Marketing Bingo - Do You Win Or Lose?

Marketing Bingo is a game I have created for checking how distinct your marketing message is from your competitors.

It works best when you look at marketing methods which group competitors together so that a prospective customer or client looks at one marketing message and then another and another before deciding to take action e.g. your website from a search in Google or the Yellow Pages (this makes the game Website Bingo or Yellow Pages Bingo).

How To Play Marketing Bingo

Write down the key factors which you want to emphasise in your marketing to attract your target customers.

Then go to your competitors' marketing and start crossing off the common areas.

You claim to be professional but so do they.

You claim to be friendly, so do they.

Unlike traditional bingo where you want to cross out all your numbers first, in Marketing Bingo you want to be left with some factors which you emphasise which no one else does - these are your differentiating factors.

Just try it for yourself because it is very illuminating.

And quite frightening when all those big benefits have been crossed off by the first competitor and repeated again by the second.

The more you look like a commodity, the more your customer will:

a) get confused - there's no clear attraction and that makes the decision difficult. And difficult decisions get postponed.

b) decide that price is the most important buying criteria because you can all do pretty much the same job.

You might be happy to compete on price if you genuinely have the lowest costs in your industry and can make good margins despite quoting low prices.

More likely, the price squeezes your margins and hurts your ability to serve the customer to the best of your ability. You may even have to build in some corner-cutting to make any money.

How To Win At Marketing Bingo

There are two dimensions you need to think about for you to win at marketing bingo.

First, you need to be saying something unique.

Something which makes a prospective customer sit up and take notice.

Second, what you say must be of value to the customers you want to attract (please accept that not all customers are good customers).

I can say that I am an eight foot tall green Martian with purple stripes - and I can promise that none of my competitors are saying it - but it doesn't have value to anyone who is looking for a strategy business coach. (It's also not true - thanks to my shape-shifter abilities I'm only six-four.)

I've written about an example of marketing bingo on my Differentiate Your Business blog when I looked at accountants advertising in my local Yellow Pages - see Yellow Pages Bingo For Accountants.

Paul Simister is a business strategy coach who helps small business owners to profit from differentiation, be distinctive in the eyes of their customers and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

You too can move past your profit tipping point by answering the 7 big questions of business success.

Comments

[Matthew Needham]

Paul, this is excellent advice. When people can copy other's strategies in a few days, identifying yourself as being different has got to be a good thing.

Great tip.

Matthew