New companies, stores, small and large enterprises are being opened every day. Over time, any company achieves initial success. With the first success comes the desire to develop even further in order to gain a foothold in a certain niche of the market. And at this moment a struggle begins between companies, that have already established themselves on the market for a long time, and a newcomer, who is rapidly growing and developing.
We can inherit competitors’ experience
Competition, of course, has negative consequences: you have to fight for each client, look for new ways to solve the tasks, propose more advanced and high-quality services. Competition takes a lot of effort, time, and money. But at the same time you can learn a lot from any successful competitor. It is enough just to evaluate his work and development vectors. Thus, it is possible to achieve more significant success with the correct assessment of a competitor.
Identify competing companies
First of all, you need to identify your competitors clearly so as not to conduct unnecessary analysis. Also identify the goals of competitor performance analysis. A survey of the target audience will greatly help with the analysis. With it, you will quickly and easily understand which services or products your target audience needs.
Key Points
It is important to understand the overall level of competition within the industry of your business. The higher it is, the more difficult it is to find a place for your company in the industry and the faster the market itself changes within the industry: goods and services are developing rapidly, it is important to keep up with the times. After studying the activity of competitors in the last 1-3 years, as well as tracing the development of their products or services, you can quickly track the trend and plan future work.
Find out who is the leader among the competitors. You can level on this competitor.
- It is necessary to determine the leader among competitors. You can safely level on him. After all, the leader sets the trends within the industry of your business. Competitors who have very low or even negative growth rates can be used as a source for the development of your business.
- Determine the categories of products that are offered by your competitors and find the differences with your product. Groups of products that leads the sales of your competitors, can give a good impetus for your company.
- Cost of services or goods. Determine the minimum, average and highest price level. Also find out which group of the population is served by a competing company. Determine the threshold of each price level. Based on the population group you work with, set the appropriate prices.
- If you are engaged in the production or distribution of goods, then learn how does your competitors sell the same products. There may be several ways to sell: the Internet, supermarkets, direct sales.
- Find matches and differences in competitor’s products and your own. There are several categories for this: is it popular or not, expensive or cheap, ordinary or specialized, high-quality or not. Accordingly, you can focus on these differences. For example, in advertising, emphasize that your service, although more expensive than its competitors, is much better. Or vice versa, focus on the price.
- Analyze the advertising of a competitor-leader in order to avoid wasting the company's budget on empty advertising. After all, the competitor has already managed to find out which advertisement is more effective: outdoor on the streets, on the Internet, on television and so on.
Learn from mistakes
Correct analysis of competitors can help you very well in the development of any business. In addition, you can find the history of a competing company on the Internet, find out the erroneous decisions that led to the crisis of the company, and just try to avoid these mistakes in the future.