How to establish a unique identity for your business

As the business owner, it’s your job to determine exactly what your company is all about

Today’s new age of marketing has provided businesses numerous ways of selling their products and, ultimately, selling the “identity” of the business itself. The greatest challenge is to create (or discover) the uniqueness and true character of your company as a whole. This identity is basically the answer to the question: why should people patronise your product or service and not your competitors?

Unless you own a copycat business that is totally fine with having to settle with an unoriginal selling point, you as a business owner should know very well that having a unique identity is vital to growing the company in terms of customer base and loyalty.

So how do you go about establishing your business’s identity?

First, you need to fully understand the market that you’re in.

 You’re going to have tons of trouble defining your company’s identity when you don’t even know the people that support your business and how they behave. You need to have loads of data about market trends and numbers within your own niche.

What’s your target demographic? How do these people formulate decisions in relation to your products or services? Where do they get additional information? What are they saying about the way you run your business? Are they happy with what you’re able to offer them?

After learning more about your market, you now need to study the competition. And it takes more than just stalking on their website or reading their marketing material. You need to have a deeper understanding of how they were able to develop their customer base. What exactly do their customers like about your competitor’s products or services? How is their business being promoted? How do they manage pricing changes? Which marketing channel is receiving most of their efforts?

Now it’s time to evaluate your advantages and disadvantages. You’re now fully aware how your target market behaves and how the competition makes their moves. That should give you an idea where to position yourself as a business. Ask yourself: In which area of marketing opportunity does my business get an edge? What is my weakness in terms of branding and awareness? What are the flaws in my strategy of reaching out to my audience?

This introspective analysis of your business can give you a clear path to creating your identity. You can even integrate a little bit of your own personality into the business image to make it more original and distinctive.

Sometimes it takes more than one attempt to establish an identity for your business, but as you move along, it should become more and more well-defined and it should be a lot easier for you to market yourself within and even beyond your niche. My job as a Business Coach is to guide you along that process so you could make intelligent decisions and come up with the best way to let people know what it is that defines your business.