Do you stand out from your competitors when your prospects go shopping? Or do you all offer the same with the “lowest price” being the only way to determine one from another? 

Being the cheapest can work for some, but for most it’s a strategy that just means struggle. Here’s one way to find out how to stand out to your prospects in a way that matters to them. 

Those last three words are the bit that bites: “matters to them”. You may think it’s all about focusing on delivering a difference with benefit A when really it could be benefit B. For instance, who remembers the Big Fresh food shopping experience that used to have animatronic fruit and veg characters in the fruit and veg aisle? You need to cast your mind back because the business failed. Competitors now just give free fruit to munchkins to keep them quiet 🙂 

So how do you find what really matters to customers? “Ask them” is the common catch cry. But what questions should you ask and how do you understand from their comments what will make them pick from the crowd?

One way we have been working recently is to dig out the minegold of information within the Google Reviews your customers have left. These snippets tell the story of what makes them happy and, occasionally, what doesn’t. 

So why not find out what they like? Why not do more of this and differentiate yourself on the happiness of your clients? 

I appreciate that a barrage of text on its own is hard to draw insights from. That’s why we turn to the simple structure of a word cloud to help. Word clouds create a beautiful, easy-to-grasp glance at what your customers are saying most frequently.  The formula is simple: the bigger the words the more frequently they are used.

Here, for example, is a cloud of customer comments from the Google Reviews of a local butcher.

No surprises that “meat” is the biggest item of all. Not location, not staff, not price – meat.

They deliver a good product that stands out and is commonly referred to as the “best” for the region. If someone took over this business and started to cut corners, they’d be undermining one of the most important attributes of the brand (as far as its customers are concerned). That strategy would likely not end well. 

Or let’s say that, not realising how intense the focus on meat was, they decided to hire the best butchers in town and put them behind the counter as specialist advisors. And to pay for this, they again cut down on meat quality. 

How would this strategy go?  As I see it, the size of “staff” is a mini compared to the focus “meat” has – so again, it could be a struggling strategy. 

Finally, let’s talk about “sausages”. It’s way bigger than “pork” or “pies”. It’s definitely the standout product. My advice is keep doing what you are doing and don’t mess with those bangers, peeps – they make people really happy!

So what makes your customers happy? 

Sure,you can guess what the answer might be. That’s quite a common strategy these days in digital marketing. 

Or you could listen to what your customers say in the reviews they leave.

Contact us today if you would like to learn more. 

Google Reviews are conversations of customers. Ideally the majority are happy with a few disgruntled souls. We think this is a space that could provide some direction to your thinking. 

We extract that data and create a wordcloud of what we find. For instance, here’s one of the local retailers who is struggling.