Three ways to differentiate from big competitors in a crowded market
When starting out in a crowded market you have a non-existent brand and a very basic product compared to your competitors. Here are three things you can do to stand out that work in the short and long-term:
1) Be the cheapest
This is the simplest. Your product is likely to be less sophisticated than the competition in which case it makes sense for it to be cheaper. Not everyone wants or needs the bells and whistles of what your larger competitors have and will appreciate saving the pennies. People often say that you shouldn’t compete on price and that it becomes a race to the bottom. I think that could be a valid concern when you are thinking about building a brand, but when starting out, getting customers is more important. You can also always raise your prices down the line whereas it’s hard to lower them as it means sacrificing revenue. Don’t be afraid to be the cheaper alternative, and if you stay lean as you grow, you will be able to maintain a competitive advantage on price even as your brand grows.
Your competitors are unlikely to drop their prices because it will mean they will lose a lot of revenue from their existing customers.
At Ticket Tailor, we are less than half of the price of our major competitor and the majority of the competition. We have been going for ten years and still make a big deal about our unbeatable prices. By staying lean and therefore keeping the team size small we manage to make good profit margins despite charging a lot less.
2) Offer the best customer support
Large companies usually have non-existent or terrible support. As a founder when starting out, you should be interested in every concern your customers have, so blow them away with amazing customer support. As you scale, you can prioritise maintaining amazing customer support through platforms like Upwork. The trick is to make sure everyone cares as much as you do about the success of your customers. Get this right and word of mouth will flourish. On top of that, your CS team can make up for product shortfalls by showing empathy and speedy resolutions when there’s a bug, direction when the UX has failed a customer, or workarounds and an open ear when a feature doesn’t exist.
It’s very hard for your larger competitors to up their game in this area if they haven’t built a culture of caring about customers from day one.
Amazing customer support has been a priority for us at Ticket Tailor from day one. Today our NPS score rides above 70 with over 4,000 customers and the majority of our growth has come from word of mouth as a result. The feedback we get from our customers is consistently along the lines of “your support is the best of any company I have ever worked with”. We don’t discriminate on how much people pay either; everyone, even our free customers, get instant round-the-clock support from people that care.
3) Be the ethical choice
People don’t just choose the best product for the best price anymore. The ethics of the business behind the product marks a huge difference to getting people over the line when comparing solutions. Ultimately this means caring about more than just profit, which can be tricky in the early days when you just need to break even to pay the rent. Look after your people, your community and your planet as well as your bottom line, and then talk about it. This will not only show your customers that you think these things are important but will also inspire other businesses to up their game.
If your competitors have been around a while then they will probably be trying to retro-fit environmental goals, but it’s unlikely to seem authentic if it hasn’t been on the agenda from day one.
At Ticket Tailor we are in the process of becoming a BCorp which certifies that a business prioritises people and planet as much as profits. This process takes a number of years so whilst it’s something to aspire to (we still are), the process itself can get your basics right. Their impact assessment tool is free to use and will show you the kinds of things you should be thinking about. On top of that we have baked “impact” into our business model by donating 1p per ticket sold to climate causes. By linking it to ticket sales, both the team and our customers have a direct impact on how much money we donate. Last year this amounted to £66k which we donated to three charities restoring natural climate stores.
