Startup Success: How to Hone Your Competitive Edge Through Marketing

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Businesses must understand what they can do to provide more value to customers than other firms can deliver. Valuable, unique and inimitable qualities, products, or services give companies a sustainable competitive advantage that lays a foundation for long-term success. Strategic marketing campaigns seek to maximize the benefits firms receive from such advantages. The following tips will help you use marketing to hone your competitive edge.

Strategic Positioning

Businesses use marketing to describe the way it wants customers to perceive its products and services. It defines the firm’s place in the market and its competitive advantage. You use your strategic positioning strategy to inform customers about your business and how you intend to deliver value. A marketing plan with an effective strategy will express the advantage your company and products have over alternatives.

Marketing efforts use one or more options to achieve a desirable strategic position. For example, a company can assume a position of value, where its products offer good value for the money customers pay. Similarly, a company can make its brand known for its quality. Other strategies position a brand within a narrow market segment with one particular customer profile, or it can choose a narrow product line with specialized goods or services. Through marketing, companies can position themselves as innovators or as producers of high-performance products.

Meet the Needs of Customers

Successful small businesses must identify their market and understand the clients who comprise it. Marketing attempts to identify a target market to inform customers about a particular product or service, explain how it meets their needs, and persuade them to buy. The more precisely a firm targets its message to likely buyers, the better return the company gets on its marketing investment.

Achieve Growth

Market development seeks to bring a firm’s existing products and services to new markets. This effort can achieve such growth through geographic expansion or by entering new market segments. A company can attempt a preemption strategy that brings a product or service to a segment of the market before competing firms. Similarly, a business can try to be a first mover in a new region or country. Strategic market planning seeks to identify the most profitable and feasible opportunities for growth. Having people with project management master’s degrees overseeing campaigns can ensure that the firm executes growth strategies in an orderly, efficient, and timely way.

Marketing can hone your competitive edge by making your customer-facing side work for you. Through careful planning, your startup can identify its customers and meet their needs, achieve growth, and assume a profitable position in the marketplace. Make marketing a central part of your annual planning and you can give your company profitable, successful and enduring future.

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