How to Make Your Business Stand Out in an Over-Saturated Market

Marketing trends seem to change on a daily basis, with new tactics like influencer marketing, brand advocates, and Facebook Live growing faster than ever this year. But, the fact remains that when it comes to marketing, everyone is doing it. The hard part is ensuring that your company is doing it well and that your ideas are made to stand out.

In marketing strategist and former presidential campaign spokeswoman Dorie Clark’s new book—Stand Out—the marketing expert seeks to reverse engineer ways that companies can make their ideas and their brands stand out.Clark talked to more than 50 top leaders in a variety of fields to pinpoint their breakthrough ideas, piecing strategies together along the way that she believes will help garner the attention your business deserves.

One main takeaway from Stand Out is the importance of developing your expert niche. The easiest and fastest way to help take a company from a startup to an industry standout is to begin with a narrow focus. Specializing your business and its products or services, whether that’s in the technology, fashion, food, or other industry, supplies an inherent uniqueness and develops your company’s authority as an expert.

This niching down idea helped create success for Sophal Ear, a political economist featured in Clark’s book. Ear’s work is dedicated to his home country, Cambodia, and focuses on the specific areas in which he previously had or worked to develop expertise, like foreign aid, avian flu, and criminal justice. Ear attributed much of his success to the fact that he started small, remained extremely dedicated, and eventually expanded out into new areas, cultivating more knowledge and passion for his work.

Another important strategy Clark outlines is to provide new research. Contributing new, factual information to the public discourse is one of the best ways to help make your business stand out and become an asset to the rest of your industry or even to the public itself. One great example of this strategy is the 2980s blockbuster In Search of Excellence, which saw so much success, in part, because Bob Waterman and Tom Peters took new approaches to provide fresh information and perspectives on the business world. Their work was unique in that it used case studies for support, focused on lower-level executives to get a ground-up look at companies, and highlighted up-and-coming businesses rather than industry giants.

Finally, Clark suggests businesses combine ideas to make breakthroughs and set themselves apart. She points out the difficulty, and near impossibility, of coming up with an idea that has never been talked about or seen before, but, suggests that by combining fields and disciplines your company can provide clients with creative solutions and products that are both inventive and unique. For more information regarding how to make your business stand out, [Click Here].