Hey ,

I speak almost every day to professional B2B marketers, and I hear a lot of confusion and anxiety around the concept of product differentiation.

Many of them know all too well that differentiating their product is important, but unfortunately, they do not believe they have any competitive levers to pull that will make them stand out. 

So, what do they do?

They mistakenly copy others’ messaging, and launch the same campaigns with the exact same marketing tactics as their competitors because they believe the grass is greener in their neighbor’s yard.

But here is the kicker: the more you copy others, the more commoditized your product become. And consequently, you’ll be always faced with this irritating question: why on earth should I buy from you? 

To help you avoid that, we’ve decided today to lay all these concerns to rest and explain how differentiation works, how you can measure the efficiency of your messaging, and more importantly how you can combine research insights and improve your messaging. 

Note: This newsletter is inspired by Peep Laja (Founder of CXL) and Andrei Zinkevich’s interview that we’ve condensed and edited for clarity.

You can watch the full interview here and see how Peep has objectively reviewed and criticized the websites of 3 different companies (live). 

Before we dive in, here are some listings from our job board that might interest you or someone around you. 

TRENCHES JOB BOARD

EXPANDI is hiring a Lead Acquisition / Demand Generation Manager

Job responsibilities:

• Manage the day-to-day execution of multiple marketing campaigns from start to finish, with direct responsibility for hitting pipeline targets and performance KPIs.
• Develop and execute demand generation initiatives that significantly increase the marketing database and overall pipeline
• Constantly look for new channels for inbound leads

Learn more about the job and apply here.

PROOFPOINT MARKETING is hiring a Performance Marketing Specialist

Job responsibilities: 

• Strategize, build, and manage campaigns across paid search, paid social, and display channels. 
• Create media plans and performance forecasts, and then analyze, interpret and act upon performance data to effectively manage campaign budgets to meet forecasted targets.
• Educate clients on how paid media affect relationship velocity efforts

Learn more about the job and apply here.

EXPANDI is hiring a Community Manager / Social Media Marketing Manager

Key responsibilities:

• Grow and moderate Expandi social media accounts and community
• Create explainer videos, how-to videos, demo videos, product overview videos, etc.
• Generate reports that summarize community activity, provide meaningful analysis, and show progress 

Learn more about the job and apply here.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the matter.

The differentiation mistake most B2B companies make 

Most B2B companies convince themselves that copying what others are doing is a safe decision. They ignore that this will only make them a commodity and keep them struggling.

In fact, your GTM strategy should be dictated by your customers, not your competitors. 

Yet, in many B2B markets, companies never talk to their customers and just copy what others are doing.

They use virtually the same press releases, the same social media updates, and the same blog posts that their ICP doesn’t really care about.

Some even use the same boring ads and landing pages with little to 0 differentiation. And some others use the same obsolete tactics of promoting gated content with sales follow-up.

But here’s the truth:

As long as you keep replicating your competitors' strategies, you will have a hard time getting a better positioning and your customers will keep confusing you with those competitors.

HOW DOES DIFFERENTIATION WORK?

1- Be a thought leader in your niche

Agencies are notoriously hard to differentiate. And Speero, Peep’s agency is no exception. At its launch, Speero was just one more conversion optimization agency (on paper). 

So, the key differentiator Peep Laja and his peers leveraged was thought leadership. 

They set themselves as knowledgeable leaders in their niche. They were building their custom frameworks for research, PXL frameworks, and of course, Peep was putting himself everywhere to be the clear thought leader in the space. And ultimately, they stood out from the crowd,

2- Be unique

One of the best differentiators, which is quite hard, is to be the only one in your lane.

If you can be unique, then you have it. 

Product-based or feature-based differentiation is what most big companies leverage, but if you can do something innovative and very unique, then you’ll have an immediate differentiator. 

3- Decide where to play and how to win

When MailChimp started, they were not the first or the only email marketing tool. Getresponse, Aweber, and some other tools were already on the market. 

But in their industry, things were fragmented to the extent that none of them was a clear dominant leader.

So, what Mailchimp did to get ahead is they executed better and faster. 

Today, if you’re launching a new email marketing tool and your product is almost the same as Mailchimp, or say you have 05 features that Mailchimp doesn’t have, chances are you will lose to them.

Nevertheless, you can deliberately choose to go for a different slice of the market. 

Ask yourself this question: what is the market that MailChimp and other category leaders are not serving too well? 

If you think of it, that's what Convertkit did. They went for creators. 

Look at it on paper and you’ll see that Convertkit is not much different from any other email marketing tool on the market. Still, they're winning, BIG. 

FYI, they hit $29 Million in revenue in 2022.

Bottom line is - decide where to play and how to win. 

Put in another way, go for a specific market, ideally an underserved one, and build features and capabilities that satisfy all their use cases. 

That is how TOYOTA entered the US market, making cheap compact cars while American carmakers were making big and massive cars. At first, they were like who cares? 

But it turned out that a lot of their customers do care. 

So later on, when KIA and Hyundai wanted to attack Toyota from the same angle, they went for the least profitable segments with subcompact cars and in their turn, Toyota was like, well, who cares? 

But we all know the end of the story. You can tell how big KIA and Hyundai are today.

The moral of the story is - try to first dominate a small segment of the market and then expand out. 

Back to our example, Toyota is now making both big and small cars in the US. Same thing with Hyundai and KIA. 

How to get your messaging validated? 

The first thing you need to understand while doing your surveys is that customers will probably never tell you how to be different. 

That's not the main purpose of custom research. You need to come up with it yourself.

So, what you should use customer research for is to validate whether your positioning is clear. 

Do your customers get your messaging right? Do they really care about your points of differentiation and all your benefit statements?

The traditional way to validate this is to just implement it. You can put it on your website or in your ads. 

But today, you’ve got to be a bit smarter because as a small company taking on industry giants, you need to carve out your own space and speed.

How you get your messaging validated depends on how well you choose your target audience. Choose wisely who you are selling to and make sure that the market is big enough to sustain your growth. 

Once you've picked your target customer, you can out to the market, and find out how much your ICP cares about your offer.

A pro-tip would be to avoid “why questions” because they trigger post-decision rationalization. 

Instead, you can ask “what made you…” types of questions.

Furthermore, here's a question you should avoid as much as you possibly can: would you buy this? 

Remember, it's a survey, not an actual purchasing moment. As long as they are not risking their money, they will make promises.

So, stop focusing on purchase-related questions. Prioritize questions that will help you ascertain whether your messaging, offer, and positioning are clear to your target audience.

Enjoyed this newsletter? If yes, chances are you have 1 or 2 colleagues (well, maybe 03) who'd also love it. Please help them by sharing this and earn some exclusive perks!

Note: As mentioned above, this newsletter is inspired by Peep Laja (Founder of CXL) and Andrei Zinkevich’s interview that we’ve condensed and edited for clarity. You can watch the full interview here and see how Peep has objectively criticized the websites of 3 different companies (live). 

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. Odjo,

Content Editor @Trenches