What you can learn about Marketing from your competitors!

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” —Thomas Edison, General Electric Co-founder

If you do your best to ignore your competitors in your space, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to improve your own marketing. By paying attention to what others are doing in your industry, you can glean  and get great ideas as well as seeing what’s missing in what others are offering.

Start by Knowing Your Competitors

It’s surprising how many businesses don’t even know who their direct (or indirect) competition is. The direct competition is easier to identify. They’re the other companies offering similar services to what you offer.

But indirect competitors might be harder to spot. Indirect competitors would be those that services different than my own to achieve the same objectives, such as advertising firms or outbound call centers. It’s important to be aware of all the solutions that are available to your target market so you understand the pros and cons of both solutions, and can best articulate the benefits of choosing YOUR solution over the other options.

Be aware: if you’re in an industry where there are a lot of competitors, for example, professional services, law, or marketing, not every one of those other companies are necessarily your competition.So, how do you know who is and who isn't?

Begin by choosing a few players of various sizes. If you’re a small to mid-sized business, you may not be directly competing with major corporations, but they’re worth studying. Also, pick a few that are similarly sized. If your customers have mentioned other brands they considered before choosing you, these are likely good candidates for your competitor list.

Here’s a useful exercise: pick your top 3 to 5 competitors (those that are growing and succeeding), and then pick 3 to 5 at the bottom, who are barely surviving. You can often learn as much from those who are doing things badly as you can those who are thriving.

The best way to stay on top of what your competition is doing is by becoming marketing-wise and subscribe to their emails. Follow them on social media. Sign up to get new blog posts. Google them and the keywords that your prospect is using to search for products or solutions. Those that pop up on the first page should be considered strong competition as well as they would be found first in a search (and if you’re first, good for you, you’re rocking S.E.O!).  These types of activities will help clue you in to how proactive your competition is being in connecting regularly with their audience and with their marketing efforts. And be open! You might learn a thing or two about connecting with your customers along the way and that’s the whole point.

Pay Attention to the Right Things

Once you have identified who you’re up against, see what they’re doing to attract more customers, including:

• Social media strategy
• Blogging content strategy
• Email marketing
• Other content marketing
• Advertising
• PR
• SEO

Here your objective is twofold. One, you want to get ideas. There’s nothing wrong with seeing that your competitor has a popular blog post offering 10 Ideas to Start a Business, then writing your own take on the topic, be proactive and use some of ideas if they are good.

The second goal is to see what they’re missing in terms of marketing and content. Are they overlooking the obvious how-to posts? Great. You can own that area. Are their emails horrible at targeting their audience or low quality? That’s where you can shine. Knowing your competitors’ weaknesses helps to enhance your own strengths and helps you tailor your value to customers to offer a branding service. 

Don’t Want to Beat THEM? Join THEM

Sometimes competitors don’t turn out to be competitors at all, so sometimes it takes looking at a so-called “competitor” in a different light to see that working together benefits everyone. In the end, you can become a synergetic force  with your competitor without realizing that.