Vital to know your business’ strengths

Your business’ strengths set you apart from competitors, delight your customers and encourage employee engagement – but do you use them to your advantage in your marketing?

Knowing your strengths and communicating them to your audience should be a pillar of your marketing strategy.

Senior management are often confident talking about what makes the business unique or successful, but it’s often not distilled into core strengths that the business can always refer back to.

Start by completing a SWOT analysis of your business – looking at its key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Interrogate the strengths you have listed: ask whether they set you apart from competitors, why you believe they are strengths and what they achieve for the business. Focus on the strengths that run through your entire business.

You may want to distil these strengths into a simple strapline or brand proposition. For example, John Lewis’ ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ strapline focuses on their core strength of always being honest and offering value for its customers, employees and stakeholders. Having a strapline for your business is an easy and visible way to promote your strengths through everything you do – it can be easily communicated to employees and shared in marketing materials.

In fact, these strengths are at the core of your business and should be at the core of your marketing strategy too. Even if you are in a highly competitive market or are constantly innovating, your strengths should always ring true. Your business can evolve and grow but still hark back to its core strengths.

Tesco offers a great example – its ‘Every Little Helps’ slogan is familiar to many of us and has been for many years. Yet, in a market that is being disrupted by discount brands such as Aldi and Lidl, the firm has still focused on its key strengths. Their most recent Clubcard campaign rewards customers with instant discounts in return for their loyalty – although it’s often just pennies in savings, it’s a little bit and often that can help.

Develop marketing campaigns that pull on your business’ strengths to keep reiterating the message to your audience. Think of creative sales promotions or content campaigns that come back to your core strengths. Is your brand particularly knowledgeable, and do you share that knowledge with your customers? Offer a glimpse of it in your blog. Whatever your strengths are, make sure you are using them to your advantage.