How to Find Your Unique Voice in a Crowded Market
Use This Simple Formula to Ensure Your Marketing Stands Out From Competitors
By JAIME ELLITHORPE
When it comes to marketing, I find a lot of business owners struggle with finding what I call their marketing voice.
What I mean by marketing voice is how businesses connect their unique message along with the product or service they’re selling to their client’s problems. Think of it like connecting three data points together to form a complete picture or story. By themselves, the data points don’t mean much, but when they’re connected, they have a big impact.
When you tie in who you are and how you got here (your unique message) to the products and services you sell (your solution), and you demonstrate how your business can help solve the problems your ideal clients face, you’ve created your marketing message.
Marketing Works With All the Right Pieces
I find many businesses fail at tying all three points together, so their marketing often falls flat.
Instead, they continue to push their message harder, spending even more time and money trying to get people’s attention, only to feel defeated thinking marketing doesn’t work. It’s not that marketing doesn’t work; it’s because one of the three points in the equation is either weak or is missing all together.
“Many people think they have to have a huge marketing budget to be successful. Marketing isn’t about spend, it’s about having all the key pieces of your messaging in place, so your marketing resonates with the types of clients you’re trying to attract.”
If you’re marketing isn’t working as well as you’d like, it might be worth taking some time to reconsider each data point and make sure it is on point. Let’s now talk about each one so you can diagnose what’s missing from your message or refine anything that could use a tune up.
How to Create Your Unique Message
The first point you want to consider in your marketing is your unique message. Basically, this is your unique angle in your marketplace…how you stand out from your competitors.
There are many ways you can separate yourself, whether it’s an interesting back story of how you got started in your business, how you had the same problem your market has and how you overcame it, or why you have a different process or approach to addressing your prospect’s problems. Take some time and think about how you’re different. Here’s a few questions you can ask yourself to get the creative juices flowing:
- What prompted me to start this business? What was my big why?
- How am I similar to my clients?
- What struggles have I overcome that they still may have?
When you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have some great material to start building your unique message and angle.
And while you’re at it, if you’d like more ways to create great marketing, go get my “3 Marketing Hacks” guide HERE.
The 3 Marketing Hacks Guide Will Show You How To Bring All of the Pieces Together In Your Message
Next, you’ll want to consider what you’re offering when it comes to your products and services. Before you begin, I want to give you a heads up that this point is the one I see most business owners screw up the most. It’s simply because they get so excited talking about the features of their offer, they forget to spell out how it solves the prospect’s problem.
This is kind of a marketing psychology thing, but when humans are focused on a problem, they need to hear how something is going to solve it. They do not care about all the bells and whistles until they know their problem is going to be solved.
After that, sure it’s great to know there’s additional benefits, but their brains can’t hear that until they are out of “fight or flight” mode and into a relaxed frame of mind. Here are some questions to answer that will help you stay out of feature mode and keep your marketing focused on solutions:
- How does my product or service solve my client’s biggest problem?
- What steps should my prospect take to get from where they are to where they want to be?
- How does my product or service help them along each step of the way?
When you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have some great material to start building your sales message.
How to Identify Your Unique Voice
The final step in identifying your marketing voice is to demonstrate how your business is positioned or qualified to solve your prospect’s problems. Before you get started, another mistake I see many business owners make is to start talking about how many years they’ve been in business or how many degrees or certifications they have. While those are all great, and they probably do help you do well in your business, your prospects are more concerned about whether they can trust you to solve their problems.
In reality a business who has only been open eight months could do just as good of a job as someone who’s been in business 30 years. And some people have raw talent while others spend decades in school.
The most important thing to remember here is that you want to soothe any apprehensions your prospects have about doing business with you and assure them they will feel better after they buy your product or service. These questions will help you position your business as the authority:
- Why should my prospects do business with me?
- How am I different than my competitors?
- What’s the result my prospect will get when he or she buys my product or service?
When you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have positioning power to have your marketing message stand out from your competition’s.
Tell Your Story and Get Traction Fast
So, that’s pretty much it.
After you have these three pieces lined out, all you need to do is put them together to start creating your unique voice in the marketplace. Then it’s rinse and repeat. Just keep telling the same stories using all three points, and pretty soon, your marketing will get traction and start naturally attracting more clients.
I hope this helps and let me know what you think in the comments below.
P.S. If you’d like to create great marketing that attracts clients 24-7, grab my “3 Marketing Hacks” guide HERE:
