a shop on a high street where people will walk past and see what you have available, but its easier still if you have a great reputation.

Having a recognisable brand name is important, if you offer a product that people like then that will become recognised and your reputation will grow. If you manage to become the leading brand in a certain field then you are in a great position for the future, for example Google and eBay are the leading competitors in their respective fields of search engines and online auctions because they both have a great reputation and the vast majority of people use those websites over any other.

3. Effective Strategy
If you plan well and you get a head-start over your competitors then you have a great advantage, the best way to plan is for 3 different outcomes; if things go how you expect, if things go better than expected and if things go worse than expected. By doing things this way you will always be one step ahead of your competitors and will know exactly what to do no matter what scenario happens.

When the internet was first coming to prominence a lot of company’s saw it as a threat, and some still do. Michael Porter said back in 2001 that those who see the internet as a complement to the traditional ways of competing will be the real winners, this has proved true for many major companies.

Follow these steps to marketing success

A fantastic competitive advantage is to know what you’re doing when it comes to online marketing, it can be difficult because most people just don’t know where to start. It’s good if you can get yourself listed in major search engines and get advertisements on other websites, but it is important to get value for money. Here are seven steps to help you on your way to online marketing success:

1. Testing
Rather than go full steam ahead with a marketing campaign and blowing your entire budget, it’s often a very good idea to have a focus group first and find out what people want from you, then you will have an idea of how to advertise to them. Then you might want to put out a few ads and see what feedback you get on them, if the feedback is good then you can go ahead with the full campaign.

2. Optimise for search engines
You could have the most amazing website on the entire internet, but what good would it be if nobody saw it? You are actually much better off having a badly designed website which is optimised for search engines rather than having a beautiful website that isn’t because you will only get visitors to the one which is optimised!

3. Only pay for what you use
When advertising through search engines or by using banners it is advisable to use pay-per-click deals where you only pay when someone clicks on your link, rather that paying a lot of money for advertising space and potentially not getting your moneys worth. These deals are great because you know you are getting what you pay for and can even determine the number of clicks you wish to receive on some search engines.

4. Pick the best time to advertise
Once you have a product that you wish to advertise and a place to advertise it, it can be a good idea to push the advertising more at a certain time of day when you will appeal more to your target audience. An example of this would be advertising children’s toys between 3pm-9pm when they are home from school and before they go to bed, or from 9am-5pm to attract the attention of business customers.

5. Use behavioural targeting
This is a bit more specialised and more useful for larger companies, you can analyse user surfing patterns and behaviour over a period of time and give them certain advertisements based on those results. I’m sure you’ve all seen the personal recommendations on Amazon and other websites, that is behavioural targeting.

6. Affiliate with other websites
The cheapest way of advertising is to affiliate with another website, this is where you would link to another website and in return they would link to yours. It’s a good idea to affiliate with a website in the same area as yours, because people clicking on your link are more likely to the interested in your product. This form of advertising is usually free because both affiliated websites will benefit from it as they are basically sharing their customers.

7. Text based ads can be value-for-money
While they may not stand out as much, text-based advertisements can sometimes be better than ads with lots of images as they can sometimes come across better and make the user think it is a serious website, not just one with a flashing banner to get your attention. They can also be more cost-effective because they are usually cheaper and you will still receive a good amount of clicks.

The new blog onlinemarketingguidance.com is now online and ready to go, for all the latest articles on search engine optimisation, email marketing, banner adverts, social networking, pay-per-click and much more… then you need to bookmark this website!

New articles will be added whenever relevant and general blog posts about the state of the marketing industry will also be made, hopefully you’ll feel happy here and we will be able to help you in one way or another.