6 Tips for Startups on How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market
Starting any startup business can be difficult and challenging – even if you are convinced that you have the best product on the market and that you have already secured the funds. Things are complicated by the large number of new startups that appear every year, which means more noise and murmur in the market. Indeed, statistics show that 90% of startups fail in the first year of their existence. Standing out in a saturated market is essential for the success of any startup.
Fortunately, there are a few simple yet effective strategies you can apply to make sure your startup can be more prominent than the rest, attract ideal customers, and build credibility. To help you with that, we have put together six different ways you can follow to ensure your startup overcomes market noise and to be seen and heard:
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How to Stand Out From the Noisy Startup Crowd?
Standing out in a saturated market does not mean being the loudest in the crowd. To stand out from the rest of the startups in the niche, everything you do needs to stand out, including what you do behind the scenes.
The next six tips to follow will show you that it is not just about customer service, but also about your partnerships, website performance, internal goal setting and measurement, adherence to your values, relationship with competitors, and more.
#1 Provide a Fast and Easy Delivery Method
Every major company and the big brand started from scratch, including giants like Google and Amazon. The latter started as a small startup back in 1994 but came to the forefront of online retailers. How? One of the many strategies it used was the promise of delivery within two days via Amazon Prime. Amazon has also promised to deliver products to its customers in 30 minutes using drones in the near future.
Consumers love speed and reliability – especially when ordering online.
#2 Build an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
One of the most important pages on your site should be your blog. Content not only attracts organic traffic to your site but helps you build trust and connection with your target audience and gives you the opportunity to be a ‘thinking leader’ in your industry, helping you develop and build relationships.
However, content marketing is not just about writing content. You need to create a content marketing strategy that is not solely focused on writing. Customer acquisition, SEO ranking, developing relationships, and building high-quality backlinks are all procedures that must be included in a successful content marketing strategy for businesses.
Given that email marketing has a common nominator with content marketing, which is increasing customer loyalty and repeat business, by sending and sharing material through it, (of course, after previously making your emails pretty great-looking through tools like Benchmark) you can build up your content marketing. Quality, relevant, and entertaining material should be included in your emails. They must also be pleasing to the eye, as we just said. Last but not least, they must serve a purpose. Four main components of an email that will properly serve content strategy are:
- subject line
- body copy
- call to action (CTA)
- sign off/footer
When it comes to creating content, originality, and creativity stand out against boring and fluffy stories that are told over and over again. Consider marketing more an art than a science. You can create the foundations of your brand and help your audience to come to know and remember you by utilizing your distinctive voice and sense of humor to make it clear who you are and what you do.
#3 Always Monitor Your KPIs
Even the best-designed marketing campaign can fail. If this happens, it can be devastating, especially if a lot of time, energy, and money are invested. Still, the key is not to give up but to learn from mistakes and constantly try new and improved ideas. Watch your competitors carefully and their successes and failures as they can give you the opportunity to learn about the industry you are targeting and what suits them and what does not.
In addition to closely monitoring competition, measuring campaign performance by tracking certain KPIs can also be a crucial indicator of what is going in the right direction and what is not. Measuring key performance indicators and responding effectively to them can increase engagement, brand awareness, and conversations in the long run, as well as generate more leads.
#4 Be Socially Responsible
The modern cultural climate values social responsibility. Many people turn to startups and small businesses because they are tired of big brands that have numerous stains on their results so far such as lack of environmental awareness, poor working conditions, cruel animal testing, and human rights abuses in developing countries – these are some from issues that environmentally conscious consumers want to eradicate.
Informing the ideal audience that your small startup is socially responsible and aware can help you gain trust, connection, and authenticity with ideal customers who are actively looking for these elements when deciding to buy from a particular brand.
#5 Improve Website Performance
In an age of speed and reliability, consumers don’t just want delivery times. Gone are the days when we had to wait for our computers to connect and load the Internet. We now have extremely high expectations about website loading speeds. These high expectations have resulted in users feeling frustrated if there is even minimal connection speed lag. For example, a delay of just one second leads to a reduction in site engagement by an average of 7%. Keep in mind that page load speed is visitors’ first experience with your brand, so they certainly don’t expect to have to wait for the website to load. That way you can lose them as readers and, more importantly, as customers.
There is something called “lazy loading”. It is a page speed optimization technique that improves website performance and can make a big difference in website rejection rates. It ensures that the most important parts of your website load quickly while uncritical pages, which take longer to load, load while the viewer explores relevant parts. Not all sites need to use lazy loading because there are many other ways to speed up your site, and all of them are worth considering because keeping customer attention, especially in the beginning, is most important.
#6 Identify Shortcomings in Your Industry
Despite the fact that the e-commerce market is both hectic and saturated, there are often consumers who still don’t feel that their needs or desires are met. Identifying these market gaps and meeting the specific needs of these consumers is a great way to achieve a significant increase in your revenue.
Learning how to recognize the ‘starving crowd’ and the problems they face is the first step in creating a business that solves their problem. Another strategy is to identify the shortcomings of your competitors and their products and determine where your brand and products can fill these gaps in the market.
Stay Unique and Look For Opportunities to Stand Out
When it comes to standing out in a saturated market, it is about being unique enough that overwhelmed consumers can find and remember you. We have mentioned just a few strategies to help you achieve this.
When positioning and starting your startup, it is necessary to be up to date with news and trends that are important to know when running a business and always be open to learning from the competition and the industry as a whole, as well as growing.
