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3 Tips to Stand Out When Starting Your Small Business

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All organizations want to stand out within their respective verticals—nonprofits want to show why they deserve donations to fuel their work, zoos and aquariums want to establish themselves as the premier animal education and research organizations, and businesses want to prove that their products or services are the best.

With 33.3 million small businesses in the United States alone, it’s more important than ever to consider what sets your business apart from all others before you begin taking steps to make it a reality. That’s what this guide is here for!

Whether you want to start a massage practice, a dog-care business, or a handmade jewelry shop, we’ll discuss how you can capture the attention of your target audience and distinguish yourself from competitors.

1. Develop a unique value proposition.

Your unique value proposition (UVP) is a sentence that describes what sets your small business apart from all others. It’s the foundation that you’ll build your enterprise upon, and it starts with determining your niche.

According to MassageBook, here’s how you can identify your niche:

  • Assess your skills and expertise. What are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? How can you imbue your small business with those skills?
  • Survey your competition. What businesses would be your competitors? What do their customers and target audience look like? What products or services do they sell?
  • Identify your target market. What do your ideal customers look like? What are their needs, habits, and preferences? How do your products and services help them?

For example, let’s say you’re an individual trained in ballroom dancing and ballet, and you’re thinking of starting a dance studio. In your research, you notice that there are already quite a few ballet studios in your area, so you decide to focus on ballroom dancing. Since you’re also in an area with quite a few colleges, you decide your target market will be young men and women in their early twenties to mid-thirties.

Take all this information and your plan for your business and condense it into a single sentence that defines the value of your product or services to a buyer. This sentence should address:

  • What you do well
  • How that meets your customers’ needs
  • How your product/service is better or substantively different than what competitors are offering

In the dance studio example above, your unique value proposition might look something like this: We teach young men and women how to ballroom dance in a friendly social setting, helping them destress, improve physical fitness, and socialize while learning a fun new skill.

2. Establish thorough marketing practices.

Regardless of how interesting or valuable your business’s offerings are, acquiring customers will be challenging without a robust outreach strategy. A marketing plan is crucial for businesses of all sizes, even if you’re just starting.

Here are a few marketing best practices you can implement:

  • Create a strong brand identity. This means establishing brand guidelines for visual and verbal elements, including your logo, brand colors, typography, brand voice, and tone. While you might not have the polished materials of a larger business, viewers should easily be able to tell that your messages are from your specific business.
  • Build a navigable website. Regardless of whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or plan to run your business online, a well-designed website is the cornerstone of your business’s marketing efforts. Make sure it’s navigable and accessible for all users, regardless of their device or ability.
  • Take a multichannel marketing approach. Maximize the number of potential customers who see your messages by creating materials for multiple marketing channels. This might include email, text messages, social media posts, and more.
  • Streamline the process with software. Consider purchasing software to simplify and automate your marketing process when your budget allows for it. You can purchase marketing-specific software or an all-in-one solution for your business type that includes these features—for example, a massage business might purchase massage software that includes targeted email and other marketing features.

You may not have the bandwidth (or budget!) to take on all these strategies at once, and that’s fine. Start with a system that works well for you, and slowly scale up your marketing efforts to connect with more new customers as your business takes off.

3. Host an opening event.

Start your business off on the right foot by hosting an opening event. These gatherings bring several benefits to small businesses, as they allow you to:

  • Gauge interest in your products and services
  • Boost excitement and brand awareness within your community
  • Increase traffic and sales for your small business
  • Build relationships with potential customers and partners

Usually, these events come with a discount or value-add for attendees that your business would not normally offer. For example, you might decide that every purchase over $30 earns a spin on a prize wheel, which lists freebies and discounts applied to the customer’s next purchase.

These events are so popular amongst businesses that some host a soft opening and a hard opening. Soft opening events are usually smaller or invite-only and act as a trial run where you test the customer experience before opening to a wider audience during the hard open.

Whether you decide to host a single opening or two, this type of event is a great opportunity to get feedback from your customers. MemberClicks recommends sending out a post-event survey to attendees that includes questions on customer satisfaction and experience with the event and your products or services.

It’s hard to come up with a truly unique business idea—with over 333 million companies worldwide, it’s likely there’s already a business out there with a similar offering. Don’t let this discourage you! What’s important is determining how your products or services are different or fulfilling a gap in the market that the other business may not have covered. Consider the case of Scrub Daddy, for example—founded in 2012, it has seen great success improving on existing kitchen sponges with new materials.

With thoughtful consideration and research, you’ll discover an approach that differentiates your business from all others. Then, act on that approach and imbue it into all your processes to truly show your community why they should purchase products or services from you!