You need to stay competitive in your field or you simply will never have a successful business. All of your rivals will outperform you, meaning no customers will bother coming to you. Why would they? If they can get a better service elsewhere, of course they’ll go!
Staying competitive can be extremely challenging, particularly if you’re in a highly competitive field. Still, you most certainly can try some tactics that will help you keep up with your rivals and surpass them. Here’s what you need to do:
Identify your strengths
There will be something that your business is better at than anyone else. It might be your customer service, it could be a specific product; anything! Identify your strengths and build on them. Make it your mission to highlight all of your biggest strengths and make them even stronger. In essence, you are creating unique selling points for your business. These are things that set you apart from the others, encouraging more people to come to you. You’re offering something that nobody else can compete with, it’s bound to make you more competitive in your field.
Conduct competitive analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of analyzing both your and your rival’s data. You analyze all the information you can find on your rivals, then analyze the same information from your company. It’s well worth learning all you can about data analysis and analytics as it will be very useful when helping your business compete. One idea is to get an online analytics degree to solidify your knowledge, then conduct the competitive analysis. Effectively, you are looking for trends and different things that your competitors are doing better than you. At the same time, you can identify where you do better than them. From here, you can work on taking your weaknesses and improving them, closing the gap between the two of you. Or, you look at their weaknesses and find ways to highlight them even more! If you want to be competitive, you need to know more about rival companies.
Improve customer retention
Staying competitive makes you think that you need to focus all your attention on gaining as many new customers as possible. New customers equal sales, which keeps you clinging to your rivals. But, you should improve customer retention as well. By increasing your retention rates, you will have loyal customers that keep buying things from you. This makes it easier to stay competitive as you’ve got income coming in from the loyalists every now and then. Let’s say you make 50 new sales every single month, but no sales from existing customers. You’re only ever making 50 sales per month, while your rivals might be making more. In this sense, you are never going to catch up. But, if you make 50 new sales every month yet retain 10% of your customers, you suddenly make 55 sales the second month, and so on. You can be more competitive as you’re actually showing progression.
You need to compete if you want your business to survive in your field. Begin by trying the advice above, and see how much of a difference it makes.