Who Are My Competitors And What Do I Need To Know About Them?
Knowing your competitors in business and what products they offer, is what helps your business stand out. Knowing your competitors is information that every serious business seeks. This information is helpful because your startup can set its product pricing better in the marketplace and create better marketing campaigns in the process.
The marketing strategies that you can create as a result of your knowledge about your competitors will attack any weaknesses that they may have in the marketplace and your business performance will skyrocket as a result. Assessing threats posed by current competitors and new entrants in the market is also vital to the success of your business.
In this article, we want to explain what you need to know about your competitors in business and how you can utilize that information to your advantage.
Who are my competitors?
There is no business without competition today. For example, even if you live in a small town and you own a steakhouse, you still need to compete with bars, movie theaters, and other related businesses where your customers want to spend cash.
But, with the increased usage of the Internet as a place where you can purchase products and services, you’re no longer competing with local businesses only. You are also in competition with businesses from other cities, and other countries too.
They might offer similar products to yours that can reduce the sales of your product as a result. But, competition is not just about taking away money from you. You can also gain a lot of capital and market share if some of your new competitors want to sell their products with your help or want to sell their companies to yours.
That’s why you need to have a constant market research process for new competitors.
What do I need to know about the competitors?
Successful businesses constantly observe the way their competitors do business. What you really want to know about your competitors is the following information:
- Products and services and how they sell them;
- Product pricing;
- Distribution and delivery;
- Customer loyalty systems;
- Innovations in business methods and products;
- Number of employees and their expertise;
- Usage of new technologies;
- CEO, owner of the business and their personality;
- Annual reports (public companies);
- Media and marketing activities.
You need to find out as much as possible for your competitors as well as for their customers:
- Who are their customers;
- What products do the customers purchase in the marketplace;
- The strengths and weaknesses that the customers see in them
- Short-term or long-term customers.
The research about their customers can go even further and inspect information such as:
- What are your competitor’s target clients;
- If your competitors develop new and better products;
- Financial capital and resources of your competitors.
How can I utilize the information about my competitors?
The information gathered about them needs to be evaluated first. This process will let you know if there are any gaps in the marketplace that your competitors failed to fill. Those are the exact places that you can exploit.
On the flip side, your market research report will indicate if there’s too much saturation in some market segments which implies that you need to direct your focus elsewhere.
Make a list of every information that you’ve found about your competitors. Then, categorize the information. What can you learn from your competitors? Can you do something better than them? Is there something that they’re doing worse than you?
Need help with competitor research? Check out our 6-step approach.
To conclude, learn from the competitors and become better than them. If you know that something works well for them, you might as well bring that to your organization. This can be anything from updating your product features to pricing packages and improved customer experience. It about innovation, not imitation.
Thank you for your attention. If you are an entrepreneur that wants to start a business or own a company that wants to expand, wants to successfully identify trends and competitors and better understand his clients but still not sure where to begin, BizzBee is here to guide you through the steps that will help you differentiate from your competition. Our expertise is in working with Entrepreneurs and Start-ups and we can guide you throughout the entire process.
Thank you for your attention. If you are an Entrepreneur that wants to start a business or own a company that wants to expand, wants to successfully identify trends and competitors and better understand his clients but still not sure where to begin, BizzBee is here to guide you through the steps that will help you differentiate from your competition. Our expertise is in working with Entrepreneurs and Start-ups and we can guide you throughout the entire process.
