Pay attention to your competitors’ businesses to avoid wasting resources on marketing strategies that might not be right for your own business.
Start with a SWOT Analysis
Before conducting a competitor analysis, analyze your business with a SWOT analysis that identifies your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats related to your competitive market:
- Strengths: What is your business good at?
- Weaknesses: Where can your business improve?
- Opportunities: What can you capitalize on now?
- Threats: Who are your current / emerging competitors?
Self-reflection can be hard for small business owners, particularly when asked to identify weaknesses in their business strategies. But if you want more market share, you have to look in the mirror before looking at your competitors.
Then Perform a Competitive Analysis
Who Are Your Competitors’ Customers?
And how do these customers overlap with your target audience? Just because you sell similar products, doesn’t mean your customer bases are identical. Focus on those potential customers most like your target audience and create a marketing strategy around what would get them to switch.
How Are Your Competitors’ Customer Reviews?
From directories like Yelp to social media platforms, consumers have endless outlets to praise or criticize a business. What do your competitors’ positive reviews say? How about the negative ones? How can you use this knowledge gold mine to craft a better marketing campaign and customer experience?
What About Your Competitors’ Web Presence?
How are your competitors’ websites? Does their site content include new products or case studies demonstrating success? Do they link to their LinkedIn company pages and other social media profiles? Are those profiles built out and updated at a regular cadence? What’s cool to incorporate into your business plan?
How Do Your Competitors’ Advertise?
This one’s a bit harder. Unless you get a postcard from a competitor or get served their Google Ad (AdWords) in search engine results, it’s hard to be sure of all the advertising channels used. What’s easier is to determine the types of offers they provide current and potential customers and how effective those are.
Go Beyond Market Research
It’s easy to get caught up in the coulda, woulda, shoulda of the business world. Know what your competitors are doing, emulate what they’re doing well and learn from their mistakes. But don’t let the competitive market consume you. A proven way to gain market share is with targeted advertising. From startups to seasoned entrepreneurs, to busy business owners, Valpak has the direct mail and digital marketing solutions to help your business grow. Visit our locations page to find your local Valpak office.
