Avoiding "me too" marketing

We love this piece from Entrepreneur.com on avoiding "me too" marketing. Here are three basic tips to get you started on your way to standing out from your competitors.

1. Scope out the competition.
Before you can effectively differentiate your business, you have to understand your competitors' marketing messages as well as you do your own. Conduct a simple analysis by gathering the marketing materials from all your competitors--everything from their ads and copies of the main pages of their websites to sales brochures. Identify their key marketing messages and special offers.

Once you know how your competitors attempt to differentiate themselves, you can evaluate your similarities and differences. If there's overlap between what you promise and what you see offered by your competitors, you may need to retool more than your marketing. Sometimes, an overhaul of the way a product is offered or the addition of new services is essential to make a formerly ho-hum company stand out.

2. Take the customer's point of view.
Put yourself in your customer's shoes after you've gathered the marketing materials from your competitors. If you were trying to make a choice between their products or services, which would you go for? Why? Often, the primary deciding factor is value. That's the little bit extra that one purchase yields over another. Value is relatively subjective, and it can be tangible or intangible. For example, superior customer service can add intangible value by giving customers peace of mind that post-purchase problems will be handled better than if they were to buy from anyone else.

To find the right point of differentiation, learn what you can provide that your target audience will value the most. This may take research with members of your target audience, such as a telephone survey or roundtable discussions, to guide your message development.

3. Introduce your new message.
To be effective, your new core message--with a unique point of differentiation--must be communicated throughout your marketing campaign and sales support materials. But you don't want to roll out the wrong message. So a preliminary, short-term test using one form of media, such as a group of magazines or websites, may be the best way to determine if you're on the right track.

After you're confident your target audience is responding effectively to your new message, expand it into all media. If it represents a radical departure for your business, kick off your new advertising and sales support messaging with the support of a PR campaign. And add any interviews or coverage you get to your website. Be sure to communicate your new messaging to current customers in a way that is reassuring and helps you upsell or resell this important group.

Depending on your budget and the media you use to communicate with your prospects and current customers or clients, allow six months or more for your new message to penetrate and for your company to pull away from the pack.

Our take: Case in point, I'll use FeverPitch as an example. We were ready to vomit when he looked all the other sites for PR/marketing companies that were "results oriented" (who the hell isn't?) or that utilize "strategic thinking." What a bunch of crap. For the most part, people want a PR agency to get their name in the media. Plain and simple. Can the marketing speak.

We tried to speak to our clients like normal people and not blow smoke. That's why our site is written more conversationally as opposed to tricking potential clients with pie-in-the-sky talk.