How to Survive in a Competitive Business Environment

How can a business beat its competition? Are you looking for ways you can apply in your business so that it can survive competition?

Business is a game where only the brave with strong strategy wins and dominate.

As an entrepreneur, you should expect to meet competitors in business. A lot of them are very brutal and if you don’t know how to deal with them effectively, they will kick you out of the market.

For you to be able to survive in a competitive business environment, you will have to do some marketing to promote your products and services. I will be sharing with you 6 ways you can adopt in your business so that you can survive the heat of business competition.

Strategic Ways to Beat Competition In Business


1. Define your Brand

Do you know that you can use branding to survive business competition? Branding is the use of advertising, distinctive design or mark, and other means to make consumers easily identify your business upon seeing your design or mark. It also involves promotion to make customers associate your products or services with your business.

You need to be able to define your brand if you want to survive business competition in the marketplace. When your customer can’t be able to differentiate your business from your competitors, it will always need you to be fighting to keep them to patronizing you.

To remain competitive, you need to be distinctive. There have to be something special, unique and different about your business that should keep customers coming to you. What would customers miss if they don’t patronize you?

Nothing?

Why Branding is Important to Survive Business Competition

In the face of competition, it is important to make your business stand out, to set it apart from the competitors. That is the only way to survive and remain competitive in the market.

The name of the game now is how people, especially your target market, associate your business, product or service as a symbol of quality, dependability and fast but efficient service, coupled with total customer satisfaction. A firm that does not brand its business, product or service will just decay and die.

Differentiating yourself from the competition is necessary if you want to beat them.

2. Focus on your Strengths

Your competitive edge start with some vital elements that is missing in your competitor’s business.

Such strengths are your primary weapons in defeating your giant competitors. Look at what makes your business attractive to your customers and make that your primary weapons in defeating your competitors.

3. Study and Know your Market

It pays to study your market if you want to survive business competition. Always be very much aware on the current needs of your market and allow your observation to create a new product or improve your present line.

4. Build a Strong Relationship with your Customers

It is a fact that if you are not talking with your customers someone else is doing that for you, and your best bet? Your competitors. Customers are the only reason why you are in business today. It is your job to make sure you build a strong and lasting relationship with them so as to keep them coming back to patronize your products and services and even refer their love ones.

Even if your past customers or clients are not currently ordering your product or using your service, it’s wise to maintain contact with them even if it is only an occasional postcard to let them know you are still in business and still thinking of them.

5. Don’t Compete with Price

Another way to survive business competition is never to use price as a weapon to compete with your competitors.

Many businesses feel one way to survive business competition and win is by cutting down on the price of their products and services. That is not a good strategy and this happen with business in crowded market.

Instead of compete with price, compete with service. Offer better customer service, respond to complaints quickly and calmly. By going the extra mile to provide good service, your business can survive competition and outlast the competitors.

If you run a shop, make shopping in your store a memorable experience that customers start telling others about the experience.

6. Know the Competition

There is no way you can win your competitors or survive business competition if you don’t know your competitors.

You have to study your competitors to see the strategy they are using and see if you can apply it into your business and use it better than them.

How to Stay Ahead of The Competition on Social Media

Do you want to stay ahead of your business competitors in social media marketing? Are you tired of social media marketing fluctuation? Are you truly in the veil to outclass in the competitive market? Have you prepared well and yet you keep failing on any social media you find yourself?

Never mind, it was quite the same for millions of businesses outside there, but you genuinely need to thank your fate for being here.

Wait! Let me expose your mind to diverse techniques you need to know about social media marketing as well as its competitive perspective.

While shouting around the path of owning the best social media ever, social media marketing has become one of the number one factor or toolbox which any business uses to promote their business. It takes a duration of business lifetime to ensure proper management of her social media standard as well as its leading angle.

The most critical aspect of this, is that many popular and well set brands spend millions of dollars to ensure their name still leads in the era of social media marketing.

Have you heard that $17.74 billion was spent on social media promotion in 2014 by advertisers worldwide? Purely believing, if big and renowned brands pays outrageously on social media for competitive and promotional sake, who are you not to spend some thousands on social media?

Without a pay to time waster, you need to know how those big businesses and brands does it and remained ahead of competitions on any social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google plus as well as less populous-media.

Have you been told there isn’t way for you to lead on social media amidst your million counterparts in the pitch? Yes! I guess. Get the codes right away and stay ahead of them in competition on social media.

Tools and Ways to Use social media to Stay Ahead of Competition

Clear The Rogue

Are you still doubting your motive to work toward the best business brands across the globe with the instrument of social media? You don’t need to! One of the first step you must not omit while taking the responsibility of running your business social media platforms is clearing the rogue.

Yes! Those junks of irrelevant and insulting post by one of your angry customer care employee or attendant could still be deadly to your social media platforms.

As a manager or newly appointed personnel embedded with the responsibility of looking into this perspective of promoting social media platforms for your business outfit, you need to review every necessary text, images, comments, review and co-related post in general.

In addition, ensure you are able to create the best and most durable content for any part of your social media platforms. Don’t forget perfect contents attracts the mindset of anyone that visit your page or platform. And don’t forget, erasing and formatting rogue and foul contents is your first drive.

“Clear” is a good erasing tool, all you need to do is to get the app, sign in and quickly it starts its work. It helps to perfect and realign any post junks and flaws which might remain undone for mere human memory. It cut across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and others. Free of stress is its motto.

Perfect Automation Can Do It

Many business owners who strive to ensure error free post are yet caught in the deep blue sea of what next to post.

After racking their medulla of no next content, they don’t want to post nonsense as well as there isn’t a right content to fill the patch.

The best thing to do to keep leading in the competition is to use automated content tool. Automating your ideas wherever it’s possible is very important.

How will you automate? One of the rated app I love using most is ‘tweet jukebox’. It helps me to rely partly on technology.

I love this application because it has the well set and composed free thousands of contents to fill the breach, when there isn’t the word-flow, I switch to this jukebox and keep pouring out the original contents composed by correlated webs as well as unused contents from different specific niche.

This toolbox helps to stay in touch with the audience and through that, those that don’t know your cheat, will run into the loop of emulation and exhaust their own outsource.

The main aim of this point is that, you must always keep in touch with audience on social media even if you don’t have what to discuss upstairs.

Emulate Influencers on Social Media

No doubt, you will surely be caught at the point where, sourcing for content, posting them, receiving information, reviewing post, replying fan, answering questions and so on will be cumbersome and most terrorizing for you.

All you need to do is to check, how do those social media influencers get their ideas, where, when, what and why are they making use of such strategy. Check for what best served them, their strategic modes, the content they use ask as well as any of their perfected work.

Numeric helps small businesses in this context to know what is their stand in the competition and help and helps them to strike a balance.

In conclusion, molding a perfect social media for your business is beyond the rules you use for individual posting or management style.

Using strategic content calendar and so many others, helps you to stay ahead of any rising social media competition always. Be original in doing those few ideas and you will marvel at its result.

5 Strategies To Turn Competitors’ Advantages Into Your Strength In Business

Having a good understanding of your competitor greatly reduces the risks involved, time spent in understanding the dynamics of the market, the expenditure or expenses on trying to understand customer behaviour and also the amount of resources committed in conducting research on the available competition within the industry you are taking part in.

For any business concern, whenever there is stiff competition, there is a lesser likelihood for success, especially among new businesses or less established ones. Because the strong competitors typically have more resources at their disposal, it becomes almost impossible for a small business to survive within the same industry. However, in order to survive, there are strategies that can be adopted.

One is to align your business enterprise to draw strength from the larger competition, instead of competing with it.

Another is to look for less competitive segments of the business where the chances of success are greater and more stable. This article focuses on how to use your competitor’s strength against them, leading to a situation where your business benefits immensely.

Who Are Your Competitors?

Your competitors are usually other business that offer similar services or produce products that can be interchanged or substituted with yours. This is especially true in the eyes of the consumer. The consumer choices determine to a large extent who your competitor will be.

Ways to Stand Out and Outshine Your Business Competition

How does a business stand out from the crowd? What makes your product or service unique? Is the competition so tough that you can’t be found among your competitors in business? For you to excel in today’s business, you have to succinctly differentiate your business amidst your competitors; only then will you stand out and get noticed.

There are several ways your business could stand out from competitors. You can deliver something amazing and valuable away to your prospect without charging a dime, create a unique partnership by building a powerful community.

Hopefully, this article is going to give you some sound and healthy inspiration to stay focus on standing out brilliantly among other business counterpart instead of fitting in.

I’d therefore love to know and hear from you – how well does your product stand out from competitors? What do you put in place that makes your service or business look different? Without wasting much time, below are tips to stand out from competitors in business.

Ways To Make Your Business Stand Out In A Crowd Of Competitors

1. Extraordinary Service

To stand out from competitors in business, you need to offer your reasonable and seasonal customers an extraordinary service so that they will hunger for more and come back to you.

Through your extraordinary service, you will stand a chance to receive more customers through referral from different personalities that enjoyed your exceptional service.

Think right on your feet about the service you can offer extraordinarily and it will go far, even more, beyond what others ( your competitors) are doing.

Plethora of businesses do say extraordinary services make them look different but failed to bring it into reality.

Deliver exceptional and extraordinary service to whosoever patronize you, either potential prospect or a first timer, services that they won’t get anywhere else except they come back to you.

2. Don’t play with your Facebook Presence

I’m sure you don’t see this coming! Well, don’t toy with your Facebook presence, utilize it to sail and paddle through your peers in the same zone at the labor market. This goes to other social media platforms.

Facebook page is not about creating an account, posting a joke, sharing audios and funny videos, few links and others. If your Facebook presence is extremely fuel in accordance with your business, your customers and the general public are prone to know every new and latest update about your business, hence they will come to you to get them since they got the information from you first.

Also, Facebook page could be use as one of your marketing strategies and before you know it, you are far beyond what your competitors can imagine.

3. Addressing Your Customers Pain Points

A customer that’s being treated badly in an organization wouldn’t make a mistake of going back their again, ever! Even if they offer the best in the competitive market.

Thus, such organization is losing customer unnoticed. For you to win the heart of your customers over, the best way to do this as a business owner is to alleviate their pain.

However, whenever your prospects are lodging varieties of complain, don’t hesitate to address duly their pain points for only this could prevent you from losing them to your competitors.

4. Go for Any Cause Marketing Effort

Are you lost? Fine..a cause marketing is an idea of building a partnership with a non-profit cause. The idea propounds that the business may lends its money, time and expertise by helping to promote the non-cause or profit.

You are likely to have seen this cause marketing at a larger corporate level where organizations support or help in creating breast cancer awareness.

Standing out from competitors in business could greatly be acknowledge to the good name the organization have made, maybe long ago or in the recent time. An entrepreneur who will be hunger for more and more customers should never be egoistic in nature.

Repaying in kind back to your community through any cause marketing effort is also an incredible way to make and gain name for your business, while also participating in some good deeds.

5. Engage in Business Different to your Competitors

For you to stand out brightly from your competitors, it is ideal you engage in some other legal business different from what they do. For instance, if your business involved kids/babies wear; you can enlarge your coast to something your competitors are not doing; maybe selling ladies wear also, since they are the one that will patronize you the most.

Finding out without their notice and exploiting holes in their (competitors) business model is a perfect way to set apart your business from theirs.

6. Let Your Business Be Guaranteed

Guarantee is a reliable way to reduce the fear and perceived risk of your customers in buying your products. Since, the guarantee will give them the privilege to return the product if not found friendly within the stipulated time.

The elimination of hesitation before making any purchase could bring about more sales. In addition, if your service or product is guaranteed, it can make your business seem trustworthy and likable as such, you stand a chance to welcome more customers than your competitors will do.

Ways of Using Your Competitors’ Strength Against Them

There are several ways of benefitting from your competitors strengths. These include the following;

Forming Alliances with Other Disadvantaged Businesses

This is a strategy that has proven to be quite effective. Drawing strength through the formation of a common front by working as a unit increases the likelihood of success. Because your competitor is known to possess a vast amount of resources at their disposal, it is only wise to cooperate and streamline the activities of these disadvantaged businesses to enable them easily raise the much needed resources to compete favourably in the industry.

Checking the Models of Strengths and Weaknesses of the Competitor

Because a strong competitor is believed to have put in place strong strategies and innovations that has resulted in its growth, such strategies used by the competitor can be emulated through a system of replication and adoption.

However, these strategies are not fool proof, as there are areas of weakness or areas that need improvement.

In such circumstances, it is only wise that you take advantage of this weakness through a fine-tuning process to ensure that such weaknesses are corrected. Doing this, your business stands a better chance of developing the required muscle to face its competition.

The Importance of Location; Pick Out the Positive Aspect of Your Location and Promote It

Location is very important to any business venture. The big competitors usually have the financial muscle/resources to select the best locations for their businesses. However, there is still hope for the small business. Check out for the positive aspects of your business location and promote it. Because the client is makes the final judgement, let them see why it is more advantageous to come over/visit your business location. This is a subtle way using your competitor’s strength against them.

The big competitors usually have the premium spaces in areas with high traffic, especially for businesses that depend on high traffic to thrive. You can out-manoeuvre your competition by offering attractive discounts or cheaper services to attract the consumer/customer.

Having a Strong Online Visibility

This vital area of advertisement and publicity has been neglected especially by small businesses. Without an online presence, it is almost impossible to compete favourably with more established competition that all have interesting and engaging websites. If the resource to build one is the problem, never hesitate to take advantage of micro sites that offer online presence at highly reduced rates.

Take advantage of employees, relatives or associates with knowledge on website design. Using this option is likely to yield many benefits because you can get quality work done, while paying little for nothing. An online presence is very important. Also ensure that the website has modified pages for browsing with mobile phones, and has easy to use interface.

Having an Effective Customer Care Unit

Because of how important customers are to any business venture, they should never be taken for granted. Most competitors understand this and have concentrated their services to revolve round the customer. To use this strength against your competitor, study your competitor’s customer care services, and look for ways of improving these services.

A client who is treated well is most likely to tell his/her friends about the quality of services enjoyed, and they in turn, together with the client will always want to return to enjoy the treatment.

Creating the right avenue for client loyalty is among the most important strategies of using your competitor’s strength against them.

Increasing Sales

This is a sure way of using your competitor’s strength against them. There are cheap, yet effective ways of carrying out publicity that ensures that your business gets maximum exposure even when operating on a tight budget. Using social media platforms to showcase your services is an effective way of reaching your target market, which is rewarding at the end.

With special focus on the ways of using your competitors’ strengths against them, the strategies given, if well implemented are certain to offer solutions on ways of effectively competing with your competition.

SUMMARY

If you sit down to analyze well, you will find out that most of the businesses competing against yours have more finances, more human resources, more marketing strategies and more ‘everything’ than you do.

CHECK: Small Business Ideas For Small Towns, Rural Areas And Villages

So you ask yourself, how do I beat them? Simple! Turn their biggest advantages into your strength. The first thing to do is to figure out what their biggest strength is.

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Here are some practical strategies to use your giant competitors’ strength against them:

==> Add Value: Pick a basic product and give it a special appeal. You can advertise it as a status product or make it special by adding more value to it.

==> Commonize: If a product has always been associated with class, you can downgrade on it by reducing its concept thereby making it available for the common people.

==> Consolidate: Look for products or services that go together but people pay for each one separately. Turn them into one and offer them in a bundle. Convenience will make customers patronize you more.

==> Dissociate: This is the opposite of the third point. Get services or products that people buy in bundles and break them down into smaller units. You will discover that most people don’t need all the components. They will come to you because it is cheaper to just get the particular product they need from you instead of paying for whole bundle.

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==> Relocate: Many giant businesses are well grounded in certain areas. Why compete with them in that region? You have a big advantage if you relocate and sell their version of product or service in areas where they are not.

If you have beaten your competitors with some strategies, do share with us.

Things To Do If the Market Is Too Competitive

What do you do when the market becomes too competitive? So many entrepreneurs are faced with this question every now and then. In today’s extremely competitive world, marketing could prove to be very difficult, and pose a hard nut to crack.

There are some businesses with huge established brands that makes it difficult for small startups to survive. Instead of looking for a low competition business to start, it may be advisable to look into how your venture can survive the stiff competition out there.

What If the Market Is Too Competitive? Today, it is much more difficult to stand out amongst competitors in the industry; especially in an industry that is saturated, and where the competition is so stiff.

This article clearly draws attention to a number of things you can do, as an entrepreneur, when the market becomes too competitive.

Some markets are not going to be less competitive no matter how long you are determined to wait. Instead of shying away from the fact, you should brace yourself for the task ahead. Good news is you can actually beat your competitors to their game by carefully studying some trends in the market.

In this post today, I’ll be sharing with you certain strategies to outshine most of these competitions. I understand that not every investor likes competition. But the basic truth is you should start approaching issues as they are, instead of how you wish they had been.

Let’s have a look at some practical steps you can take if your find yourself in a very competitive market.

Maximize Neglected Marketing Strategies

One of the things to do is to dig out advertising methods that your competition is not making use of. Most businesses copy advertising models. There is a general belief that since they are in the same line of investment what works for Company A will also work for them. While looking for alternate means of promotion to give a unique boost to your sales, try to validate them as some ideas might have been experimented and proven to fail by your other competitors.

Effective Networking

Teaming up with other businesses in your market widens your experience and exposure. As long as you are in partnership with a brand you can gain from, taking time to study how they are doing what they do and areas that they have not touched, your investment will surely be a step ahead of others. A good partnership is sometimes the only available mallet to break through a really competitive market.

READ: 3 Secrets Why Many Entrepreneurs in Africa Fail

Prioritize Customers Satisfaction

As the sales roll in, many businesses tends to slack off in their approach when servicing their clients. Outsourcing some of your clients’ needs to more reliable organizations and units is a good way to take the pressure off you. Your competition start diminishing the moment your business begins treating customers better than its competitors.

BONUS GUIDE

  1. Study Your Competition

For you to be able to penetrate the market when the market becomes too competitive, you need to study your competitors and know what exactly they are doing in contrasts and in comparison with what you are doing. Know what they are doing right and improve upon it; know what they are doing wrong and exploit it.

Gather as much information about them by knowing who they are; what products they offer; what sets them apart in the industry (i.e. their unique selling point); and their reputation. Most important is that you should capitalize on their weaknesses.

  1. Always Keep Up-to-Date with Industry Trends

Without always keeping abreast with the trends in the industry, your business marketing strategies may soon go obsolete and outdated. When you do not cultivate the habit of always keeping abreast with the industry latest changes and trends, you will find out that your competitors will sooner than you think push you to the back seat in the industry.

Always research on the latest information regarding the industry, and make forecasts, say 6 months to a year, into the future. You should always keep abreast with the latest trends by subscribing to industry newsletters, news tickers/ trackers, and several other subscriptions.

  1. Keep Customers Satisfaction a Top Priority

Always make sure you treat your customers well so that you can establish a long-lasting customer base. It costs much more to outsource for new customers than it costs to maintain the customer base you have established.

Ensure you know your customers well on a one on one basis, and train your employees to always cultivate great customer relationship, and to always deliver great customer services. The reason is because the success of your business largely depends upon the number of return or repeat purchases you are able to make from your esteemed customers.

  1. Do not Cut-back on Prices

When the market becomes too competitive, the easiest thing to do would be to cut back on price and offer your products and services at reduced costs. You should never do this. This is because no matter how cheap you offer your products, you will still be able to find a business in the industry that will be more than willing to even offer the same products and services at a much lower price; so how then do you stand out in the crowd?

The moment you reduce your prices, you will find out that customers will come in, yet you will still lose as much money. Instead, you should brainstorm on smarter ways you can stand out in the competitive market, like improving service quality.

  1. Identify and Fill a Void

Sometimes, to be able to stand out in a competitive market, you do not necessarily need to be so innovative and revolutionary. Although being innovative is very good for the market as a whole, but you do not necessarily need to be very innovative to really succeed in business.

All you need do is to take a critical look at your target industry and look out for a void, a niche that had not been explored that much, and take advantage of it. Figure out the best possible way of adapting your business in line with that void.

  1. Be Unique

For you to really be able to stand out in a competitive market, you have to be unique. You cannot stand out if there is nothing that differentiates you from the rest of the competition. You need to identify what aspects of business will set you apart from the rest of your competitors. This is what is called your “it factor”.

Your focus should be on identifying that thing that will set you apart from the other competitors in the industry, which customers will be able to see as better than what the others have to offer. It could be the quality products that you offer, or maybe it is the special customer services you render. Either way, you must make sure to make it is a distinguishable factor, and you should be known for it.

  1. Know Your Competitive Advantage

For you to be able to beat the competition in a market that is too competitive, you need to define your competitive advantage. You cannot compete when you have not been able to figure out a plan on how to win in the competition.

Your competitive advantage could be quality customer services, or quality products, or just cheap price; or it could be a combination of quality customer services and either quality products or cheap price.

  1. Improve on Marketing Strategies and Effective Networking

Improve on your marketing strategies if you have not been putting too much effort into it. Put in effort to promote and advertize your business.

Sometimes to break the strong rock of a competitive market, you need to be in partnership with a stronger and reputable company that you can learn and gain from. Take out time to study how they are doing what they are doing.

  1. Create, Execute and Track Business Plan and Marketing Plan

This is one of the basics when it comes to making your business stand out from the competition. In actual fact, this is where every entrepreneur should start; creating a business plan that fully caters for the marketing strategies of your business, and how the marketing strategies are going to be fully executed.

It should not stop there, when it comes to beating the competition in the market, you must be able to willingly track the plans you have set out, and modify where necessary from time to time. You must really take this one seriously so that all the efforts you have put in to write and execute your marketing plan will not seem a little wasted.

You will discover that most times competitions appear bigger than they actually are. If you are ready to go the extra mile doing things that your competitor does not even think exists, you are already ahead of the pack.

CONCLUSION

You have to learn all about your competitors so you can come up with a powerful strategy that will take them off guard. Find out what the competition is doing to entice and draw in customers and then beef up your businesses marketing efforts to get your company name out there. These are some of the most effective strategies to survive competition in business.