It is a nightmare for any modern brand to be confused with competitors and fail to stand out. Brand differentiation is a permanent process aimed at building and maintaining brand awareness. Strong brands always stand out because they can adapt to customers’ needs and preferences rapidly.

Companies heavily invest in everything, which makes them different and helps to remain relevant and interesting for their customers. At the same time, traditional methods of brand differentiation, such as pricing and improvement of the quality, lose their efficiency. Consumers' needs and tastes become more sophisticated, while their demands for brands and their products permanently increase. Together with the product, they want to receive an interesting story, attractive image, and brand values that will resonate with their own beliefs. Due to this, digital tools become more and more important and powerful in terms of brand differentiation. Let’s take a quick look at the 20 most useful tips on how to achieve brand differentiation online.

1. Become an expert

Customers buy better from brands that position themselves as experts in specific domains. It is essential to invest time and resources in creating qualitative content.

2. Deliver ultimate customer experience

The design of a user-friendly customer experience is crucial for their retention and loyalty. The customer interaction with your digital products (applications, websites, etc.) should be as simple and effective as possible. 

3. Be present on social media

Being present on social media is completely different from being registered there. In order to stay relevant and interesting to your customers, you should maintain a permanent presence and be active on social networks, which are the most popular among your target audience. They represent effective platforms that help you explain why you are different from competitors.

4. Develop an application

The development of a native application is a good way to stand out among competitors. On the one hand, it facilitates the interaction of customers with the brand and its products, while on the other, it allows the company to collect valuable data about users. If used properly, this data can help improve the product and boost sales.

5. Introduce online payments

This is a handy tool that helps customers to make purchases faster and contributes to the overall positive experience of interaction with the brand.

6. Use storytelling

What can be better for differentiating yourself from others than having a unique story? Even if your brand does not have one, invent it and present it in a way that will make customers believe in it. Application of the storytelling is a good way to create a 'human face' brand image.

7. Refer to influencer marketing

Engage opinion leaders and online influencers in spreading the word about your brand. Identify those of them who share your brand values and can persuasively transmit them. If you create strong associations with concrete individuals who are popular among your target audience, you will get a lot of loyal customers.

8. Appeal to emotions

Customers are not interested in the financial sustainability of your company or your accounting reports. When choosing one brand over another or adopting a purchase decision, they are driven more by emotions than logic. 

9. Analyze customers’ feedback

Collect and analyze customers’ feedback to understand what they want from your brand and your product. The most effective changes are delivered when customers' opinions are taken into account.  

10. Reiterate on your values

Values make one person truly different from another. The same is relevant for brands. You must consistently transmit a particular set of values through your content to your target audience.

11. Use cutting-edge technologies

The better access you have to modern technologies, the easier for you to differentiate your company from others. Customer experience created using VR technologies will always be more attractive than the basic navigation interface of the website.

12. Test your marketing

Always test your marketing materials and products before presenting them to a wider audience. It will allow receiving valuable feedback from target groups of customers, which will help you improve your product or marketing materials in accordance with their preferences. As a result, you will get better conversion rates and increase sales.  

13. Know your customers – do research

You will attract customers if you know how they behave and adopt purchase decisions. To get behavior insights, you can use Implicit Priming Tests as well as other neuromarketing technologies. 

14. Invest in qualitative visual content

Taking into account the permanently shrinking attention span of consumers, it becomes harder and harder to attract their attention with textual content. At the same time, qualitative visual content can easily attract customers’ attention since it requires far less time for processing by the brain and causes instant emotional reactions.

15. Balance entertaining and educative content

Truly successful brands managed to find the right balance between emotional and educative content. Subconsciously customers want to be emotionally attracted to the brand, but at the same time, they also want to receive information that will help them adopt an educated purchase decision.

16. Use multiple communication channels

It’s a very simple rule: the more communication channels you use to disseminate your content which distinguishes you from your competitors, the better.

17. Create a unique brand identity

Every distinctive brand has its unique identity, which encompasses everything from visual components such as logo and color range to the story of the brand creation and distinctive peculiarities of the product.

18. Make your content sharable

Unique brands are those that are perceived as such by consumers. The best indicator that consumers find the brand special is when they actively share its content. In such a way, they underline that they associate themselves with values and messages the brand transmits. You can find some valuable advice on how to create such content here.

19. Provide additional added value

Such added value shouldn’t always be material. It can be represented by users' engagement in work on your new product, improvement of user experience, optimization of your website in accordance with their preferences, development of an app, etc.

20. Sell a viewpoint, not an image

Your colorful and attractive marketing should be based on particular values, which will run through all your communications as a golden thread. Otherwise, the success of your marketing will be temporary, and it will not produce any long-lasting effect on your brand perception.   

We hope that the abovementioned tips brought you closer to identifying the most suitable ways for achieving effective differentiation of your brand.