4 Ways to Stand Out In the Most Crowded Markets Uncovering your uniqueness will propel your sales and customer interactions.
By Alyssa Adams Edited by Micah Zimmerman
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
A "saturated market" only applies when everyone's services look the same. When you differentiate yourself, leverage your expertise and embrace your inherent uniqueness, your business will never get lost in a "saturated" market.
You become a category-of-one.
In a category of one business, competition falls away and you can get more clients, sell profitable offers and step into your role as a thought leader. Building a successful service-based business takes a thoughtful approach. It's essential to weave your expertise, unique skills and passionate perspective into an expert brand that immediately allows you to stand out and clarifies why someone would choose to work with you over another business owner.
Here are four ways to get started embracing your uniqueness so you can stand out in your field.
Related: 4 Surprisingly Simple Ways To Stand Out From Your Competition
1. Explore your expertise and subspecialize
Take a walk back through your training and experience. What is your area of expertise? How does this area of expertise help you stand out? Is there a sub-area of expertise that would allow you to stand out as a very specialized service?
For example, let's say your expertise is in anxiety disorders in adults. What would make this one layer more specialized? Let's imagine you discover you love working with new moms who are experiencing postpartum anxiety. This would immediately make your services more specialized, making it easier to create aligned content, get referrals, and draw in clients looking for what you offer.
If you have no idea where to start, write a list of everywhere you've worked. What did you like about each client population or position you worked in? What did you bring to these positions that was unique? Next, write about your favorite clients. These are the clients who have had success, the clients you couldn't wait to see and the ones who made you feel like you were working in your zone of genius.
Ask yourself a simple question: What draws your interest in your field? For example, when working as a health psychologist, I was particularly interested in coping with significant injury or illness and how people assessed their risk of illness. I had colleagues in the health psychology field who were interested in pain psychology and how to regulate pain through a mind-body approach. Other colleagues focused on weight loss and health behaviors. We each sub-specialized in a different area, which helped us to stand out in our field.
When you don't establish yourself as having a clear area of focus, you often struggle to get referrals, create compelling content, or magnetize aligned opportunities to share your insights. When you specialize in your expert business, it creates the fastest path to getting clients and marketing effectively. Many talented service-based business owners may inadvertently spin their wheels and can't get the recognition or clients they deserve because they've let themselves stay too broad.
Related: 5 Steps to Carving Out a Niche Business
2. Clarify your passionate perspective
What are you passionate about? What is something you wish others knew about your field? When you leverage your unique perspective, you infuse passion into your business. Clients work with you because they feel like you can help them. Your perspective is inherently different from anyone else in your field because it's informed by your unique training, work experiences, client interactions and personal perspective.
You've likely formed your perspective over years of working in your field, so why not share it with prospective clients? Your potential clients are tasked with sifting through a sea of similar-sounding professionals, so it's your responsibility to help them laser-focus on why you are best suited to help them. Once you clarify your unique perspective, you can begin creating focused, targeted and compelling content that draws in precisely who you serve best.
3. Use human design
Human Design is described as the science of differentiation. It's a system of understanding yourself and how to use your energy to thrive while letting go of resistance. It combines elements of astrology, I-Ching, chakras and the Kabbalah. Human design offers a roadmap of your gifts, strengths and how you're meant to impact others.
All you need to get your bodygraph, or human design chart, is your birthday, birth time and birth location.
First, learn about your energy type – Generator, Manifesting Generator, Projector, Manifestor, or Reflector. This refers to how you're designed to navigate life and how your energy is meant to interact with the world. Each energy type has a different aura that defines how you interact and impact others, which can be leveraged in your business.
Each energy type impacts the world in different and unique ways. Projectors are here to guide, lead, master systems, share their insights and invite others into a new way of approaching life. Generators are designed to provide the energy to move things along and bring things to completion, to share what you love and master an area, and to lift the energy of the collective. Manifestors are meant to bring innovation, share visionary ideas, inspire others and bring a new paradigm to the collective. Manifesting Generators are here to respond to multiple things at once and do many things you love. When your work is satisfying, you can effortlessly bring inspiration into reality. Reflectors are meant to objectively reflect how well things are going (or aren't going), live in flow with nature and harmony with the community and offer introspective and objective evaluations of communities and businesses.
Awareness of your energy type can unlock a new and deeper level of uniqueness, which you can infuse throughout your business brand.
4. Take a step outside of yourself
A great way to learn more about your unique gifts involves asking your loved ones their thoughts. Their insights can help you uncover gifts you haven't fully embraced or recognized. What do your peers, friends, partners, clients or colleagues see as your unique gifts? It can be hard to see your gifts or areas of genius. Reach out to someone you know well to see how they describe your strengths and unique gifts. What language do they use? Do you resonate, and are you willing to lean into your strengths? Embrace the insights of others since they can reveal new things about you that you may not have noticed.
Now that you know how to weave your expertise, unique perspective, and special gifts together, how will you infuse this uniqueness into your business brand?
Related: How to Take 4 Strategic Steps Outside of Your Comfort Zone
