Once you’ve identified your differentiators, it’s important to validate them with the marketplace. Here are 6 ways to ensure that your website and marketing materials describe, reflect, and prove your differentiators.
Transcription
Today I want to talk about how to support your claims for your differentiators. Now this is something that’s important, and I’m going to draw on a visible expert course from Hinge University. There a six common ways of doing it.
Supporting your differentiators
The first one, and perhaps the simplest, is a case story, using one of your actual clients, and using an actual client with an actual name, and doing a video, even, is both helpful for gaining credibility with your case study. Another way of doing it is awards. This works particularly well if it’s a great place to work award or something like that. Or it’s an independent body saying that you do a certain thing, saying that you are a high growth firm, or a great place to work.
A third kind of way to support a claim is by independent research, and this is perhaps one of the most powerful. Having an independent organization say that you have a high level of client satisfaction, a specific level is much preferable to you just asserting it on your own. Fourth way is you can use publications. That is a great way for you to establish your expertise. If you are claiming that you have special expertise, in a particular way, having a publication to back it up is a good way to demonstrate and support your claim. Bios also work as another way to do that. People’s formal credentials that are in their biographies can be used to support. For example, you might say, “Our staff has an average of so many years of experience.” That’s a good way to do that.
And then finally, telling a story. Tell a story about why you started the firm, how it grew or something can be a way of establishing a claim, of your leadership, or a particular value you have.
Organizing your supporting claims
Now, another exercise you can use to organize the support for individual claims, create a two-column document, one down the left side have the specific claim you’re trying to support. List each claim. Then, one the right side, list the support you have. That’s a good way to remind you what you have for supporting a particular claim and keeping track of all of them when you are developing marketing copy or a presentation.
Now if you want to dive deeper in this topic, I recommend that you go to our website and type in hingeuniversity.com and check out the Visible Expert Course within Hinge University. We’d love to have you join us there.
