How To Stand Out In A Saturated Market

one of the questions I get all the time is how do I stand out in a saturated market and it's a relevant question because it used to be in business that your business was differentiated by geography you were the only butcher Baker Candlestick maker 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 sorts 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 leared

about standing out in the crowd that I want to share with you in this uh 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 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 and the human brain has this little gatekeeper it's got a bouncer on the door uh called the lyic system and the lyic 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 lyic system and it's a filter that keeps most messages and most people out of the filter now you've got this and you've probably experienced it if ever you've 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 uh ignore if I was to ask you at the end of a 5-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 um 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 your brain will go right 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 hundreds of years um 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 be 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 cuz they're

strange they're weird uh 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 you're probably not a good selling point not a good starting point 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 super sexy Hollywood star you go woo 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 right so it's a 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 or GQ 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 sache of like some product that's there like a product sample someone's giving away these

samples for free your brain Will O I wouldn't mind one of those I'll have one of those thank you very much you'd put your hand out you'd reach out you grab that free sample and you go thank you very much now they got through the filter by giving away something for free in a digital environment when you give away free information free content when you share your recipes 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

Steven Bartlett with di over CEO put a lot of time energy and effort into giving away free value on on his channel and now he's a global Superstar people recognize 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 artic articles 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 her 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 uh put it on a beautiful landing page make sure 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 right by giving their details and and saying that they would like it they request it and therefore uh it has a little bit more

value so think about how you're packaging free it's not enough to just give away your recipes you want to give away your recipes in a beautiful book with some nice photos of the finished product 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 those 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 um 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 amount of time and they've seen you through some repetition how much time how much repetition so Robin dumbar

says that 7 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 get cut through so we just call this 7-Eleven rule the 7-Eleven 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 when we scale companies

when I work with companies that are scaling and when we work with companies on our accelerator programs what we do is we lay some foundations for 7-Eleven right so we make sure that we have 7 hours worth of videos podcasts reports probably a book and all of that's available so theoretically if someone wanted to spend all day researching that particular person or that particular business they could literally go from 9:00 in the morning till 5: : in the afternoon uh with a little break for lunch and they could just learn and research and learn and

research and they could watch videos listen to podcasts read books uh 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 uh 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 to any conversations around growth and scaling pra of getting out there and trying to grow a business or scale

a business we have to be 7-Eleven ready uh and that's one of the things that we do so that we theoretically we can get cut through in a noisy Marketplace see the thing about getting cut 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 you know saying something that people have never heard before the opposite of competition is connection right it's not being different it's being connected so rather than thinking about how do I make my business more different we want to

think how do I make my business connected to more people 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 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 apply some of these lessons to be more connected to your Marketplace and watch how different people treat you now if you're enjoying these videos please give me a like and a subscribe and I

will look forward to sharing even more with you on this channel