can Market Analysis show how to beat your competition?
This article is called how can market analysis show you how to beat your competition? One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is how you can beat your competition. Essential for when starting, growing, sustaining, and even selling your business. It may sound aggressive to say how you can beat your competition, but let’s face it: they want your business. They want to beat you, and they will not stand by and let you take theirs.
Beating your competitor should mean gaining market share. The more of the market you have, the more customers you will have. The more customers, the more profit, etc., provided you are selling at the right price, covering all your costs, of course. Which is not necessarily the case in the highly invested tech world. Here are our thoughts on assisting you in winning your battles with your competitors.
Follow in the footsteps of your competitors
You and your competitors should all have strategic plans to try and succeed. Competitors may have made mistakes in the past and learned from them. And that’s the reason why they do what they do. Ask yourself these and other questions to help you build a clear picture of your competitors:
- What are they doing?
- How are they doing it?
- How do they make their customers happy?
- What is their market?
- How do they approach and communicate with their market?
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Collate sufficient information about your competition. How much is adequate information a good question? You can spend endless hours looking at them. So, defining some questions to answer will help you create a structure and understand when you have enough information. Thoroughly answer the questions you have set and will be getting there, at least initially.
Once you have collected their information, it’s time to boil it down and build it again. This allows you to compare, contrast, and evaluate against a set of criteria. Criteria like:
1. The basics
How long they have traded, their location, their growth, and capital received. Key staff members, revenues, and profits.
2. Products/Services
Compare and break down your and their products or services to determine the proclaimed and actual benefits, durability, features, quality, performance, warranties, etc.
3. Innovation
Innovation activities are essential for the future of your business. It can also be a key differentiator from your competitors. So, take a look at their innovation strategies. Define how many innovation projects are on the go. Determine their speed of innovation. Now, in the past and the future. How do they compare to your innovation activities?
4. Marketing
Compare your marketing with that of your competitors. Look at:
- Reputation
- Image
- Key messages
- Market prominence
- Brand value
- Ease of website navigation
- The tone of voice etc
5. Sales
Analyse and compare your sales team’s performance against your key competitors. Define their sales funnel, associated sales channels, supporting materials, how they sell, etc.
6. Social media
Social media presence is what many of the CI platforms that are not CI platforms focus on. Followers and what they publish are one thing. But try analysing and comparing your social media presence with your competitor. Asking questions like:
- What are they saying,
- Who are they saying it to?
- What are they not saying?
- How are they marketing their business?
- What’s their overall message?
- Who are they targeting?
- Which demographics are taking in the message?
- What’s working and what’s not?
Compare your offer to theirs
What do you offer? Which products do you sell? Or what services can you provide? Which part of the offering differentiates you? These are not simple questions, and it takes time to answer them, as sometimes they’re not so obvious. Yes, you sell a widget, but what does a prospective or current customer think you provide?
Analyse what you can offer to make prospective customers kick your door down to buy your offer. Now, switch this thinking from yourself to your competitors. What makes them so good, what do they really sell, and why do customers love them?
- What makes their offer better than yours?
- What’s the most important part of their offer?
- Also, what are they trying to achieve in what they do?
Do better than your competitors
You understand your current situation well, so now you need to look at how you can do better than them. Offer a better product or service. Ask yourself how you can do better than them? What are the problems with your competitor’s offering? What do the customers dislike about what they do? Is there something they could be doing but are blind to it? Is it a potential competitive advantage you can exploit?
Solve Real Customer’s Problems
Time to look at their customer base and understand their competitors’ thoughts. Why do they use your competitor? What solutions can you provide to make them switch to you? Assuming they are looking for alternatives, who else could provide for them?
What do potential customers think of these potential competitive advantages? Do they agree, or is it damp squib? What problems do they have with your competitor and the provision in general? Can you develop a solution for them?
Know your customers
Take a look at your current customer base. How well do you know them and their needs? The more you ask them about what you do, the better. It shows you give a damn about them and value their business. But it also allows you to potentially isolate future solutions for them. And, of course, other customers, too.
Keeping customers informed and asking for their advice heads off customer dissatisfaction, reducing the chances of them jumping ship to the provider down the road and taking money out of your pocket.
Differentiate
Use all the information you have isolated to differentiate from the competition. However, determining and building the world’s most incredible product is one thing. You need to tell the world about it. Make sure you have a consistent message explaining why you are the best on the market and why customers should use you. It must be simple and easy to understand, too. Achieve differentiation. You will increase your market share and go from strength to strength.
Market Analysis shows you how to beat your competition
In this article called how market analysis can show you how to beat your competition, we introduced you to look at what your competitors are doing. Competitor Analysis and comparing your offering to your competitors. Then, look to do better than your competitors and solve your customers’ problems. Finally, get to know your customers and differentiate.
Art by Jezar
We are Octopus. The Global People-Powered Competitive Intelligence Agency.
Outsmart your competition. Make the unknown known. Octopus helps you gain clarity in complex markets. With clients and tentacles around the world, we deliver sharp, actionable competitive intelligence through a blend of deep primary (HUMINT) and secondary research. If you’re looking to make smarter decisions, beat the competition, and reduce uncertainty, we’re the partner you want on your side.
