4 Proven Ways to Create a Competitive Advantage

4 Proven Ways to Create a Competitive Advantage

Do you want to be the obvious choice over your competitors? How about charging more for your products or services? How many of us don't want these things right? One of the great ways to accomplish this is to create a competitive advantage. And I'm going to share four simple and proven ways that you can do this.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. Back on episode 115 of the Rialto Marketing podcast, I talked about the elements of value pyramid from Bain Consulting was the one that put this out. And there are a ton I can't remember. I think there's somewhere around 40 different elements of value in this pyramid. But creating a competitive advantage has so many advantages. You can sell more, you can charge more, you can increase customer retention, grow revenue, make more money. The list goes on and on and on. But I think the elements of value pyramid can be a little bit overwhelming for people because there's so many different things in there.

I want to dig deeper on four of the elements of value that they touch on there that I think are easiest and the simplest way for most businesses to create a competitive advantage. And the more of these you have in your business, I don't just have one, I have two, three, four. The more you have, the stronger competitive advantage you create.

Let's dig into each one of these, and I've got examples for you, too, to kind of hammer the point home.

4 Proven Ways to Create a Competitive Advantage

So the first one is save or make money. How can you help your customers, clients, whatever you want to call them, save or make money. How can you do this? Here's an example. This is an example from Anchor. Anchor. It used to be called Anchor.Fm. I believe it's now Anchor. It's a podcast hosting platform. On their site, they talk about create, distribute, and monetize your podcast, all for free. Create, distribute and monetize your podcast all for free. That is a great competitive advantage because most of their competitors are charging for podcast hosting. Anchor does not. Huge competitive advantage.

Second way that you can create a competitive advantage is saving time. How can you save your customers, your clients time? Can you save them time by them using your service? Or how can you save them time in the process of working with you? Okay, so here's one from Geiko. And Geiko, I don't know anybody that hasn't seen this one. 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. Now, this is a unique selling proposition that does talk about time. It also talks about saving money. Okay. But the first thing here is 15 minutes. How many of us don't want to jump in and start looking at our insurance because we're like, "Oh, my God, this is going to take way too much time. I'm going to spend an hour or 2 hours of my time trying to save money on my insurance. I don't want to do it." So what they're pointing out here is, "Hey, our process, you're not going to spend a lot of time. We're going to save you time in this process. And by doing so, you can save 15% or more on your car insurance." Really simple. I mean, these are not complicated. We are not making this complicated. This is simple.

Third way you can create a competitive advantage is eliminate hassles. Think about the norms that are accepted within your industry, but the people just cannot stand. How can you eliminate those hurdles? What hurdles exist in your process, in your industry that you can eliminate and talk about? Here's one, this is an old one. Fedex is not using this anymore and things have changed drastically in shipping in the last 10, 15 years thanks to Amazon. But when FedEx was using this, they were talking about when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. They were only an overnight carrier at the time. They were using this unique selling proposition and they were eliminating a huge hassle. Nobody in their market was talking about overnight shipping. Like, I need something, I need it now. Obviously, this seems funny to talk about today because the shipping environment is drastically different. But at the time it was hard to get things overnight. You could not get them overnight. So FedEx talked about when you absolutely, positively have to get this overnight. We are the carrier that you want to choose. Created a huge competitive advantage for them.

Last element I'm going to talk about reducing risk. Nobody wants to risk. Put risk out there. We need to reduce risk. And if we can do that, it is going to make it much easier, much more compelling for people to work with us. Here's Best Buy. Best Buy has a price match guarantee. They talk about we won't be beat on price. If you buy from Best Buy and you find that same product at a lower price elsewhere after you buy from them, they will refund the difference. So they're reducing risk. Right? Because that's a concern. That's a fear that a lot of people have. "Hey, man, what if I buy this thing today and I see it for a lower price tomorrow?" Best Buy is reducing that risk and they are talking about it. Right. It's one thing to offer these types of benefits and competitive advantages, but we have to talk about these in our marketing over and over and over again. It has to be their front and center all the time. Otherwise it's not going to be seen as a competitive advantage because nobody's going to know about it. So we have to talk about these things in our marketing.

The last one that I'm going to leave with you is probably one of the most well known unique selling propositions. They are not using it anymore. But when they first started in business, Domino's talked about fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less guaranteed. Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less guaranteed. Man, they weren't talking about the highest quality pizza or the best tasting pizza. It was fresh and hot and it was delivered in 30 minutes or less. I get it quickly, right? It's saving me time and it's guaranteed. They're reducing risk. If it's not there, if it's not fresh and hot and it's delivered in less than 30 minutes, they had a guarantee and I believe the guarantee at the time was that it was free. So, man, they were putting their money where their mouth is. This USP hits on multiple of these four elements that I've just touched on, which is why it was so strong and created a huge competitive advantage for them.

So let me just run through this one more time. Four proven ways to create a competitive advantage. One, how can you save or make money for your clients? Two, how can you save them time? Three, how can you eliminate hassles? And four, how can you reduce risk? The more of these that you can implement and blend into what you do, the stronger competitive advantage you will create and when you have a very strong competitive advantage, you will be the obvious choice and you can also charge more and make more on your products and services. Okay.

Conclusion

So I hope you found this helpful. If you need some help with this with your marketing in general, you're struggling, you're not quite sure what your next marketing step should be, you're having a hard time because you don't have somebody who can strategically drive and own the implementation and execution of your plan to get results, hop on over to our website rialtomarketing.com. It's R-I-A-L-T-O Marketing.com. Click on the get a free consultation button. I guarantee you will get a ton of value from the call and walk away having some clarity on what's your next step should be to help you get where you want to go. Thank you so much for listening. Till next time, take care.