7 things you can learn from your competitors
Your competitors can teach you a lot about the business, so don’t see them as your business rivals only, but as an educator as well.
What rubbish is this? Why your competitors will educate you? Why will they make already tough competition tougher?
You are right. They will not tell you anything. They will never want to see you growing like them and make a dent in their market share.
Then, how can they be your teacher?
Though they will not teach you anything, you can learn plenty of things from them through self-study. You will have to research their business and the tactics they adopt to influence their target market, and you will gain loads of useful information that you can use for your business.
This blog will inform you the seven things that you can learn from your competitors.
Here are they.
The expectations of the market-
Competitors product analysis allows you to understand the expectations of your target audience. When you analyse the products of your competitors to know how much successful they have been to meet the expectations of the market, you get a clear view of where your products stand against the products of your competition, and what improvements are required in your products to make them the best available choice for your target audience. If you find your products are expensive, you can take measures to make the pricing more competitive.
If you don’t manufacture anything or offer any service, but sell the products of others, even then the competitors product analysis will help you select the most demanded products for your e-commerce store.
What sort of website design you need-
Check the websites of your competitors displaying in the top 10 organic search results of Google. Every website will give you some website designing ideas. Take the best aspects of every website and then analyse them to decide what aspects can help you design the best website.
However, use every aspect in a way so that nobody can figure out you have taken the idea from some other website. Those who believe in originality of works might call this unethical, but this is not in actuality. Everybody takes ideas or inspiration from something or the other and then create their own work. If we look at the things this way then everything is unethical.
What type of content you need and how you should place it on the website-
Check the bounce rates of the websites in top 10 search results. This will give you an idea which websites visitors like.
What is bounce rate and how will this help you identify the websites liked by the visitors?
The bounce rate tells you the behaviour of the website visitors. As per Google, “A bounce is a single-page session on your site.” In other words, if visitors check merely one page of your website and leave it without doing any other activity on it, the search engines count it as the bounce. The total number of one-page sessions decide the bounce rate of any website. You can check it with the help of Alexa.com.
You can take content ideas from such websites which have the lowest bounce rates. You can check how they have written the content and how they catered it to their target audience. This will give you great ideas regarding how you should write your content and how you should present it.
How to ensure the best customer support-
Customer support has become an important way to win the favor of the customers. This is the reason that almost every serious business person takes this seriously. If your competitors are offering customer support to their customers, you cannot ignore this. Just think about it - why your target market will think about you when they are getting customer support from your competitors. So, study the customer support provided by your competitors, and then make a strategy for it. In case your competitors are not offering it, you will get an edge over them by offering it.
How to ensure the best customer interaction-
Interacting with your target audience is crucial to create your presence in the market, attract sales, and create a loyal customer base. So, study what your competitors are doing to connect with their target audience and interact with them.
Studying the interaction channels used by the competitors does not mean you should depend upon those channels only, but you should look for other possible interaction platforms as well. For example, most businesses rely on Facebook and Twitter only, you can use Linkedin and Google+ as well.
Research their interaction strategy also. Make a list of the best thing they are doing and the things they are missing and then form your strategy based on these facts.
What your marketing strategy should be-
What your competitors have been doing to market their products, this is important for you to know it. Once you know it, create your marketing strategy based on it. If your competitors are spending big amounts on television, radio, newspaper, and online ads that you cannot afford to invest in marketing your products then think about search engine optimization, content marketing, pay per click ads, and social media optimization. They will not cost you much and help you a lot to attract buyers for your products and establish yourself in the market.
What not to do-
If this is important to learn what to do, it is equally important to know what not to do. Instead of doing mistakes first and then learning from them, learn from the mistakes that your competitors have already made. This will allow playing a safe game.
As you have known what all you can learn from your competitors, be prepared for the self-study of your competitors. If you believe I have missed something that must have been covered in the blog, please mention it in the comment box so that I as well as readers can learn about them.
