Does Your Website Need A Competitive Advantage?

Websites need to leverage the competitive advantage a business offers to become a successful component of the business’ marketing strategy.  Rather than asking if your business has a website, the right question to ask is how is your business’ website contributing to the goals of your organization.  If you can’t list specific things your website is doing for you, it is just a digital brochure.

Businesses succeed because they offer a product or service in a way that appeals to a broad enough cross section of people that they are able to cover their expenses and make a profit.  If too many businesses offer the same product or service in the same way, the market becomes fragmented and none of the businesses have enough customers. Some or all of them fail as a result.

This is a major problem that many multi-level-marketing businesses face.  They all offer the same product in the same way to the same audience and there is no clear benefit from transacting business with any particular product or service provider.  A website can’t fix that problem. You need a strategy.

For example, Lalaroe is known among adult women for making leggings and selling them through MLM business entrepreneurs.  Somewhere along the way someone realized the market for leggings was limited, so they expended into kids’ clothes, and specifically, cute dresses for little girls.

Most of their marketers fail because they are all offering the same products to the same clients in the same way.  However one of Lalaroe’s marketers is different. She took a cruise this year for free with her husband because she sold that many dresses.

This skilled marketer figured out that her online marketing needed a competitive advantage that would cause people to choose to buy dresses from her rather than the multitude of other people selling the same product at the same price.

She used her online presence to tell her story.  She is the mother of a special needs child with profound expenses.  Their family was spending every penny they had on medical expenses, working extra hours, skipping vacations and selling possessions when needed.  This marketer decided to start selling dresses as a side hustle to bring in some extra cash.

She used Instagram, Facebook Live and her own website to tell the story of her family and why she was selling these dresses.  Other special needs moms saw her story, felt her family’s pain, and made the decision to buy their dresses from her.

The marketer then used her audience to talk about new dresses before they were available to build anticipation and take pre-orders.  She turned Facebook live into her own personal QVC channel to showcase dresses, talk about their design intricacies, and then sell the limited number she had on-hand.

Now an entire bedroom of her home is a closet full of dresses.  At the end of the year she dreaded doing inventory so she did what all businesses do and had an “inventory reduction sale” limited to on-hand products.  

Her husband is the shipping manager and every time they get a Facebook sale he receives an alert.  He came home on December 31 and told his wife he thought they had been hacked because he got so many notifications that day.  Needless to say, inventory went really fast on the 1st of the year.

What is your website’s sales and marketing strategy?  What tone of voice does your website use? What story does it tell?  What is your website’s competitive advantage?

If you don’t have one and marketing is not your wheelhouse, look for a web design and marketing company that not only builds websites, but offers marketing strategy insight to help your business.