Standing to stand out in an overcrowding market place can be extremely difficult so as a business what tactics can use to be the one that gets noticed amongst your competitors. At Digital Conversations we  call this creating your pink cow!

A pink cow in a paddock of black cows is going to get noticed right? So don’t blend in, become the pink cow and have customers raving about your brand. It doesn’t matter if you are promoting in a traditional medium or in the digital space, standing out generates leads and buzz. The explosion in consumption means there’s never been a better time for you to develop and leverage marketing opportunities across channel to get noticed and generate multiple touch points.

Each month, there are billions of searches online looking to buy products and engage services. Now is the time for your business to make a strong first impression particularly in the impatient digital world where the opportunities are huge but the competition is fierce. In the digital world, it has become a necessity for us to adapt and grow with the ever-changing market.  Here a few thought starters to creating your own pink cow:

1. Try to create localised content or better yet asked your audience to create contact for you. I don’t want to say content is king but it really is. Fresh relevant content gives your audience something new to engage with and the more personalised and local the better. If you have a national market ensure you segment your database to into states or regions and make content relevant to each market. A great example of this is Black Milk Clothing who have a massive following of ‘loyal Sharkies’ that create content for their beloved brand every day.

2. Use catchy headlines and create unique campaigns that intrigue and are clickable The biggest challenge in getting potential customers to view your Electronic Direct Mail (eblasts) is to get them to open them. The solution is to create catchy headlines that intrigue so they want to open to find out what you are talking about. Simple stuff but often forgotten.  If you got the following two emails which one is more interesting:  What makes a good website OR What websites and chocolate have in common? What stands out?

3. Don’t talk to everyone. You don’t have a general audience anymore. Instead you have unique persona’s that wants to have a relevant personal experience with your brand. You are sending your message to a specific market so you can tailor it to exactly how they will respond. Remember your audience is inundated with messages throughout the day, without that little something extra, you’re just going to get lost in the noise. Being different, means getting noticed and achieving more engagement and sales.

 4. Don’t talk AT your customer and remember it’s a two way conversation when you’re using social media. It’s easy to feel like you’re hiding behind a screen and sending out content into cyberspace but you’re not and there are people on the other end of those posts. Make make sure you know it’s a real conversation and it should involve interaction. The same rules that apply to face to face interactions apply online.

Digital is a constant evolution and there’s no telling exactly where it will be in one month or on year from now but standing out will always be number one and creating your own pink cow should be top of your agenda.

• Purple Cow concept was created by Seth Godin and this blog reflects his concept.