If you’ve ever felt confused or lost about how you differentiate yourself in a saturated market, you’re in the right place. In this video we’re going to look at some strategies to help you to help your business stand out in a competitive market, which is pretty much every market these days.
⏰ Timestamps ⏰
3:04 Mistakes businesses make trying to stand out
4:36: The Infinite Confetti Game – why you may be playing this game and why it’s keeping you stuck
7:20 The counterintuitive thing you should be doing instead in order to stand out
7:46 Key questions you should be asking yourself to help you have stand out content and offers
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How To Stand Out From The Crowd in A Competitive Market – Video Transcription
In this video we’re going to look at some strategies to help you to help your business stand out in a competitive market, which is pretty much every market these days. I’m also going to share some mistakes that you may be making when you’re trying to send out that may actually be causing you to get lost in the noise instead. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help awesome entrepreneurs like yourself, build their business income and impact using video on social media.
Now make sure you check out the links in the description because I’ll put the timestamps to everything and any resources that I mentioned in this video will be there as well. Let’s get right into it.
Now, this is a big generalisation, but I feel it’s kind of fair to say that most categories and most markets today or this day and age in 2020 are pretty much saturated. I know there’s a really big generalisation, but particularly if you’re a coach or you’re a consultant or you are a creative or creative professional marketing themselves online, the internet has really lowered the barrier to entry.
It’s easier now more than ever before to start a business and to try and grow it online using social media, having a website, all of that is so much easier. The technology is so much more accessible now than it has ever been before.
As a result of this, it’s fantastic that we have lots of people pursuing their passion and helping others and trying to make a living doing what they love but it also means that there’s a lot of competition in most markets, whether that is fitness, health and fitness, which is one that has always been saturated, but it’s even more so now, online, spirituality, social media, I know that for a fact, business it can really feel, you can really feel lost against all of the competitors because there’s so many out there.
I know what it feels like to see so many competitors. You know, my space is like the social media video space. There’s a lot of competitors out there. It’s really easy to feel lost and it’s really easy, easy to feel like the world’s best kept secret.
I know what it also feels like to be, to know that you are really good at what you do and what you have to offer, but there’s so much competition it, you feel kind of invisible. A big mistake that I see a lot of business owners make is that when they’re trying to stand out and be seen, they take, they do some things whether they know it or they aren’t aware of it.
The first mistake that I see people make is copycat syndrome. This is being really weird. Did you see that? It was a cat for a second. One of the mistakes is that people copy their competitors and they do that because a couple of reasons, you know, there’s this saying that success leaves breadcrumbs.
A lot of people believe that if you copy what people who are bigger than you, more successful than you or ahead of the game of you are doing that you too will have success because you’re doing what they’re doing and you’ll get the same results as them.
But what this, what ends up happening is whether you’re copying their look or their content or the style, you end up just being a carbon copy and looking like everyone else because most likely everyone else is trying to copy them as well. It doesn’t quite work out.
The second mistake that I see people make is that in order to be seen and be heard, they try to be loud or they try to scream a bit louder, they shout louder or they post more content. They post non-stop memes, they post status updates, images, videos, trying to beat that algorithm and to be seen more.
The problem with A copying everyone else and B shouting louder and screaming louder in order to be heard is something that I call the infinite confetti game. This isn’t at all related to Simon Sinek’s infinite game either.
If you look up infinite confetti game, I don’t think you’ll find anything because I made it up last night when I was coming up when I was working on this content. The concept of the infinite, infinite confetti game is something that I see a lot of people get stuck in.
When you try and copy everyone else, what ends up happening is that you get stuck in the infinite confetti game. I’m just going to close that there. Sorry. It’s distracting me a little bit, a little bit too much animated action.
Let me talk to you about the infinite confetti game. In this game, you throw a bunch of confetti in the air, like all of the pieces explode in the air and you have this moment of excitement and all this glitter and you’re like, wow. But what happens?
What comes up must come down? Then you end up with this mess on the floor, which is all of the bits of confetti. And then what do you do next? You throw another bunch of confetti in the air and this vicious circle repeats and this is exactly what happens when you try to stand out by copying everyone else and by screaming louder and posting more content, you get that excitement for a few seconds, but then you end up ultimately with a mess on the floor and no real traction.
The strategy of being a copycat, whether you realise you’re doing it or not and posting excessively so you can beat the algorithm and be seen in newsfeed actually makes you more invisible because you look like everyone else and you’re a carbon copy.
You’re part of the noise that you desperately want to step away from. Being noisy and manically posting a lot and spamming every social media account that you have may feel like you’re getting, may feel like it gets you traction because you think, Oh, I’m sending all these social signals to all of them, to Facebook and to Instagram and to all the social media platforms.
You think that you’re showing up more, but it’s actually counterintuitive to what you should be doing in order to stand out. Posting like a crazy person and trying to be really loud and then copying everyone is actually really counterintuitive to what you should be doing if you want to stand out and what you should be doing to stand out is actually to slow down and to be more refined in what you offer and with your content.
You can do this by asking yourself two questions, two key questions. The first question is, am I showing my unique personal perspective? This really sounds simple, but we’re going to dig a little bit deeper so you can see how much value this question has to help you stand out. Whether it’s looking at this from your content or the programs and the services that you provide,
If you, if you look at your content, let’s start with that, and you feel that what you’ve created looks like everyone else’s, it’s about stepping back and saying, how can I incorporate my own experience and my own take on things? When I look at my content, particularly when it comes to my tech reviews, microphone reviews, camera reviews, which is a very competitive space, there’s so much competition.
I differentiate myself by focusing on my experience and my point of view when it comes to reviewing my products when it comes to reviewing products. I know it will be different from everyone else’s, what everyone else is putting out there because my experience is uniquely mine and this, and like you, if you do the same, your approach and your style will resonate with different people.
I see this a lot. When I first started doing tech reviews, when I first started doing social media content, it was really intimidating because there was so much competition out there.When I shifted to making myself stand out by putting my perspective on it, by putting my viewpoint and putting my unique experience onto it, I knew that it would be different because no one can have the same experience as I have. I really made that a focus of my content.
Now, the second question is, after you’ve looked at, is your, is my content and is my programs coming from my unique perspective? The second question is what can I add or remove based on my experience? When it comes specifically to your programs or services, if you see your programs or services as quite similar to what everyone else offers, what you can do is you can look at it and ask yourself, how can I add things to it to make it different? Or how can I remove things from my system to make it easier? Now I’m going to go and we’re going to go over to my iPad. We’re going to have some iPad action so I can draw this out.
This all works nicely. Let’s just say that you are in the health and fitness niche and you have a weight loss program, which is an incredibly competitive niche. Now if everyone has a program and their program consists of, okay, let’s hope this works today, so everyone’s got programs for weight loss and essentially, you know, that one part of the program will be diet.
They’ve got a component of their program that addresses diet and then they’ve got another component of their program, that terrible circle that I’ve drawn that addresses exercise. Then they’ve got another component of their diet, which is well not at the diet, they’ve got another component of their program which is meal plans.
This is a really bad drawing, but I’m trying to demonstrate a point here. This is a very, I guess, common thing that you see with a lot of health and fitness plans. They give you a diet plan, they give you an exercise plan and give you meal plans. Very, very, very common.
If you’re in this niche or just for the point of demonstrating this point and you want to stand out, the question is, what can I add to this, this framework? Or what can I remove from this framework to make myself different? And then, you know, it can be a range of things.
Maybe the thing that you add is you add a component and in your component here you add something on mindset or you add something on mind fitness because you know that this is a key thing that helps people transform and helps people shift that not a lot of people have in their programs.
They either do exercise or they do diet or they do meal plans, but they don’t have all four components of meal plans, diet, exercise and mindset. Maybe that’s an approach that you can have it’s or like maybe instead of mindset you can add something on journaling, oh this I am, my writing’s terrible today. Journaling, maybe you added component about journaling.
It really is a question of what can you add based on your personality, based on your experience. Maybe it’s something that you add, you know, that’s arty and I’m just making up things here. But the point of it is to avoid copying everyone else. If I can look at your framework and then try to figure out of, you know, the pillars of your program that are similar to everyone else’s. If you know one, two, three is what everyone else does, what can you add or what can you remove and this will help you stand out more.
I also wanted to bring home that when you’re looking at making the shift from copying everyone else and blindly posting vast volumes of content on social media to slowing down and showcasing your unique experience and perspective. Then also looking at your programs and you know, seeing how you can create a different framework based on your experience.
You will start to see that your competitors and what they are doing doesn’t really matter because they can’t replicate the experience, experiences that you have. They can’t possibly, it’s yours. They’re uniquely yours. This is how you really focus on standing out. Like really bringing yourself and your experiences into your products, into your content and into your services as well. Standing out with your program and services this way means that no one can replicate that because it’s your unique knowledge and this comes from everything that you’ve gone through.
That essentially wraps up today’s training. We covered quite a bit today in today’s live stream. We talked about the infinite confetti game and how copying everyone else and shouting louder to stand out is like throwing confetti to make a buzz, but all you end up with is a mess on the floor. It doesn’t actually give you any traction.
We also talked about how trying to beat the algorithm by posting more in order to be seen in newsfeed makes you kind of invisible and it really cheapens your perceived value. Then I talked about the two questions that you really need to ask yourself if you want to stand out from the crowd, if you want to attract the right people and it’s going deep and really asking, am I showing my unique personal perspective or am I being that copycat and just copying everyone else?
The second question was, what can I add or remove to my services, my programs, my framework, based on my own experience? If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business, make sure you grab a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets. It’s a super simple way of getting you up live and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.
I’m going to put the link in the description and on the screen somewhere and I appreciate you being here and I’ll see you on the next live stream. Bye for now.
