Competition is a staple in the business world and it is certainly a given when it comes to Internet marketing. Instead of ignoring your competition, though, recognize that you can learn valuable lessons from them and make a point to check out as much of your competition as possible.
Discover what Your Competition has to Offer
When you find out what your competition has to offer their customers, you can use this information to make sure you are offering more. For example, if you and your competition are selling similar products, what color choices does your competition offer? What is the price difference between what your competition is selling their products for and what your prices are? What about shipping? In order to bring in new business and retain much of your customer base, you will need to stay competitive. You may gain some fiercely loyal customers by offering exceptional customer service or by going the extra mile but by and large you will need to stay competitive in terms of price and quality.
Discover what Your Competition Doesn’t Offer
Finding out what your competition doesn’t offer is just as important as finding out what they do offer. If they have limited varieties of a particular item, perhaps you could offer more. If they don’t ship internationally, perhaps you could ship internationally and corner that market. Offering something the competition doesn’t is a strategic marketing technique that savvy Internet marketers use to gain new customers and maintain their customer base.
Check out Competition Websites
Study competition websites and measure them against yours. Are they attractively designed and user friendly? Do they offer fresh and useful content that is easy to find? What does your competition have that you don’t? What do you have that your competition doesn’t? By closely studying your competition, you will be better equipped to improve upon your website and customer offerings.
Don’t Badmouth the Competition
Never badmouth your competition, either to customers or other Internet marketers no matter how ineffective you think they are. Your reputation is everything in this business and you don’t want to be known for badmouthing the competition. Remember, word of mouth travels faster on the Internet and if you have something negative to say about the competition, not only will it be repeated, but it will be traced right back to you.
You can learn a lot from your competition if you will take the time and effort to see what they are up to every now and then. You may learn ways you can improve your website and you may learn more about your customers by discovering what they want and what they don’t want when you visit competition websites. Competition is a good thing. It makes better Internet marketers of us when we have to work hard to shine above the rest.
The process of methodically obtaining, recording and then analyzing the data or information about prospective customers, business competitors plus the existing market trend is called Market Research. It is precisely used to design and create an effective and efficient business plan, to project and launch new products or services into the market, to position and fine tune current services or products, or to expand and increase the reach of the existing product or service. Market research sometimes is used to estimate what parts of the population are interested and are most likely to purchase a product or service, after analyzing and studying many variables including gender, age, income level and location.
Market research is almost always either primary or is secondary depending upon the business need. The Primary market research involves an exhaustive testing of variables like focus groups. The activities like surveys, field tests, interviews tailored specifically to that product are conducted to study the product positioning whereas in secondary research, indirect information gleaned from various sources that appears to be relevant to the new or the existing product is used to estimate the product positioning. Some advantages of the secondary research as evident from its generalized methodology as compared to the customized one of the primary research lies in the fact that it is primarily easily accessible and cheap. The obvious disadvantage of a secondary research is that it is often not specific to a product and the research and the data collected is often biased and is difficult to validate.
Market research aims to answer the following questions:
What are the existing market trends? Which way is the market going? Who are the other parties involved with similar products?
What are the views of consumers about products in the marketplace?
What are the prime needs of the market? What are the new business opportunities? How successful are the existing products in meeting the needs of the consumers?
Using Market research companies can collect information regarding new products, existing products and new business opportunities learn how well new items will be received by the consumers. It can also help businesses to learn how the public responds to a similar product before actually launching the product or service. In this way, business can align their product and service lines with the wants and needs of potential consumers. They can halt production of products that are not popular amongst consumers and improve a product that the public shows little interest in, or lower the price as necessary based on market research information.
This website uses cookies that are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the privacy policy. By accepting this OR scrolling this page OR continuing to browse, you agree to our Privacy Policy