How Can Market Analysis Show You How to Beat Your Competition?

How can Market Analysis show you how to beat your competition?

This article is called how can Market Analysis show you how to beat your competition? How can you beat your competition is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself. 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 that you are gaining market share. The more of the market you have, the more customers you will have. The more customers, the more profit etc. Providing 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 sufficient information is 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 answered 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 then build it back up again. Allowing you to compare, contrast and evaluate against a set of criteria. Criteria like:

1. The basics

How long they have traded, location, their growth, and capital received. Key members of staff, 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 is 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?
• Whom are they targetting?
• 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 take time to answer them as sometimes it’s 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 have a good understanding of your current situation, 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 isolate future solutions for them potentially. And of course, other customers too.

Keeping customers informed and asking for their advice heads off customer dissatisfaction. Reducing the chances of 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, differentiating 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. Why customers should be using you. It must be a simple and easy to understand message too. Achieve differentiation. You will increase your market share and go from strength to strength.

How can Market Analysis show you how to beat your competition?

In this article called how can Market Analysis show you how to beat your competition, we introduced you to looking 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.

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