Did you know that you can leverage your competition to grow your business even more?
Healthy competition is not an obstacle that keeps you from success. It challenges you to find better solutions, create more effective workflows, and provide the best experience you can for your customers.
In this post, and share some practical ways you can start leverage in your competition today. As you understand more about other businesses that do what you do and cater to the same customers, you start to see your own business differently.
Let's dive right in look at ways you can grow from your competition.
Your audience carries out intensive research before they make a purchase. This means that they will look for blog posts and videos online that compare your products against your competitors.
This is the perfect opportunity for you to drive some of that traffic to your own website. You can create comparison posts and YouTube videos where you highlight the differences between you and your competition in a professional way. For example, for one of my brands, we've made a post comparing our SEO plugin AIOSEO with Yoast SEO.
Your potential customers, when doing their research, will want to know the differences between you and your competitors along with the following parameters:
Pricing
Customer support
Feature list
Ease of use
Prerequisites needed to use the product
Risk-based aspects like refund policies, money-back guarantees, and more
Product education and documentation
It is important that you create a fair representation of both yourself and your competitor's products. Don't shy away from mentioning a few areas where your competition is clearly better than you. For example, when it comes to catering to certain markets where you don't have complete expertise.
Doing this shows customers that you are honest and professional and that they can trust you.
Creating products comparisons send more traffic your way and also lets you have some degree of control over the narrative around your product and brand.
SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush aren't just for boosting your own site's SEO. When you use them and put your competition under the magnifying glass, you unlock even more ways for your business to grow fast.
There are several ways to use SEO tools to learn more about your competition. In the first place, such a tool can help you figure out who your competition is. You just enter your domain name into their analyzers and they produce a list of competing websites that rank for the same keywords as your site.
This gives you the chance to know what your competition looks like.
You can then enter your competitors' URLs into the analyzers and learn the following:
What keywords they rank for
How much traffic they get
What their domain authority is
Which websites linked to them
When you compare these details between your company and your competitions, you have a good idea of what to focus on in your own marketing strategies.
If you find out that your competitor's domain authority (DA) is much higher than yours, then you could focus your efforts on building your own DA.
Or if you learn that it might be too difficult to rank for some keywords that your competition ranks for, then you can focus on long-tail keywords or ones that have less competition.
Another way to use the information you get from an SEO tool is to find websites that will be willing to link to your site.
Create a backlink report to find websites that link to your competition. The fact that they've linked to your competitor's site indicates that might link to yours too. You can reach out to these websites and ask them to do so.
These are some of the ways you can use SEO tools to learn more about your competition. And also to develop a better digital marketing strategy in the process.
##Identify pain points
If you're paying attention, then your audience can provide you with a lot of information to make your business better.
One clever way to gather information and also leverage your competition is to listen to what their customers have to say.
Using social media management tools or even an SEO tool, start following your competition's activities on social media.
You can also check out what people are saying about your competition's products and services on popular forums. Regularly checking such content will help you identify critical pain points and areas of improvement.
You can then add the features that customers want and then use these points to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Your competition doesn't always have to be your competition. Another way to grow from businesses that offer competing products is to join forces with them. In fact, this happens all the time.
It's not unusual for me to think about buying a competing brand or product. The way I see it, if they're already making a good product, then I don't have to make it myself from scratch. I don't see the point of reinventing the wheel.
Depending on your own situation, you can choose to collaborate or merge with your competition if it makes sense. You can fill in gaps in each other's strengths and also get a larger market share by entering into a collaboration.
I've laid out some useful ways to leverage your competition.
It boils down to analyzing your competing businesses and understanding how you stand in relation to them. This activity will give you new ways of thinking about your own business that will help you achieve your business goals.
My 2 cents to the product comparison is that you have to be really careful on this.
It's possible to get sued if you misinterpret your competitor's facts or damage their reputation somehow if they prove they lost customers because of the false statements.
So you need to be conscious about it, even if you compare it honestly. One thing is comparison pages on 3rd party unrelated sites, completely another when you're bold stating "my product does X while competitor does Y, so use X".
Of course, if you're small, you'll probably fly under their radar for a long time :)