Five Ways Your Competitor Is Using Instant Messaging Options to Improve Their Customer Success

Five Ways Your Competitor Is Using Instant Messaging Options to Improve Their Customer Success
January 4, 2021| Razvan

(header image: People vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com)

If there is anything that’s become apparent in 2020, it’s the fact that customers are demanding more in terms of ease of purchase, speed of delivery, and personalized communication. Businesses (including your competitors) that take advantage of this knowledge by positioning themselves appropriately to cater to these needs, will keep their cash flow steady and customer success high.

What contributes to customer success?

To understand how to achieve good customer success, it’s imperative to know the factors that contribute to it. They are as follows:

  • Good customer service
  • Good communication channels
  • Speedy delivery or service times
  • Good brand reputation
  • Continued support after product purchase

Communication is the thread that holds all these together. For these factors to work, communication must be timely, specific, efficient, and accurate, and good communication is aided by the right communication tools. In this article, we will focus on instant messaging as a veritable means of communication, with examples of how your competition is using it—especially in a time when most people want communication that is timely and responsive.

Monthly instant messaging usage worldwide via Statista

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Why you should NOT ignore your competitors

October 14, 2019| Roxana Irimia

To ignore or not to ignore your competitors?

That’s the big question that can change the whole game, especially in business. Investigating what your competitors are doing or not, figuring out what they plan, what will be their next move, and analyzing their strategies could give you valuable insights to use for your good.

Of course, researching behind competitors’ moves can be a struggle and a waste of time. Watching all your competitors’ channels can take hours, plus there are tons of different things to look at (Website, Social Media channels, Emails, Keywords, Reviews and more) and you might think that it’s quite impossible to gather all this data in a single place, right?

Don’t worry, monitoring tools and software can make things easier for you, so you’ll be able to track automatically all your competitors’ marketing activities with very little time investment and almost no effort. That means you have no excuse to start monitoring your competitors you need to know who you’re up against, right?

How to identify your competitors?

Don’t want to make it sound like a cliché, but let’s make it clear from the beginning: you DO have competitors, and competition exists in every single field and domain, no matter the business. The question is: when it comes to your brand, who are you considering?

Correctly identifying your competitors can be a challenge, especially if you did not discover them from an initial phase of your business. Still, it shouldn’t be a hard task to spot them if you follow simple steps.

Defining your relevant competitors, it’s the first objective in your competitive research. To identity competitions that count for your business, you should start by understanding which types of competitors you should include in your investigation:

What are the two main types of competitors?

  1. Direct competitors

A direct competitor is the one who offers the same product/service as you do, the one that suddenly pops up in our mind when you think of “competition.” Also, it’s the one that comes in your customers mind before choosing to make a purchase or converting to your service, the one that is targeting the same audience as you, with the same goal of profit – so ignoring him might not be a good idea, if you care about your business’ future. 🙂

Burger King and McDonald’s are direct competitors. Intercom and Zendesk are direct competitors, and so are Nike and Adidas – brands offering similar services and products.

To identify your direct competitors, you have to take a closer look around your business environment and to stay relevant by knowing your business-level and your position on the market.

To stay relevant and pick those competitors that count, you’ll need to have a clear overview of your business, products/services, and marketing strategies so that you can compare it with your direct competitors. Understanding “who you are?” will help you to discover “who your competitors are?”.

       2. Indirect competitors

Call “Indirect competitors” those businesses that don’t necessarily sell similar or related products, but target the same group of customers as you do, to satisfy the same need.  Nearly every business has indirect competition, so try to keep your eyes on those too, even if your focus is mainly on your direct ones.

Your indirect competitors may not have similar products or services, but they are direct competition with your business digitally. They may focus on the same marketing strategies, deliver the same type of content as you, competing for the same keywords, and wanting the same things as you, which is your customer’s/user’s attention.

Domino’s Pizza is an indirect competitor for Burger King – a hamburger fast food restaurant and a fast-food pizza restaurant – two companies that make slightly different products but target the same customers (hungry people).

Your competitors’ actions, whether direct or indirect competitors, can affect your business’ success, so it’s essential to take into account both types of competition when planning your business or your marketing strategies.

Moving forward, let’s see some ways to start our competitive research and how to start searching for competitors:

How do I find my key competitors?

  1. Market Research

Take a closer look at your industry and product’s market, and analyze which other brands are offering a service or product that would compete with yours. I advise you to can start your competitive research at a local level, and once you’ve discovered which key competitors are around you, search for your national competition.

Also, take into account that there may be a business in another country that offers the most similar product to your own. Even if you don’t feel “attacked” by their presence, it’s better to know that they exist so that you can be aware of their marketing efforts.

Search on Google for your product/service, add your location to be more precise, and write down the results.

If you decide to use a competitive intelligence tool, on Competitors App you can automatically find your competitors’ based on your brands’ keywords. Once you add your details, domain, and keywords, you’ll receive a list of competitors.

  1. Ask Customers Feedback

Your customers can help you to get straight to your key competitors. Once they’re on your side (they decided to subscribe, or they’ve bought your product), you can ask them which other brands/products they were evaluating before taking the final decision.

Leads can also bring you valuable information regarding your direct competitors. During the sale process, ask your potential user/customer which options they are taking into account or send a survey to find out more information. Try to understand customers’ logic behind choosing your product or service in one situation and competitors’ in another.

  1. Check Social Media groups, Community Forums

Nowadays, people tend to seek out advice and recommendations online, on Social Media groups, community forums like Reddit, Quora, Slack groups. Join relevant groups for your industry and keep an eye on the conversations to find out your potential customers preferences, what are people’s options when it comes to choosing a service/product as yours and what influences on their buying decisions. Gather insights and take action!

After you have identified your competitors and made a list of your key competitors (the ones that are relevant for your business), you can start creating a competitor analysis plan or better say  … start digging into your competitors’ businesses. You must keep an eye on their products, marketing strategies, sales efforts to stay competitive in your industry.

As mentioned before, you can start monitoring your competitors’ activities using a monitoring tool, so you’ll automatically gather competitors’ data and get notified each time when a competitor makes a move. Here’s a detailed article on how to conduct a competitive analysis effectively.

Why is it important to know who your competitors are?

Researching your competition its, for sure, an excellent idea, especially when it’s done automatically, with a monitoring tool. You’ll get valuable details on your competitors’ actions without wasting time and resources. Still, you’re asking yourself if investigating your competitors should be a priority for you?

Here are the top four reasons why you should identify your competitors and start tracking their moves:

Why should you NOT ignore your competitors?

  1. Competitors help you to develop your content strategies

Monitoring your competitors’ content will give you insights on what you should post on your channels. Track your competitors’ Social Media channels; see what type of content are they sharing, how often, and what feedback are they receiving from the audience.

By analyzing how the public interacts with your competition’s content and marketing efforts, you can understand what you can do differently to improve your content strategies.

      2. Competitors help you to spot new market opportunities

Identifying your competitors can open your eyes to new consumer demands and preferences. Also, finding out what people think about your competitors’ products or services will give you valuable hints on what you can improve to overcome your competition and to attract the attention of unsatisfied clients/users.

      3. Competitors help you to deliver an outstanding customer experience

See how competitors are treating their customers/users and pay attention to each detail that can make a difference between your business and your competitors’ brands.

Are your competitors sending promotions and offers frequently? Are they friendly with their users? What’s the users’ experience on competitors’ websites?

      4. Competitors help you to differentiate and develop your brand

By identifying your competitors, tracking, and analyzing their moves, you can grow your business and strategically position your products & services in the marketplace. The simple fact of being aware of what your competitors are doing and what strategies are crafting can give you clear directions on how to differentiate yourself from them and how to transform your business into a profitable one.

Identifying your competitors and investigating their actions, what they do/don’t, and how they build their brands can help you to make your services and strategies stand out. Gathering competitors’ data will help you to improve your business performance and to position your service/product on the market strategically. So the questions are: To ignore or not to ignore your competitors? I’m sure by now you have an answer. 🙂

Stay up to date with your competitors’ marketing activities and gather valuable insights on how you can improve your strategies. Sign in for a free trial period on Competitors App and start tracking your competitors’ moves.

5 Unique ways to recapture competitor’s customers

August 27, 2019| Ugljesa Djuric

Have you ever thought about how, no matter how hard you tried to make a better product or service, people are still not able to find out about you?

The market is overwhelming, and competition is enormous.

You spend your budget on commercials, but conversions are still not happening.

And, while you’re trying your best, everyone is talking about your competitors.

Fortunately, there are ways to make your business a “well-oiled machine” for recapturing competitor’s customers.

If you think that such a thing is not a ”fair fight”, do not worry. With these five solutions we have chosen for you, the competition with competitors remains within fair-play.

Continue reading this article, and it will become much clearer to you how to do that.

 

1. Create a high-converting landing page with competitor comparisons

 

Creating a landing page on which you can compare your brand with a competitive one might bring you much higher conversions.

But, you should be completely objective and insist on fair-play.

Before you begin making a landing page, keep in mind the following:

  1. Never try to add negative attributes to competitors that do not exist, just because you want to stand out in comparison to them.
  2. Don’t promise what you can’t do, because, after that, disappointment by the visitors of your landing page arises. If their expectations are not fulfilled, they are doubtful to return to your website.

After understanding these items, start creating the page.

Find the competitor that is more popular than you, but the one from whom, in reality, you can offer a better solution for your target group.

It’s up to you to take advantage of their popularity to get more customers and, what’s more important, your competitors’ customers.

Why is it essential that the competitor you compare yourself with has to be more popular than you or at least someone who’s your equal?

Because when people search, e.g., Trello, there will also be both those who have mentioned him on their websites and his alternatives.

In this way, someone who is not completely satisfied with the service that Trello provides will be able to choose one of its competitors who offer him with better user experience. Someone who suits his needs more.

To make it clearer, look at the following example that monday.com did with Trello.

First of all, as soon as you enter their landing page, you will see what the primary purpose of the monday.com tool is.

They then point out why they are a better option than Trello:

Then their features come to the visitor’s attention, and only at the end, when the visitor goes through all this information, the key proof is waiting for him.

It’s a comparison report that shows them black-and-white results, that is, why they should choose them and not their biggest competitor.

When you create your landing page to recapture competitor’s customers, you do not have to follow this example blindly.

Use it as an idea in which order should the information go when you decide to write your comparison. 

First, introduce people into your mission and purpose, and then point out key differences and evidence.

In the end, do not forget to set up a CTA button so people could be able to try out your product or service as soon as possible if they wanted to.

2. Write a catchy and objective article

 

Competitive analysis is another great way to recapture competitors’ customers.

The catchy and objective article will attract the attention of your competitors.

If they are not satisfied with a particular segment of your service or want to try something else, this is an excellent opportunity for you to introduce yourself to them.

Choose a few competitors and compare their offers and features with yours.

Don’t forget to write a realistic comparison. Do not present your competitors in a negative way only. 

Look how lemtalk wrote an article about Intercom alternatives. 

  • lemtalk
  • HelpCrunch
  • Drift
  • Zendesk

Lemtalk gave feedbacks about each of the four mentioned alternatives, including themselves. 

Every feedback is objective and explains why they wrote this comparison in the first place. 

Intercom was not the best solution for them, and the market has a lot of simpler and more affordable tools that are great for small team communication.

They compare each alternative with Intercom individually, tell you what the differences are, and what their experience with each of them is like.

Each tool is rated according to the following criteria:

  • Easy to setup
  • Easy to use
  • Customization options
  • Value for money
  • Customer Support effectiveness
  • Features Score

These metrics help the target group to summarize what lemtalk team thinks about other platforms.

Keep in mind that you should be careful when writing articles about competitive analysis. 

If your target audience has already used one of the tools, it will know whether you are objective or you want to make money on your competition’s account. So make sure you describe the real picture and your real experience. 

Also, do not try to make your offer seem much better than it is, because people will notice everything. 

Once they become disappointed in you, you will lose their trust and help your competition out.

So keep it real.

Another good example to look at is Userpilot’s article about 5 Appcues alternatives.

 

3. Outreach to the competitor’s customers

 

First of all, you will have to find the competitor’s customers.

Do your research (if you have not already) and find out on which sales channels are your competitors promoting themselves.

For example, in the case of social networks, check who their followers are. You can also look for them in the comment or review section.

Many companies now also build online communities through Facebook groups that are often closed and serve to maintain communication between the brand and its users. Join them, and you will acquire one more option to see who their followers are.

But you should know that these are often the most trusted buyers, so do not get too promotional once you get in touch with them.

Do this with all the promotional channels of your competition.

After you find their customers, make the first step.

Be polite and professional. Do not be too intrusive.

You can contact them directly through the platform on which you have found them, or you can send them an email if you’re able to reach them.

Emails are the best option because building quality mailing lists today can be of crucial importance to your business.

When you contact them, try to offer some deal (for example, a free demo or a free trial of your product) or explain why your product is better than the competitors.

Provide them with all the necessary information if you want to get them interested and convert them into your buyers.


4. Point out competitor’s weak spots

 

We can learn a lot in business only from doing research.

And the better and more thorough the research, the more information you will get that can be of great importance to you to improve your business and increase the number of customers.

Feedbacks, reviews, and comments can tell you a lot (but really, A LOT) about your competitors.

People like to express their opinions, whether they be positive or negative.

And especially, they like to share their experiences.

This is a gold mine of information when it comes to recapturing competitor’s customers.

Reviews on websites such as Capterra are a great source of opinion, interest, needs, and desires of your target group.

When you read what your target group wrote about your competition, you will find out what are they doing well and what not so.

It’s more than an excellent guideline to find out how to make a better product than theirs.

You will be able to offer potential customers exactly what they want and what they need.

For example, when you see a review where someone has complained about a particular matter concerning your competition or has given a proposal for improvement, it’s the right time to adopt that and provide them with your offer.

Then contact them, and let them know that maybe you can be the one to give them what they need and what they expect to resolve their pain points.

You can even have the interviews with competitors’ customers about their needs and problems, or offer them to fill out a survey.

Shortcomings of your competition can quickly become your strengths.

 

5. Monitor competitor’s online campaigns

 

Creating an online campaign requires a lot of time. Usually, it takes several months. But also, while you’re creating it, you can see errors and decide to correct them right away, which means this process can take even longer.

To create effective campaigns, monitoring your competitor’s online campaigns should be on your priority list.

By observing their campaigns and the changes that they are implementing, you will see what they have been doing wrong but also what your frequent target audience best responds to.

You should monitor the following:

  • emails and newsletters
  • social media
  • SEO
  • website changes
  • keyword rankings
  • blogs
  • ads

If you analyze their strategies and moves, you will find out what are the best practices in your niche.

When you implement them, the results will include recaptured competitors’ customers and an extended customer base!

Remember that when it comes to the world of business, everything should be automated.

To automate the process of monitoring, your competition can use tools such as Competitors.app.

You can choose features and who you want to monitor.

It’s effortless to use, and it will collect all of your important data in weekly reports.

 


The bottom line

 

As you can see, most of these methods for recapturing competitor’s customers are quite simple.

But, if you want to be successful, you need to make some effort and invest time in it.

Monitoring competitors’ online campaigns indeed take most of the time, as there are many items to be followed.

And the damage caused by wasted time is irreparable.

The amount of time required increases significantly when we understand how much the competitors need to be explored.

However, if you want to save a considerable amount of your time and focus on other important tasks, you can leave this part of the job in the care of the Competitors.app.

You will get your reports ready for analysis, and after that, you only have to apply what the app shows as the best results.

It has different packages so you can choose which one is most suitable for you.

Now, with all this information, we think that you are ready to obtain a bigger base of potential customers.

It’s time to start using it.

Good luck!

 

How to evaluate, analyse and beat the business competition

July 3, 2019| Ugljesa Djuric

Competition is everywhere, and if you’re not aware of it, you should. Competitors are our best friends and enemies at the same time. Knowing how to beat the business competition is of crucial importance.

You probably heard a lot of confident people saying: “We don’t have important competitors!”. That isn’t true.

Although confidence is an essential factor when it comes to business, the competition, whether we wanted to admit it or not, really exists. We must keep up with what is happening in their business plan.

Whatever you do, there is an excellent chance that someone else does it also.

The focus should always be on your business, that’s the fact.

Nevertheless, it’s also important to be aware that the existence of business competition is inevitable.

If you ignore the performance of your competitors, you are likely working against yourself. Not paying attention to them, you can create a huge disadvantage for your business.

If your goal is to prevent a regression in your business, the solution is to make a comprehensive competitive analysis.

Competitive analysis or competitive research is a field centered on strategic research that specializes in the collection and review of information about rival firms. It’s an essential tactic for finding out what your competitors are doing and what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being.

Competitive analysis will help you to:

  1. evaluate
  2. analyze 
  3. beat your business competition!

Why is it important to monitor business competition?

Observing the steps that your competitors are taking can bring you great benefits.

Even before, when online businesses were not so developed, one of the most important segments when it comes to business plans was market research, which necessarily includes business competition.

 

You must know where your position is in comparison to the competitors. Not only when it comes to the results in Internet browsers, but also what are they exactly doing, what are they excellent at, and what are they doing wrong.

You can always use their mistakes or omissions as a benefit for you and take the win regarding the business competition.

Let’s give you one example to make it clearer.

Finding out which keywords are used by your competitors, it can help you realize which are the low competition keywords that people search, which keywords is competition not using, and which keywords are relevant to your field.

Jackpot!

Now you know which keywords you need to focus on and to, in that way, get more visits to your blog, website, or online store.

Given that the business competition is a complex topic, we will take you to step by step through this article and explain how the research of your competitors should look like.

 

1. Who are your competitors?

 

Of course, first, you need to find out who represents your business competition.

Make a list of your competitors.

Probably, the main competitors in your niche will pop into your mind first. If that’s not the case, do your research using Google, which will surely be an excellent source for you.

 

You do not have to take absolutely every brand or company into consideration, but, for example, start with the ten major and the most successful competitors.

You will easily be able to expand this list later on.

For now, it’s important to make the base – the starting point from where your business competition analysis will start.

 

2. Different sales channels, content and the tone of communication

 

In addition to websites that are the basis of online presence, social networks play a huge role in brand awareness.

It’s time for you to find out which sales channels your business competition is available on.

 

Today, there are many social networks that you can use for your promotion. Some of the most popular ones are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Get started and check which channels are your competitors promoting themselves on.

Tip: Do not follow each step of your business competition, blindly. If you are dealing with a job that is not suitable to be advertised on, for example, Instagram, and one of your competitors is doing just that, do not follow in their footsteps. If you are not sure which channels you need to focus on, look at what the majority is doing and try their method or consult with an expert who will be able to lead you to the right path.

Once you’ve learned where others from your niche are promoting their business, it’s time to pay attention to the type of content that they post on different channels.

Some of the content types are:

  • visual content: photos and videos
  • blog posts
  • eBooks
  • webinars
  • newsletters
  • podcasts
  • FAQs
  • demos

Identifying the type of content that your business competition publishes can help you to plan your strategy on different channels.

The important items to pay attention to when it comes to the content are quality and regularity.

When you consider the tone of communication, look at the way your competitors communicate with their users.

Be sure to pay attention if they have a section with the left reviews.

In addition to seeing how they respond to their visitors, you also have insights into feedbacks. See what their users are praising and what they would rather change.

Take advantage of the competitors’ feedbacks to change in your business, everything that they weren’t doing right, and implement what is highlighted as their benefit. You are a few steps closer to beat the business competition!

 

3. Customer support


Your users want to know that they are important to you.

So take good care of them!

If you want to find out where your customer support stands in comparison to a competitive one, get down to the research.

Do not just watch what your business competition is doing; get in touch with them.

Most websites offer the option of live chat where you can start communicating with chatbots or with real people and ask them whatever you want.

 

Of course, if we talk about social networks, do not use the company profile because there is an excellent chance that you will be left without answers.

This can also be a good opportunity to find out some things you couldn’t possibly understand by merely browsing the site.

For example, you’ve noticed that one of your competitors has a particular feature, but you do not know which principle that feature works by. Send a simple message (via live chat, email, inbox) and kindly request more information about the function and the work method of this feature.

 

Thanks to this, you will find out:

  1. information about the feature (or any segment that interests you)
  2. how much time do they need to respond to your message
  3. what is their style of addressing visitors

Do this with different competitors so you could conclude.

One more time: do not blindly follow everything that your business competition does. If they need a lot of time to respond to your message, say 24h, that is certainly not a good way to keep your potential customers interested. Try to be as up-to-date as possible and to provide information in real-time.

 

4. Find out your USP!

 

The USP is an abbreviation for a unique selling proposition.

The most simple definition of the USP is The factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason one product or service is different from or better than that of the competition.

The USP is extremely important for you to stand out in comparison to the other competitors.

This should be your main characteristic that will be connected by others to your product or service, and which will make it easier for them to remember you by.

 

 

Find out what stands out as the main advantage of your business competition. Let this information serve you as an inspiration for your USP if you do not already have a clear idea of what is separating you from the others.

Let’s see some great examples of USPs:

M&Ms: The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

M&M’s USP is imaginative and easy to remember. Be honest, do you know anyone who has not heard of M&Ms?

Domino’s Pizza: You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.

There is a pizzeria on every corner, and therefore, the business competition is enormous. But Domino’s Pizza has come up with the simplest USP that works. Why is that? When you think of eating a pizza, you want it fresh, hot and to arrive as soon as possible. That’s precisely what Domino’s Pizza offers, and because of that, the very next association on your mind will be related to this pizzeria in particular.

Make sure to present your USP to the audience in an ethical and/or creative way, and let this become one of the main strengths in beating the business competition.

Tip: When developing your USP, you must keep in mind your ideal buyer persona. The USP should attract your target audience, so pay attention to the following:

  • what motivates them
  • what are their interests
  • what are their wishes
  • gender
  • age range
  • where do they live

 

5. Search engine optimization

 

We have reached the last but not the least important step when it comes to evaluating and analyzing the competition.

By knowing the search engine optimization strategies of your competitors, you can give them the final blow and finally beat the business competition!

Every brand wants to find itself in the highest position when observing the search results in Internet browsers – people focus mostly on the first page of the results.

How Impact says: 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.

It is a big deal.

Every successful SEO strategy must include business competition research.

The investigation of competitive procedures is an absolute fair-play. Besides, be sure that your business competition is already observing the steps that your company makes, so why would you then allow them to be in the lead?

Today, many tools can help you monitor your competitors’ performance, and the conclusions you make based on the results will help you to improve your SEO rankings.

Some of these tools are:

By using some of these tools, you will save yourself valuable time which you can use for some other tasks.

While monitoring your business competition, you can find out:

  • which keywords do they use
  • what types of backlinks do they post
  • what kind of content do they publish
  • how do they rank

Keywords are an essential part of a good SEO strategy. This should be your starting point when you start planning your SEO strategy, but also when you monitor the strategies of your competitors.

  1. By analyzing the keywords used by your business competition, you can see which are the words that are best quoted in your niche.
  2. You will see which words, some that you maybe haven’t used previously, have a high number of searches and therefore you will get new suggestions.
  3. You will be able to see which are low competition keywords that your competition does not use, and you can target them.

A backlink is a great option to provide yourself with more significant traffic. You will find it easier to get a higher ranking by using backlinks on your website or blog. Your business competition is probably already using backlinks of the sites that might be important to you.

  1. By tracing backlinks to the websites of your competitors, you will find out which are the popular sites that can bring you more visits.
  2. You will find websites that are related to your niche that you can contact for outreach and link building more efficiently.

Content analysis will show you which type of content the people best respond to. Consequently, you will know which type of content you need to showcase on your sales channels.

All these items will help you find out the SEO metrics of your business competition.

Why is this important?

It’s important to know where you are in comparison to the competition. The results of these analyses will help you to evaluate the positions of the business competition.

You will find out what are you doing better and what are you doing worse than the others in your niche.

Learn their strengths and weaknesses.

When you get the results in front of you, you will know in which direction you need to go to improve your business and to beat the competition.

 

The bottom line 

 

If you decide to follow these steps, you will have a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of your business competition, and you will know in which direction you need to go.

If you have felt stuck a couple of times, the number of visits has dropped, the sales have stopped, or you do not know what else you could improve, this is a great way to see the real situation.

Analyzing and evaluating competitive brands will surely broaden your perspective.

Keep up with the innovations.

Most companies that fail or go bust are those that do not keep in step with the times and changes. Do not let yourself get too comfortable even when you have the most conversions.

Don’t forget to do competitive analyses regularly.

It is not enough to do the research only once. We live in a time when things change at lightning speed, and one trend gets inherited by others.

For example, you can do it four times a year.

Maintain your audience’s interest.

Follow these tips, and the progress will be unavoidable.

After gathering all this information, it’s time for your strategy.

Be ready to beat the business competition!

 

5 Best ways to create a killer competitive advantage

October 2, 2018| Ugljesa Djuric

All of us have something in common – we have competitors. And sometimes, how will we beat them and create a competitive advantage is our biggest concern.

I talked with several professionals and experienced CEOs and CMOs in their industries. All of them shared their valuable insights about how they created competitive advantage and scaled their business among a bunch of competitors.

Together with our experience, this article represents an ultimate guide on competitive advantages – what are them and how to use them to beat your competition.

First things first – How to do your competitive research.

Before you even think about creating competitive advantages, it’s time to do your competitive research.

Competitive research is a must, and there are various ways how to do it efficiently. Because this isn’t the main topic of this article, we will cover the most critical steps.

No matter whether you are starting a new business or already have established one, every second day, some new direct or indirect competitor is born. So competitive research is a renewable process, and you should do it at least every second week.

The best way to find new competitors is to try with keywords research.

Look for the following information about your competitors:

  • Founders – It’s essential to know who your competitor decision-makers are
  • Social Media Networks URLs – How are they, for God’s sake, communicating with their customers? What content are they creating?
  • Distribution channels – How are they finding new customers?
  • Core Value propositions – What are the main differences between them and you? What are their Core Value propositions, and how my product/service can be more useful to my customers than theirs?
  • The number of employees, headquarters, stage, and the size of the investment – This helps you to understand how big their resources are, and you can imagine what are they capable of.
  • Other information (Number of customers, website visitors, etc.)

Here’s the list of websites which can be quite useful for you, and it can save you a lot of time:

For this, you can use our Ultimate Competitor Analysis spreadsheet to be sure that you didn’t miss any information about your competitors (By the way, it will save you a lot of time and make organization easy).

Our friend, Ognjen Vuković from Reportz, explained in a few sentences why competitive analysis is so vital for your business:

“Knowing your competition is good. Knowing what works for them is even better, and knowing how to do that better than them is the ultimate goal you should set regarding your competitor analysis.

In Reportz, we use multiple tools and techniques to monitor and out-perform particular clients’ competitor activities such as social behavior, paid efforts metrics, and SEO/SEM stats.

Every good strategy has to have competitor analysis at its core, since having in-depth info about what works best for your competitors can give you an overview of what to focus on and how to outperform them to make a success.”

What is a competitive advantage?

Without good competitive advantages, we will never get our market share. So it’s really important to understand what competitive advantage is.

Let’s understand it with the example:

We have two companies specialized in “connecting people in the world.”

The first company is older, and it already has some relatively big customer base. The second one is new but promising and more attractive.

The second company had more features, and it was entertaining, while the first company wasn’t.

They empowered people to connect and to make relationships.

Later, the second company got funding and created a monopoly over the market.

You probably know about which companies I’m talking about – they are MySpace and Facebook.

So, a competitive advantage is anything which can help you to outmaneuver your competition. It can be price, unique value proposition, better product, better communication, or better marketing and sales.

In the case of Facebook – It was a better story. A story that empowered people to take action.

Storytelling – the art of making your customers special

Today people do not follow brands and logos. They are the following stories.

They identify themselves with the stories of other brands.

Coca-Cola is a great example: Its competitive advantage is based on empowering people to take actions with various marketing campaigns that are alluding to happiness, love, relationship, and friendship.

Nike is another great example of perfect storytelling (Especially with their campaign with Colin Kaepernick).

Beverley Theresa, CEO of Social Media with Beverley Theresa, told us her story and how she created her competitive advantage with content and personal branding:

“Content is key. I’m consistently creating and offering free valuable learning for people looking to set up their social media. It helped me to grow my business immensely.

Also, my background helped me to build credibility. So people told me that my attitude and personal brand gives me a competitive advantage. They are usually contacting me and saying that they want to work with me because of the way how I’m communicating.”

Don’t be afraid to tell stories. Explain to your potential customers what drives you and why are you doing what are you doing. What’s your idea, mission, and vision.

Research your target audience and find out what are their main problems and create engaging content with a lot of useful information and resources based on your potential customers’ problems.

But remember this – content isn’t only the blog post – it’s much more. You can engage with your potential customers in various ways:

  • Create funny videos with explanations and solutions of your potential customers’ problems
  • Create Infographics
  • Make Quizzes, How To’s, Guides, Playbooks, Workbooks, and Spreadsheets

One thing matters more than content itself – it’s distribution.

Here is some advice on how can you distribute your content very well:

  • Prepare your content in different formats – Instagram posts, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, etc.
  • Distribute your content on Guest blog posts, your blog, Quora, Medium, Reedit, etc.
  • Post in different Facebook Groups
  • Ask Influencers for sharing
  • Motivate your customers to share it by giving some offer or other free resources (spreadsheet for example)

Prepare your content based on your potential customers’ needs – make them feel special! 🙂

Focus on your users

Good business is based on two things:

  • Good team
  • The loyal and engaging user base

Sometimes everything which matters is creating a good relationship with your users.

Baptiste Debever from Feedier explained to us how they managed to create competitive advantages in an industry full of competition – both direct and indirect:

“Any feedback tool is a competitor of Feedier. But that’s okay. Feedback is a huge market, and the so-called surveys are just a part of it.

We want to create our crusade were focusing on the feedback, and the user is what matters the most. So gamification, experience, and rewards are what’s important to create competitive advantages in the overcrowded industry.

– Feedier is built from scratch to engage your customers. Our technology knows whether the customer is happy or not, and therefore, we can provide the right engagement to the right user. Asking 5-star reviews only to customers being at least 80% satisfied, for example.

– Feedier adapts the questions to the customer. Thanks to the first step, we know whether the customer is happy or not and why. We can, therefore, adopt the question to any customer based on that. The experience is unique!

– Feedier aims to create a relation between your team, your customers, and your products.

– Feedier makes it easy for you to share your surveys to the right customers. We will send the emails for you, write your social posts and even let you embed them right into your website.

– And finally, Feedier gamified with a complete framework and the ability to send rewards at the end of the survey.”

Anita Erker from Linkchain, shared with us their way to create competitive advantage by focusing on her users:

“Listening, listening, and listening. Value creation is a constant, ongoing art.
Each day I conduct a micro-research, which helps me to gather more in-depth details – not just about the competition, but users, the marketplace, partners,… Each segment of the audience is equally important. To keep the balance and differentiate yourself is in the middle of that matrix.”

From their practices, we can find out that building a loyal customer base and good user experiences help you to create proper competitive advantages.

Find the niche where you can make a difference

Sometimes it is not easy to compete with big companies and dinosaurs. It can be hard, with much effort and money invested in getting low results.

Sometimes, the best solution is to be specialized in one-two unique things.

The best example of this is Trello. Trello managed to create an industry monopoly over the much bigger competitor – Astana – by focusing only on one thing.

Nemanja Zivkovic from Default Design described to us how are they creating competitive advantages by delivering results and focusing on a unique niche:

“We’re focused on giving a constant value, daily, on one side. We’re present in communities everywhere where our customers are.

On the other side, our focus is on delivering results in conversions and leads.

When our customer is getting profit, then he has enough to pay us, and everybody’s happy.

On the other hand, we’re organizing the 1st online conference in the ExYu countries focused on conversions and marketing automation while creating a platform for marketing automation and pioneering website personalization.

We found a niche within marketing where we can make a difference.”

Kady Hobbins from Kaden Ave Communications is another great example of how to create competitive advantages with delivering best results:

“We’ve set ourselves apart by really drilling down and specializing in what we’re truly good at – making high-quality social media content that helps generate conversions and build brand awareness. We try not to spread ourselves thin and do things we’re just okay at, nor do we take on clients that we don’t think are the right fit. In return, we’re happier, and our clients are happier.”

Build a respected brand and community

Sometimes, building a good brand is everything you need. But this process is long and hard.

Building a good brand is easiest to do with building communities.

Communities are one of the greatest things humanity ever invented! By building a community, we can share more value and knowledge with our potential customers.

If you don’t want or don’t have time to build your community, sometimes it is enough to be an active participant in the existing one.

Ioana Budai from Apart25 shared with us their secret on creating competitive advantages by actively contributing to communities and networking events:

“We’re standing by a ‘Go the extra mile’ approach, so we aim always to offer some extra insights besides our main service lines. Apart from this, we also get involved in the community and create networking spaces both for people in our industry and the local startup environment.

In short, this is what makes us great at better grasping the needs of our clients and partners.”

Solve Big Problems

Sometimes solving problems with significant pain is everything that you need.

If your potential customers find out your product benefits, which provides them value, they will buy it. Simply as that.

Vlad Calus from Planable shared with us how they managed to create a relatively new market and solve the actual problems:

“As a team, we worked a lot in the past with brands and agencies and struggled ourselves with the issues of content, collaboration, and approvals. We started from the premise that we wanted to build a product that is essentially solving their problem from the group up. That’s what resulted in Planable becoming the most visual content collaboration platform, which is our biggest advantage.”

Creating competitive advantages isn’t easy – but it’s necessary to create a monopoly in some industries.

Constant keeping an eye on your competition helps you to create a competitive advantage and be better than them. That’s the reason why we always need to monitor their:

  • Social Media
  • SEO and PPC campaigns
  • Newsletters
  • Website changes and keywords

Competition never sleeps, that’s the reason why you shouldn’t too.

Claim your 15-day free trial of Competitors App, and be one step ahead of your competition even today!

CEOs Playbook: Ultimate guide on how to beat your competition

September 4, 2018| Ugljesa Djuric

The 13 minutes you will spend reading this will probably be the best investment you have made today! Why? Because you will learn how to compete and beat your competition, be better than them and scale your business!

A few weeks before I started writing this article, I had reached out to Gerard Compte from „FindThatLead“to make a better business relationship with him. In the first message I had written in the P.S. section, I said:

“Good Luck in slaying your mortal enemies Gerard! ;)”

When he responded, I learned a precious lesson from reading the first sentence of the message:

“There are no enemies; just good people called competitors who are helping us to understand our market and customers better. Competition is the best thing you will have in business.”

This sentence is mind-blowing!

(more…)

Competitive research. Why it’s so important and how to do it.

August 13, 2018| Ugljesa Djuric

No matter are you starting a new business, or you already have established one. Competitive research is a must! Everyone has some “mortal enemies” and “desirable customers.” In this article, you will learn:

  • How to do your Competitive research
  • How to monitor your competitors on the Web
  • How to get the desired customers
  • How to beat your competition

So, come on, my dear Sherlock, let’s do some research! (At least, you can be a real detective for a few hours! 😉 ).

Competitive Research

How to do your competitive research

Carefully planned and executed competitive research may save your business. What also matters is what to do with that data after.

My mentors and advisors once said:

“If you do not do your homework, you can hit bottom. Do it, and you can build an enduring business.”

Competitive research is a must for your business for several reasons:

  • You will find all their data which you need to start a business
  • You will skip a “trial and error” for a lot of times
  • Based on the data you find, you can monitor them, and find the holes in their strategies, which can be essential for you.

Doing competitive research is not an easy thing to do. It can sometimes be very time-consuming. But, if you plan everything carefully, you can do it in a few hours.

If you already don’t know who your competitors are, try typing 10 – 20 main keywords for your industry in Google.

In the beginning, just wrote on the piece of paper the names of your competitors.

When you have done that, now it’s time for the hell spreadsheets!

Finding the names of your competitors isn’t the only thing you should do. But it’s the beginning.

Here’s the list of data of your competitors you should find out:

  • Founders – It’s essential to know who your competitor decision-makers are
  • Social Media Networks URLs – How are they, for God’s sake, communicating with their customers? What content are they creating?
  • Distribution channels – How are they finding new customers?
  • Core Value propositions – What’s the main differences between them and me? What are their Core Value propositions, and how my product/service can be more useful to my customers than theirs?
  • The number of employees, headquarters, stage, and the size of the investment –  This helps you to understand how big their resources are, and you can imagine what are they capable of.
  • Other information (Number of customers, website visitors, etc.)

For this process, you will need about 1 – 3 hours, based on the number of your competitors.

Here’s the list of websites which can be quite useful for you, and it can save you a lot of time:

  1. LinkedIn
  2. AngelList
  3. CrunchBase
  4. SimilarWeb

What also matters in competitive research is organization! We have prepared for you a complete Ultimate Competitor Analysis Spreadsheet! 

Everything you will need, you can find in one place – in one spreadsheet!

 

Here you can download for free your ULTIMATE COMPETITOR ANALYSIS SPREADSHEET!

 

Now, when you have done your competitive research, It’s time to see what we can do with that data

Like every founder, you want to be the best on the market. You want to hold a monopoly over some products or services. But, you’re always leading battles with your competitors.

What if I say to you that you can be, almost all the time, one step ahead of your competition? Don’t you believe me?

Well, yes, you can, and I will show you how!

Monitor competitors website changes

“Hell, what?”

Yes, you can do that. There is various software that allows you to do this.

But, before we dig into every step how you can do that, let’s first explain why it’s so important.

There are a lot of use cases, but, I will mention just a two of them:

    1. Your Competitor can change his homepage call to action button from “Register here” to “Start your free trial now, no credit card required.”
    2. He can also change his meta <title> and <h1> to target a different keyword.

This information is very valuable for you because you can easily find out what’s your competitor strategy.

Competitors App is a competition monitoring tool, which allows you to monitor competitors’ website changes every single day. The best part of it – it’s all automatic. Everything you will need to do (except to insert your competitor names at the beginning), is to read the data every day. That is not more than 3 minutes per day.

monitor competitors' website changes

After you create your competitors.app account and insert your competitors, the app will automatically start to inform you about their newest website changes. Also, competitors.app will monitor them every day, and whenever some new change becomes visible, you will be informed – both in your app dashboard and in your email inbox (So, sometimes, you even don’t need to log in to your account).

Monitor competitors’ Social Media

Monitoring your competitor’s social media is very important. Reason? That’s the place where we communicate with our customers, share content, and very often – that’s the place where we find new customers.

If you carefully monitor your competitor’s social media marketing and strategies, you can be one step ahead of them. You can see what content are they publishing, so you can see and write better, exciting, and trending articles.

How are they treating their customers, how are they rewarding them, and what’s their relationship with them.

If you monitor your competitors’ Social Media Pages very well, you can see what posts performed very well, and you can inform your team to work better with previous knowledge.

Monitoring competitors’ Social Media can be very hard and time-consuming. Sometimes, you will need to waste hours and hours, manually monitoring them.

But it doesn’t need to be so boring and exhausting. Here are some examples of how you can save your time:

  • Obligate someone from your team for daily monitoring and checking your competitors’ social media channels
  • Turn on post notifications
  • Use competitors.app for tracking your competitors’ social media channels.

Here you can learn more about tracking your competitors’ social media pages with Competitors App

Grab here your free 30-day trial Competitors App account, with no credit card required!

monitor competitors social media

How to recapture your competitor customers?

Once you have found out your biggest competitors’ data, and while you are monitoring them on every single step on the web, it’s time for you to beat them!

With monitoring, you can find out what your competitors’ strategies are. You can be one step ahead of them.  

The next step is: Interview your competitors’ customers.

Reach to them through your competitor’s social media pages. You can pick 15 – 20 people or you can scrape your competitor follower base and make a bulk email.

Ask them the following questions:

  • What are your biggest pains about [the problem]?
  • Do you have some solution?
  • Are you using [competitor product/service]?
  • What do you like best about it?
  • What would you change in [competitor product/service]?

(For more details about customer development, I suggest you read “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick)

Once you have answers to the questions above, you can create more personalized content and marketing strategies with solutions to their biggest problems.

Read other competitive articles for your business
  • Competitive Intelligence Business - Competitive intelligence (CI) is a term you may have come across before. Like many industry buzzwords, it isn’t immediately apparent what CI is and how it can be useful to your business. But don’t worry, because we’re going to explain the ins, outs, pros, and cons of CI.

Competitors App helps marketers monitor their competitors' marketing moves in one place, with very little time investment.

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