Every company’s feeling the pinch right now. The trend is that, right now, businesses are looking inwards as a way to protect themselves. But we must always be looking outward. Competitors are a great way for us to gain a greater understanding of ourselves. Our immediate competitors could undercut us in a number of ways, but how can we learn from our competitors appropriately?
Analyse Their Marketing Strategies
The umbrella of marketing covers so many different disciplines that you can spend a lot of time analysing what works and what doesn’t. You could easily spend time ensuring you check competitor backlinks and fine-tuning your search engine optimisation as much as you would their advertising campaigns and website design. It is all important.
It helps you understand where you can market yourself better, while also stealing from them. There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to stealing, as long as it doesn’t impinge the intellectual property. Stealing in an illegal sense is a big no-no, but sometimes it’s important to remember the wise words of Oscar Wilde: “Talent borrows; genius steals.”
Look at How They Engage With Customers
Their online presence will give you a number of clues as to how they conduct themselves, especially in the face of customers who complain to them. If you are finding yourself up against a number of customers that have complained because of the impact of the Royal Mail strikes, you are not alone. But it’s in how you react to these issues with your customers that go a long way to repairing the situation. When you monitor their social media accounts, it gives you a flavour of what the customers are saying about your competitors.
The Products They Offer
We have to identify the potential gaps in the marketplace, and when businesses offer a diverse range of services, it’s not necessarily for the benefit of the business. The most important thing to consider is if your competitors are spreading themselves thin. Businesses diversify into other products because there is a demand for them from their customer base. They’ve spent time listening to customers and have responded with a newer product or an upgraded version of an old one.
It’s also important to recognise that when they are upgrading a specific product, you are already offering as well as identifying those gaps in the marketplace that will allow you to think about adapting existing services or products, but you may also want to start thinking about offering your product around the world. It may take a lot more effort, especially when you are adapting an online store to accept different currencies, but it can be a simple way to differentiate yourself from an immediate competitor operating on a local level.
Staying Up-To-Date
A very simple way for you to differentiate yourself from the competition is to keep track of the trends your competitors utilise and use this to improve your business. It can feel like you are constantly trying to keep up with competitors, but this is why identifying gaps in the market and assessing major pitfalls can help you to stay ahead of the curve. Learning to understand which products will be more viable in a year or 18 months’ time will give you a head start so you can adapt your business accordingly.
Using Industry Events
You can use conferences or seminars to get a lot of valuable information. It is essential to have a presence at industry events like expos, so we can not just promote ourselves but also recognise how we are measuring up against our immediate competitors. Having a regular presence at expos helps you to understand why you should stick to your guns or diversify.
One of the biggest mistakes we all have is thinking we need to keep up with our competitors but this means we’re not looking at ourselves enough. Because if we’re constantly trying to upgrade based on trends, we are potentially altering our business every 18 months or so. When you start to look at how your business is measuring up in industry events, you should use this to understand how to make yourself different, but without compromising your core values.
Going Right Up to Your Competitors
You might think this is not a suitable option, but if you ask your competitors the right questions, you can get a lot of straightforward information. We have to remember that we’re not necessarily attempting to run our competitors into the ground but to make us a better version of ourselves. You can gain insight into a number of simple components, for example, the markets they move into or if they have scaled their business up slowly over time. When you look at what they are doing differently, you can use this to inform your strategies.
Look at Pricing Strategies
Competitive pricing analysis is the most important tool here because it allows you to determine whether you are offering a product at its true value. It can increase your understanding of what you can do, but it also helps you to improve your cooperation with suppliers. As reduced spending power means customers are thinking twice about purchasing products across the board, look at your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and value propositions to differentiate from the competition.
You need to deliver value for money and this could mean you are not necessarily looking at diversifying your services but actually streamlining and focusing on a very specific part of your target markets. Many businesses have to forego quality for quantity in this area. However, you still need to provide a service that delivers based on value.
It can be tempting to cut prices time and time again to ensure you are bringing in some form of income but this is why analysing your competitors and their pricing can help you to position yourself more suitably within the market.
We must learn from our competitors, and ensuring we do it in the right ways gives us greater insight, not just into what they are doing, but into how we can conduct ourselves better.