In this blog, I’m going to share with you some sales and marketing tactics
that you can use immediately to grow and scale your business.
Today’s topic is how to use business competitors to your advantage.
Your competitors are already out there doing a lot of different things to scale and grow their businesses and to attract new customers. So, all you need to do is watch them and then emulate what they’re doing.
I heard a saying one time that goes: You don’t need to go out and create a new mouse trap. All you need to do is create a better mouse trap.
And that’s what I want to share with you today – some strategies and ideas that you can use to leverage ideas from your competitors.
Tip No. 1
The first thing that you want to do is conduct some local market research. There’s no need to get lost in all the details. You just need to answer a few of the following questions:
- How long has your competitor been in business?
- How many employees do they have?
- How many locations are they in? Are they local? Are they national?
- How are they advertising?
- If they’re selling a product, how did they go out and manufacture that product?
- If they’re a service-based business, how are they delivering that service?
You don’t need to answer all these questions, but try and answer as many of
them as possible to give you an understanding of how the competitor is operating.
Tip No. 2
The second thing that you want to do is analyse your competitors’ offerings, analyse their products, analyse their services.
- What is their primary product?
- What is their primary service?
- How do they charge for that product?
- How do they charge for that service?
- How quick can they deliver on that product?
- How quick can they deliver that service?
Take Amazon as an example. We know that if you are an Amazon Prime customer, for most products, you can get next day deliveries.
What about your competitors? Do they have some similar offering?
If they deliver a service, how fast can they deliver on that
service? Do they upsell?
If you were to buy one product from them, do they have an upsell strategy to sell you more products or sell you onto a different service?
If they’re in the manufacturing business, what type of equipment do they use to deliver their products, and, similarly, if they service based business, do they have a process, a system that they use to deliver that service?
All you need to do is find out what those things are and how you
can emulate some of that. Then, if they are not delivering on certain things, determine how you can offer that as differentiator.
Tip No. 3
The third thing that you can do then is identify your competitors’ advertising.
- Are they advertising online?
- Are they advertising on social media?
- If it’s a service-based business or even a product-based business, do they have a mail out?
- Or do they deliver via flyers or advertise in the newspaper?
Finding out how they conduct their advertising and where they attract their customers is one way of getting that market advantage.
Tip No. 4
The fourth thing that you can do is become a customer. Buy their products. Try their services. The best way of doing market research and finding out how your competitors sell, market and promote their business is if you are a customer. Test the services, put their product through its paces and test it from there.
What you can also do is read the reviews (online reviews or any other reviews / testimonials) that the customers may have.
Nowadays, it’s easy. You can go online onto Google or Facebook and check and read the reviews. That’s not really hard to do.
Tip No. 5
What you can also do is check their website, and not only check their website, but conduct a Google Search to see which businesses rank at the top and which businesses are actually advertising on Google as well.
Do a search based on the product.
So say, for example, you are going to launch a junk removal business, put that into Google and then check out which businesses come up, and then go onto those websites and check them out.
Look at the layout of those websites. Look at what they offer. Look at what buttons they have. That will usually tell you how to build your website and what keywords you possibly need to be using as well.
These are just a few ideas that you could use to gain an upper hand and an advantage on your competitors. You don’t need to recreate the wheel, just improve the wheel. These are some ideas that I hope you can use to scale and grow your business so that you do not compete but dominate in your field and in your market.
