Competitive Marketing: What makes you different?

Regardless of whether you sell windows or online marketing services, every single facet of your business and product has the ability to be differentiated. It is critical to understand this fundamental idea before launching into any marketing effort. If you do not define your niche strengths and detail your individual selling benefits, then you are choosing to market yourself against other companies who are selling on the same points. Rather than set yourself apart, you are choosing to be a part of the crowd. This idea is very critical to reaching marketing success. Without setting yourself apart, every hour of labor and every dollar of your budget that you spend on marketing your business is fighting against dozens or even thousands of other like-minded businesses. Step #1 : Identify the Competition Whether you are in the real world or in the online marketplace, you must ask questions about the companies who interact with the same type of clients that you are looking for. For online research Google, Superpages.com, and CitySearch.com are valuable sites for locating both brick and mortar businesses and virtual ones without a physical location (web companies, consultants, etc) While it may seem “dated”, the yellow pages is also a very easy to utilize competitive research tool. Yellow page advertising is typically not very effective, but many successful businesses have full page advertisements detailing years of success they have had. Chamber of Commerce and business networking groups are also very easy ways to identify competitors with a simple phone call to the coordinator of those groups. Action Item: Create a chart of at least ten other companies. This chart should be broken into two main categories of competitors. Five of those businesses should be in a similar stage to where your business is today. Five of them should be of companies that are where you want your business to be in two years. By understanding where you are and where you want to be, many marketing strategies and tactics will be detailed out. Step 2: Shop the Competition What do your competitors offer? Ask them. Pick up the phone, send off an e-mail, and gather as much information as you can about what they have to offer…  and how they offer it. When interacting with them – take note of as many different aspects of the engagement as possible. If you sign up to be contacted online, record the points of contact they use to reach out to you. How fast do they respond? Do they send an e-mail follow-up? What information are they providing you? If you interact with a live business contact on the phone or in real life, think like a consumer. How are they talking to you? What mannerisms do they have? Action Item The easiest way to understand how your competitors differentiate themselves is to ask the same questions of them that you have been asked. Have the top ten questions on your mind and try to ask every one of them. Ask yourself the honest question of “Is this business successful and do I want to be like them?” If the answer is yes, realize that they have probably faced many hurdles in the evolution of their own marketing process and sales cycle. Learning from your competitors past experience is an effective way to streamline your own learning curve and maximize your own results. Step 3: Make Comparisons Once you know who your ten competitors are and have tracked the responses to your ten most common questions, you now have a snapshot of how a variety of similar businesses are attacking the very same issues you need to overcome. Try to make creative comparisons of the companies that most closely resemble your own business model. Action Item Identify areas that seem to have gaps amongst competitors who are currently in the industry. Examine how your model of business can fit into those gaps. Once you have detailed the gaps, find at least two valued professional contacts and ask them to make independent reviews of the information. Conclusion By understanding the marketplace in your industry, you can detail and adapt your own marketing efforts to focus on areas that you competitors have left unattended. Identifying areas of prospects that have an unaddressed need is a more effective way of allocating marketing effort- rather than fight for the same cluster of prospects that are already oversold; you can offer your services to a group that has been left unattended. Ideally this competitive comparison takes place at least twice a year. Old competitors may close shop or change tactics, and new businesses may try to focus on the same niche and create a more aggressive environment. By keeping a competitive report on like-minded businesses, you can have the data needed at your disposal to help minimize your business mistakes and learn from competitive failures and successes.  2007-12-21T06:36:47Z

2007-12-21T18:19:44Z