4 Things You’ll Want to Learn from Your Competition
Competition is a Nasty Word
Only if You Fear It
Do you also hear people talk about competition as if it were a stalker or a leech-ridden swamp?
This is really confusing because, in reality, it’s good for all of us to have choices!
Not only that, if you didn’t have competition, it may just mean that you don’t have a big enough market.
And just think, your true competitors most likely share the same values and have similar goals. Since we’re all in this together, wouldn’t it be cooler to consider our competition as an opportunity to work together to make an even greater impact in this world?
So please, don’t worry so much about your competition. It’s natural and healthy and something you actually want to keep you on your toes, help you move forward and to learn from.
What can you learn from your competition? A great deal!
Short Summary
Talk about competition
What You’ll Want to Learn from Your Competition
#1: How to Position Yourself
#2: How to Communicate
#3: How to Develop Your Products & Services
#4: How to Choose your Keywords
#1: How to Position Yourself
In my eBook: Ethical Brand Marketing | How to Rock Your Revenue and Make More of an Impact in Your Industry, you’ll learn how a strong positioning strategy will determine your sustainable success. If your customers view your company the way you want to be viewed, that’s wonderful. If not, you may want to take measures to reposition yourself.
Learning about your competition’s position will give you insight on how to differentiate yourself.
You can do this by taking a close look at your competition. How are they positioned? What are the adjectives you would use to describe them? Are there some words you want your customers to use when they think of your brand?
What niche is your competition serving? Do you want to remain in direct competition by serving the same exact niche or would you like to pick a slightly – or even completely different – niche.
Here’s How
Let’s say your main competitor is described as ‘trendy’ and even use that adjective in their messaging. You, however, know good design when you see it and yes, your stuff is trendy too, but to be honest, you want a long-term sustainable customer, a loyal raving fan, not someone who skips around from one place to the next hunting down the latest trend. Instead, you may want to be viewed as ‘timeless’ and ‘stylish’ and tell stories about the amount of time your customers can spend with your products because they are high quality, long-lasting and always in style.
Competition battles have no place in this ethical space, so don’t worry about your competition. Instead, embrace it and learn from it.
#2: How to Communicate
Communication is so important in connecting with your customers and turning them into raving fans. Conscious consumers who really engage with you do it because they resonate with what you’re saying and how you’re communicating. Can you learn from your competition by looking at their communication? Absolutely.
Here’s How
Not only should you pay attention to how your customers speak and what words they use, pay attention to how your competition plays with their words and how their customers react to them.
You could also do this with other industries as well to get fresh ideas of how to amp up your messaging. You can get real creative, just as long as it fits your style, brand and target market.
Fair Warning: Always remember, being clear is more important than being clever. For example, if you use a play on words, but it’s not 100% clear what you mean, then don’t use that play on words. It’s better to use a ‘normal’ word than a metaphor that hardly anyone will understand.
Don’t worry so much about your competition! It’s natural, healthy and keeps you on your toes. Embrace it and learn from it.
#3: How to Develop Your Products & Services
You know what’s great about social media? You get to step inside people’s head and know exactly how they’re feeling and how you can help them. All you need to do is just read what they’re writing on social media.
Here’s How
Take some time and visit your competitor’s social channels. Read their reviews and browse the comments on their posts. You may read some agitated responses. Is someone complaining about their customer service, the delivery delay or anything else? Can you change something in your business to improve your service?
Is someone super happy? Read your competitor’s testimonials to find out what their customers value and concentrate on that in your own business.
#4: How to Choose your Keywords
Checking out what keywords your competition is ranking for will help you pick your own keywords. You may or may not want to rank for the same words, depending on your competition’s status. If they have a significantly higher domain and page authority than you for a particular keyword, it will be wiser to choose a different keyword or keyword phrase to give you a better chance at getting on page 1.
Here’s How
Mastering SEO is a science within itself. We follow the strategy of ‘Write for people, optimize for machines’. Meaning, we write about topics you are interested in reading about and formulate it – hopefully anyway – in a way that you enjoy and resonate with.
To be able to get more traffic on our website, we use tools such as SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner and Google Analytics to choose the right keywords that will give us a push, but not put us against a much bigger competitor. For each page, we have an assigned keyword that we add to the title, meta description and a few times within the text.
Want to talk about your competition?
What have you been able to learn from your competition? Please comment below and let’s talk !
Rock On,
Photo credit: CloudVisual on Pixabay.
