If you’re writing content for your business and it sounds like a late-night infomercial, it’s time to stop. I’m gonna make this real clear for you. No one really wants to know about how great and mighty you are. All people want to know is how you can solve their problems. That might sound a little harsh, but let me put it in perspective. If your business is resting entirely on is promises of ‘lots of experience’, ‘the best services’ and a ‘professional team’, congratulations! You’ve succeeded in looking like every other small business in your niche. Many small businesses, at least in Australia, suffer from a syndrome I like to call survival of the fattest. Everything has to be bigger, better, bolder! More experience, the highest quality products, the best customer service. Every business competing for the small scraps, trying to prove they’re the best for the job in some strange kind of bragging contest. Take a look quick at your competitors and you might see the same thing. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying talking about these things is a crime. In fact, there are customers who will use them as a metric to decide which business or product to choose. But if these things are all your business has to offer, you may find yourself in trouble. I write content for a living. I’ve written for businesses in a hundred different niches, and the hardest ones to write for are not the ones I don’t know anything about. They’re the ones you simply can’t write about. These are businesses that are so generic you’d think they were made by robots. They’re struggling to keep their head above water not for a lack of experience, but because there’s almost no difference between them and the next guy. There are two questions people ask themselves when they’re shopping around. When all you’ve got to offer is your experience as a professional, the big decision often comes down to which business has the best prices and spends the most money on advertising. Definitely not the position you want to be in. From a content perspective, differentiation comes from two things: A unique offering and a ‘customer first’ approach to writing. You’ve got to stop thinking about what you can offer the customer, and start thinking about what the customer is looking for. Convince people you’re putting them first, and can solve their problems better than your competitors, and you change the playing field from a price fight into a battle of brains. The first part of the puzzle is your unique offering, or as its better known, your unique value proposition (UVP). It’s the thing that will get people through the door and onto learning about the rest of your business. It’s also a huge part of any business, and can take a long time to work out. Chances are you have a UVP already, but it just hasn’t been crystallised into a concrete offering for your customers to understand. While actually creating a unique value proposition is a topic for another time, your job from here is to make sure all the content you write is directly appealing to your customer’s needs. As I mentioned, you’ve got to appeal to your customer’s needs, and position them at the center of your story, not your business. Talking about your business, your experience, skills and prowess, is all important, but we’ll get to that later. First you need to talk to, and about your customers. Writing like this is the difference between bragging about how much you can help someone, as opposed to asking them where they want to go, and promising to get them there. It’s putting your customer at the centre of their story and positioning your brand as the one that can help them reach their goals. Testimonials are a fantastic way to do this, as they show exactly how your existing are winning with you, and how your new customers can too. Writing your content “customer first” is also the reason why a unique value proposition is so important. It’s the one thing you can do for your customers that no one else can and is fantastic not just for differentiating your business, but also for putting your business in the customer-first mindset. In addition, we highly recommend reading more about SEO Melbourne Service. The harsh reality is that most people simply don’t care about your business beyond what it can do for them. But it’s not all doom and gloom! If you focus on showing how much you can help your customers, not how good your business is, and centring your business on your customers you’re going to see some amazing results.No one really cares about your business.
So How Can I Be Different and Stand Out?
The ‘I’ language has to go. Bring in the ‘you’ language!
If you own a business, there are two things you should do now
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