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Video transcript:
So how do you stand out and outperform your competition in a saturated market? Now, this is a relevant question because it used to be in business that your business was differentiated by geography. You were the only butcher, baker, hair salon, whatever it is that you did in your local area. And because locality was such an important part of every business, it essentially meant that just by being in a location, you weren't competing with very many people.
But fast forward to today, we are in a digital environment where every single business in the world is essentially three or four clicks away from your business. Every time you show up and say something that you think is pretty unique, everyone else is saying the same thing. The truth is that there's only so many things you can be saying that are true, that sound interesting about your business, and everyone else in your industry has discovered those same sort of things as well.
So it's incredibly hard to be different. It's hard to stand out. It's hard to be differentiated in this modern digital world.
So there's a few things that I've learned about standing out in the crowd that I want to share with you in this video so that you can stand out in a more powerful way, that you can attract more customers, that people kind of like see you and they just ignore your competition. Now let's talk about it. So in order to understand how to stand out first, we have to actually understand how the human brain works.
Now the human brain has this little gatekeeper. It's got a bouncer on the door called the limbic system. Now the limbic system is the system that basically says, I'm going to keep all this information out and I'm going to let through just a small amount of information and let you see that.
So all of your customers are fitted with this healthy limbic system and it's a filter that keeps most messages of most people out of the filter. Now you've got this and you've probably experienced it before. If you've ever been walking down a busy street, like in the middle of a major city, you can walk from one end of the street to the other end of the street and literally just not even be aware of who the people are.
You can walk past people. Your brain just turns them into kind of like blobs going past you that you kind of ignore. If I was to ask you at the end of a five minute walk, who do you remember seeing? You probably don't remember seeing anyone.
So that is your brain, healthy, functioning, just filtering information out, letting it just pass by you like water off a duck's back while you just navigate through and you just get to the other end of the street. Now that is what's happening in your marketplace. Your customers are just filtering out all that information.
They're just ignoring you. They're ignoring everyone because their filtering system in their brain is just doing a good job of just getting rid of it. So what gets through the filter? There's some research on this, and I'm going to talk you through the research.
So there are actually five things that make it through the filter. The first three are a little bit hard to work with, but I'll talk about them anyway. So the first one is anything that is scary.
So your brain is a super detector when it comes to anything threatening or scary, and your brain will highlight that if something scary is happening around you. So we got to pay attention to that. So there is a business model called the news that is built exactly on getting through this filter.
What they do is they look around all of the things that are happening in the world and they find the scariest stuff and they put that at the very front of their business model. And essentially we pay attention to the scary stuff called the news and they sell advertising off the back of it. So that's been a very successful business model for many years.
But for most businesses, being scary doesn't really work or talking about scary stuff doesn't really work, but ultimately scary gets through the filter. The second thing that gets through the filter is strange. Have you ever been driving along and you see one of those giant inflatable, weird things that has its arms in the air and it's kind of like bouncing all over the place? Those things get people's attention because they're strange.
They're weird. Same thing. If you're walking down the street and you see someone dressed as a giant purple dinosaur, you're going to go, oh, I haven't seen that today, or I haven't seen that in a long time.
So your brain goes, that's a bit strange. And therefore people will pay attention to strange. Now, once again, it's very few business models that can benefit from being strange.
Why on earth would you want your business to be strange? It's probably not a good selling point and not a good starting point for doing business with most of your customers. But it's worth mentioning that strange gets through the filter. The third thing that gets through the filter is sexy.
So if we were walking down the street and there's like a super sexy Hollywood star, you go, wow, okay, that's pretty cool, right? You spot someone who's sexy, but unfortunately, most businesses don't want to show up as sexy and many businesses couldn't do it even if they wanted to. So it's a difficult one for many of us to even try and pull off. Let's talk about the final two that absolutely work for every business, including yours, including mine.
Any business that applies these ones, it's going to work really well for you. So the final two things that get through the filter is free stuff, giving away free value and being familiar. So if you were walking down a busy street and someone was giving away Vanity Fair magazines, and they're like really nicely put together, and let's say they've got even a little ribbon around them and they've got a little sachet of like some product that's there, like a product sample.
Someone's giving away these samples for free. Your brain will go, ooh, I wouldn't mind one of those. I'll have one of those.
Thank you much. You'd put your hand out, you'd reach out, you'd grab that free sample and you go, thank you very much. Now they got through the filter by giving away something for free.
You see in a digital environment, when you give away free information, free content, when you share your methods, when you share your valuable stories, you're giving away something for free and it's getting through people's filter. So we have seen someone like Stephen Bartlett with Diary of a CEO put a lot of time, energy and effort into giving away free value on his channel and now he's a global superstar. People are recognizing him, they know who he is and all he's doing is sitting there quietly in the chair, allowing people to speak, getting some of the world's top experts to come and share their information and share it for free on his channel.
And therefore he's getting massive global cut through by doing something for free. You can apply this same principle by giving away free stuff on podcasts, by creating a free report, by doing really good quality free posts on social media, by doing free long form blogs and articles, by creating informative YouTube videos. All of that stuff is where you're packaging up your knowledge and giving and sharing some of that for free.
Now when we give away something for free, the packaging really matters. If I were to give my wife some nice jewelry but hand it to her in a plastic shopping bag, she wouldn't think that's a very nice gift because it's not packaged like a very nice gift. If I was to give it to her in a beautiful box with a bow, she's going to feel like that's a special gift and it's the same when you give away free things.
You've got to package it up, put it on a beautiful landing page, make sure that you put some videos or some testimonials or some reviews and make sure that people know that this is something of value. Maybe people opt in to receive that free thing by giving their details and saying that they would like it, they request it and therefore it has a little bit more value. So think about how you're packaging free.
It's not enough to just give away your strategies. You want to give away your strategies in a beautiful book with some nice photos of all the steps. So sharing free is important for getting through the filter if it's packaged correctly and we talked about familiar.
So being familiar, there is some research on how to be a friend or how to be an acquaintance or how to be familiar to people and the two pieces of research I like to talk about most often is called Dunbar's Numbers by professor Robin Dunbar and Google's report called Zero Moments of Truth. So in both of these reports they basically said that through time and repetition we get to be familiar with people. So if you're spending time with someone and you're seeing them over and over again your brain says that's not just anyone, that is a special person that I keep track of, that I let through the filter of my mind.
Now you can imagine walking down that busy street. If you see someone who you know quite well on the other side of the street as if by magic, your brain highlights them out of the crowd and you are excited. Your energy levels go up when you see their face and you probably would cross the street and say hello to them.
So that is the power of being familiar. Your job as a business is to put your face on your business and to make your face familiar to people so that they know who you are, what you represent and that they've seen you an x amount of time and they've seen you through some repetition. But how much time, how much repetition do you need? So Robin Dunbar says that seven hours is a significant amount of time for people to recognize you, for them to know you like you and trust you.
And Google says that 11 positive interactions is what it takes in order for a brand to cut through. So we just call this the 7-11 rule. The 7-11 rule is 7 hours, 11 interactions.
Now if you can clock up 7 hours and 11 interactions with people, they will get to know you, like you and trust you and they will open up their mind to hear more from you. So make sure you have 7 hours worth of videos, podcasts, reports, probably a book and all of that available. So theoretically if someone wanted to spend all day researching that particular person or that particular business, they could literally go from 9 o'clock in the morning to 5 o'clock in the afternoon and they could just learn and research, they could watch videos, listen to podcasts, read books, look at reports, read articles and all of that would be there for 7 hours.
And the other way we think about this is 11 positive interactions. So we want to repurpose all of that content into multiple podcasts, videos, articles, blogs so that there's at least 11 different things for people to engage with. That's based on the research, 7 hours, 11 interactions.
So prior to any conversations around growth and scaling, prior to getting out there and trying to grow a business or scale a business, you have to be 7-11 ready. And that's one of the things you need to do so that you theoretically can get cut through in a noisy marketplace. You see, the thing about cutting through is that it's not about being different, strange, doing some weird thing.
It's not about dressing up as a giant dinosaur or saying something that people have never heard before. The opposite of competition is connection. It's not being different, it's being connected.
So rather than thinking about how do I make my business more different, you want to think how do I make my business connected to more people. You see, the reason you've got your best friend is not because your best friend is wildly different to everyone else. Your best friend is just more connected to you than everybody else.
And when we think about differentiation as connection rather than differentiation, it all makes sense in a very noisy world. Go out there and apply some of these lessons to be more connected to your marketplace and watch how different people treat you. Now, if you want to get more free business training like this, you can visit the first link down in the description below, which is going to allow you to sign up for an extended free trial of my favorite marketing software and get all my business training for free as well as a completely free strategy session where they'll walk you through exactly how to use and set up the software so it's perfectly customized to you and your business needs.
Thanks for watching and maybe I will see you in one of the next videos that should show up right about now.