The best strategy to defeat your competition is to know what the rivals do in their ranks. I will explain this
If you do not know your game, you do not know their strategies. OK?
If you do not know their strategies, and you can not predict their next move, then you can not create a competitive plan.
If you can not create a competitive strategy, you can not beat your competition.
But if you can know your opponent’s strategies, and you can predict their next move – you will take quick steps and stunning competitive advantages, which will result in increasing your business and income.
So, if you understand it, then let’s see how you can better predict your rivals.
Knowing your competition even better than they know themselves, it’s hard. But not impossible. Are you ready?
Understanding their services and product
At the beginning of each business, you will need to do your competitive research.
This is not enough to list the names of your competitors. If you want to defeat them, then you will need more.
- Offer your service or compare your product with them.
- What are yours, and what are their unique value propositions?
- What are your and customer’s perspectives, and they are using customer acquisition methods?
- Who is their founder?
- What are their investment and team size?
To understand your competition, you should answer this and many other questions as much as you can!
I have been outlined only for those basic things you need to do. If you want to learn more, I also wrote a complete guide on the operation of your competitive research here.
You are contesting the competition as the ultimate monitor to predict the next move of its rivals, right! Only conducting your competitive research is not enough! You will need to do a lot to make a better competitive advantage and defeat your competition.
After you do your competitive research, it is essential to keep an eye on your competition. This will not help you to predict their next move. In essence, it will give you some valuable insight into their product or service changes, team scaling, investment, and other ideas, which can be very important to create a competitive advantage.
Here are some of the things to keep an eye on:
- Changes on Website
- news
- Special offers and Product changes
- social media
- SEO and Keywords
- Content distribution and publication
- Advertising campaigns (Social media, PPC, etc.).
Monitoring your competition can be very time-consuming and challenging. But here’s some ways to do this and save you time (as much as you can):
- Always track your social media pages – turn on notifications and follow your employees and managers (sometimes, if your competitor is a vast and huge company, then it can be very heavy.
- Every several days, try to type some of your relevant keywords in Google to see your PPC campaigns.
- On Facebook, when you visit their page, on the left, you have a piece of tab information and an advertisement, where you can see their active and running ads.
- Visit their page sources to check their keywords
- Join their newsletter and always be updated with their latest product changes and special offers.
- I have been doing so many times for many years. But later I got a solution, which saved me hours per week.
Creating Competitive Advantages
After you know who your competitors are, and you know their next steps, and you have insights into their strategies – it’s time for you to take action and create significant competitive advantages.
Some of the most common Competitive Advantages Strategies are:
- Providing more value – Always think about and think about your current and potential customers. Sometimes giving more value decides in the eyes of customers whether they use a brand or any other. Write a qualitative blog post, talk to your customers, and create content they need.
- Build personal relationships with your customers – this is one of my favorite competitive advantages. Creating personal relationships with your customers will not only provide you with customers or high paying customers. If you build quality relationships with them, then your customers will become your best marketing and competitive advantage. How? Because they will be your colleagues and they will propagate your product in the world! 🙂
- Present better ways of pricing – Yes, you can always be cheap. But sometimes, it is not enough to get back to your competitive customers. Right? Being cheaper sometimes can be that you have the wrong product – and customers will always use a better product – no matter it is more expensive or cheap. But you can do one thing here – you can offer some services from your competitive premium packages in your free or basic packages. This is a unique competitive advantage – and you can later give them some other accessories.
There are some strategies to differentiate while competing head-to-head in a ‘commodity’ market. Your question tells that the business sells the same product, the same brand.
They are the spindle at the idea of understanding better customers than all the competition. To understand the meaning of customers
- What problems do they solve with the product
- What are the seizure segments based on their needs/problems
- How do they decide
- What are the triggers for purchase
- What are the price drivers: value, service, selection, service, etc.
- What options do they consider?
- Who influences them to make decisions
- What are their main questions or concerns when making purchase decisions
- e.t.c.
With this information, opportunities to differentiate are apparent. for example:
- Personal service
- Adaptation
- Services required to solve the customer problem: distribution, installation, training, etc.
- Focus on a set of customers with specific needs, specific geography
- Provide better equipment for buying products: (think about Barnes and Noble and Best by vs. Amazon)
- How-to guide
- Pre-sales training
- Better ways to search/find/browse products
- Complete product information
- Expert recommendations
- Comparison tool
- Guarantee or Warranty
- complementary products
- And, last but not least, do a simple purchase process.
Hope that this will help
