Competition is something that often breathes a level of fear into businesses of all sizes. It is an understandable and human emotion; more competition means more marketing spend and more choices for the customer pool to choose from. It also means that you’ll need to work harder to ensure that your customers keep coming back. Even though it might make you a bit uneasy, competition is a good thing for your business. After all wasn’t your passion to succeed and working for yourself the reason you started your own business?
A recent post from Men with Pens discussed this issue and made the point that competition inspires innovation (click here for the full post).
When you have competition, you have to improve. You can’t rest on your laurels because there’s someone doing what you do with a new gadget tacked on that makes it even better. Someone’s going to come up with a brand new game changer. And that’s a good thing, because it means two things:
Life will never be boring. And your business will never be stagnant.
When it’s phrased that way, how could competition scare you? It should drive you to stand out among your rivals to be the top business in your field. Here are three tips that may help you stay ahead of the pack:
- Think outside the box – One way to keep a leg up in your space is to monitor what your competition is doing in terms of acquiring new customers, but also what they aren’t doing. How can you expand on your marketing efforts to be more successful than they are?
Let’s say that you are in the catering business and your competition is doing direct mail campaigns and offer a robust Web site. On top of participating in these marketing channels, try attending bridal or other trade show to help expand your client base. You can also host free cooking classes at a local college to help gain exposure and build stronger ties within your community.
- Customer care – Without customers you would be out of business. So why not go the extra mile to satisfy them. One method that has been tried and true to work is offering a satisfaction guarantee. Now this doesn’t mean that if you’re a contractor or gardener you should give away the project away for free, but rather offering to make any minor improvements that the customer would like either free of charge or for the cost of materials.
It is also important to be accessible to your customers when they need you. A major differentiator between vendor A and vendor B could be the hours of operation or emergency service. For example, Joe the Plumber is available Monday-Friday 9-5, but Sully’s Pipeworks is open for service 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Which plumber would you rather have on your speed dial when a pipe breaks in the middle of the night?
- Be you – While competition is a healthy thing, it does not need to be a blood sport. No matter how much you dislike your competitors, only focus on your business while advertising and in a public setting. No one likes to hear about how business “X” is better than business “Z” according to “X”. It shows insecurity in your own operations and offers free publicity for your competitors. If your competitors sink to that level, resist the tendency to retaliate.
Think about it, if you are a customer of Joe’s Pizza and they compare their prices to Sal’s House of Pizza, but don’t deliver,wouldn’t you check to see if Sal’s did? The free advertising might send extra business to his pizzeria if he’s offering free delivery and is open later than yours.
How have you dealt with your competition? And what are you doing to stand out in your community?
