Small Business Design Resources

Sizing Up Your Competition

Most small businesses have competitors in their area or on the web. It is your job as the small business owner to check these businesses out to see what they’re doing right or wrong…then apply their strong points to your own business. Let’s talk about how to locate your competitors.

Use Google Places to find the competition in your location. Take a look at their website and if you can, try to make an “appointment” with them or check out their product if they have a store. You want to absorb the techniques they’re using if it makes them successful. What type of advertising campaign are they running? Can your small business design profit from borrowing a few of these ideas and applying them to your company? If your products are similar, find the differences and see if you need to make changes. Are they offering lower prices or even extras along with the product? How about their service? If it’s service competitors, consider using them and see how they go about it. How did they treat you (the customer) and how well did they do the job?

You may find out that businesses similar to yours may be doing things differently. This can be good or bad, so don’t run out and try all these different techniques all at once. If you know that a company is doing better than you, investigate and find one thing to apply to your business. If they’re taking out an ad in the newspaper and you’re not, maybe you are underestimating how much business you can get from local ad placements.

One thing to remember when you’re trying to improve your small business is the SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Whenever you’re checking out a competitor, just ask yourself the following questions:
• What advantages does your business have?
• What can your small business improve on?
• What opportunities are up and coming in your market?
• Are changes in technology going to hurt your business?

When you answer a simple SWOT analysis, you’ll most likely uncover things about your business that you can make changes on. Once again, don’t make a bunch of changes at once. When you see something that is working well for a competitor, give it a try. When you do too many things at once, when things don’t work out it’s harder to backtrack. While trying out techniques, keep in mind that you do want to have an advantage over your competition and that is to be unique. So take the good ideas from other companies and make them your own! Offer complimentary services the other businesses don’t offer. At the end of the day you want your small business to stand out, not blend in!

5 Tips on How to Stand Out Among the Competition

Every business small or large has competitors and yours no doubt has them. Read my 5 tips on How to Stand Out Among the Competition in my post on The Entrepreneur Connection.

Keeping An Eye on the Competition

In order to keep your small business practices up-to-date, it’s important to keep an eye on the competition. You’ll learn what the latest trends are, find out what’s working and what’s not, and remain responsive to what your customers want and expect from businesses like yours. Fortunately, there are several easy ways to learn about your competitors.

It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s important to learn as much as you can about how your visitors browse your website. If most of your visitors leave before making a purchase, you can bet that there are competing sites that they find easier to use. ClickTale is a great tool that lets you see exactly how visitors use your site, so you can pinpoint what is working and what is not. Looking at visitor browsing patterns will show you what visitors want and expect to see on your site–not only will this help you make changes to retain your visitors, it will also provide important clues about what competitors’ websites offer.

Analyzing your website’s statistics and the behavior of your visitors is an essential part of staying competitive, but what about the people who aren’t visiting your site? Some of your potential customers are visiting competing sites instead, and services like Compete.com can help you discover why. Compete offers access to multiple ways to analyze your competition. You can learn what keywords your competitors are optimizing for, see their site traffic history and other competitive analytics, compare your search marketing performance, and learn which sites on the Internet excel in ways you’re trying to emulate.

You should also take advantage of services like Google Alerts, which will deliver the latest news on your competitors straight to your email inbox. Set up an alert for any topic you wish to monitor–like the name of your competitor’s business, product, or targeted keywords–and keep up-to-date on the latest Internet buzz.

Checking out your competitors’ social media presence is another way to learn about them and how they’re using this newer marketing tool. Look to see if your competitors have Facebook or Twitter profiles and what they’re doing with them. If they have a lot of followers and good interaction with them, that’s a sign that they’ve found an effective way to attract your target audience. Also try searching for their website’s URL on bookmarking sites like delicious.com and Digg.com–you can find out who’s bookmarking and recommending your competitors sites and what tags they are using to identify them.