What is your advantage? This is the first and most important question you must answer for your business and your marketing. All of your marketing should be geared toward communicating your competitive advantage, and what you do better than the competition.

This is also the most difficult question to answer. In fact, knowing your advantage, your purpose and creating an image are the hardest parts of marketing. That’s why many companies skip the strategy altogether.

The easiest part of marketing is spending money on promotions. That’s why there are plenty of people ready to sell you “marketing packages”, the problem is without a sound strategy you are just rolling the dice. You may get lucky, but that’s not the best way to run your business.

The Value of Strategy

When working with clients or teaching students in the classroom they struggle with the strategy questions because they dig deep into who you are and why you are in business. A lot of people give up.

I guarantee you this, if you stick with the plan and develop a strategy in the next 3 sessions it will make the tactical part that much easier. And because most of your competitors are not willing to put in the effort, you will be that much further ahead. I will go further and say that there are many people with business and marketing degrees that will be less prepared than you if you do your homework.

Use SWOT to Find Your Advantage

A SWOT Analysis is a tool for determining your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. A SWOT can be used to analyze many things, a product, a company or even yourself. Fill out the SWOT Analysis document with your products and/or services in mind.

When you are done, go back and look at your strengths. Identify 1 or 2 strengths that can not be easily duplicated by the competition. For example, being the first or the original is not able to be duplicated, while low price can be quickly and easily copied.

Create a Tagline

A tagline, or slogan, is a few words that summarize your advantage. They should be used and/or implied in all of your marketing promotions. Don’t be lead astray by some popular slogans that identify neither the business nor the advantage. Many poor taglines are known because of the millions of dollars spent to promote the product, not because they are effective. You probably don’t have that kind of budget, but you do have ingenuity and you can outsmart your competition with a strategic tagline.

Look at your strengths again. What are you able to provide for your target market better than your competition in a way that can not be easily duplicated?

Course Resources

Book - 7 Keys to Marketing Genius by Michael Daehn

Videos - 7 Keys to Marketing Genius by Michael Daehn

Outline for Marketing Plan by Michael Daehn

Session 2 Checklist

Complete the following before continuing to Session 3:

• What is the unique competitive advantage of your product or service? (The best way to determine this is by performing a SWOT analysis)

• How can you meet the needs of the target audience better than the competition?

• What is the positioning of your product or service?

• How do you encapsulate your advantage in a few memorable words?