Getting the jump on your competition often makes a big difference, and nowhere is this more obvious than in local search. If you aren’t doing this for your business yet, here are four of the best reasons why you should.
Why You Should Start
1. Understand your market better. By analyzing your competition’s results, their stats, you gain a better idea of how your market works, of what it wants, what it responds to. That gives you better insight into what to invest your money on, what marketing campaigns and channels to pursue, which ones to close and which ones to try out even further.
2. Know your real customers. Seeing how your competition has made the market jump on its head or how it’s driven consumers to shell out big bucks just to buy its products or support its services is a big lesson in how to reach the people that matter to you, the people who’ll appreciate your products/services and pay money to see them grow and improve. It tells you what your real customers want, what they need, what resonates with them and what psychology works to compel them to go out there, browse over your product page and click buy.
3. Learn from the competition. Remember how brand positioning works? Entrepreneur offers a nice refresher in case you don’t. Basically, one of the main questions you ask yourself before you decide on the market stance or position of your product/service is: how is yours any different from your competition. And that means you have to know what your competition does before you can arrive at a satisfying comparison. Learning from the competition, though, means you have to take it a step further. You don’t just compare stats, campaigns, or sales. Instead, you extract what elements made your competition’s campaigns work, what made their sales climb, what made their teams perform better and faster. Essentially, you have to find out what elements made a difference—and then it’s your turn to come up with a plan that would ensure you make a bigger one.
4. Test everything. How do you build that plan though? Well, you’ll need to do a lot of testing. Test your results against every factor until you identify what elements will sink your ship and which ones will help you win.
In Conclusion
There are so many more reasons why competition analysis should be part of your strategy. Give it a shot today and watch the insights you gain turn your business around.
