Do you ever think about how competitors on the market directly impact your company? This is something to keep in mind because they can hit your business hard in a number of ways.
You can also use your competitors to boost your position and ensure that you are able to get more interest from clients and customers. Let’s explore how this works and some of the steps that you can take.
Price Changes
You do need to make sure that you are keeping a check on the prices that your competitors are choosing for products and services that are similar to yours. It’s crucial that you don’t end up in a situation where they are charging significantly less or even more.
You need to be somewhere near the same cost with the only exception being if you are holding a special event or giveaway. If you lower your price beyond the competition then you could trigger a price war and this won’t benefit anyone.
If you set your price too high compared to the competition then you might just turn away some of your customers and lose them to lower prices.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking simply refers to checking out what your competitors are doing in the rest of the industry. Indeed, with industry benchmarking, you will be able to make smart decisions about how to move your business forward and choose the right directions for growth. You might also be able to find a gap in the market.
This means that you will be able to sell something or offer a service that doesn’t exist on the market. You could even find a new USP to attract more customers and even potentially steal some from the other companies.
You just need to make sure that you learn how to use this tactic the right way.
Negative Attacks
You do need to be wary about negative attacks from competitors online. It’s possible that they will try and hit your business, ensuring that your promotion is impacted. For instance, they might explore negative SEO.
Negative SEO is dangerous because it will mean that your business ranks but for the wrong reasons. For instance, this could be a bad review of one of your products. In most cases, the reviewer won’t be providing an honest opinion and will have been hired by a key competitor.
In other cases, you might find that one-star reviews pop up on your pages. If you think that a review of your company isn’t valid or truthful, then you can send a formal complaint and attempt to get it removed.
While this will take time, it is worth doing. Usually, negative attacks arrive because you have unfairly targeted one of your competitors. As such, you need to make sure that you are playing fair online.
We hope this helps you understand some of the ways that the competition can hurt and sometimes even help your company. If you keep this in mind, then you can ensure that you aren’t caught off guard by changes here.
