In the business world, things are unpredictable and strategies to gain more loyal customers constantly change, but one thing remains constant. It is the growing rate of competition which is always tough – whether in traditional commerce or ecommerce. But with the staggering growth of e-commerce and digitalization, competition has tightened even more leaving less room for business mistakes as it can immediately lead to plunging business failure just as fast as its successful growth.
This article serves as a guide to avoid such failure by integrating into your business strategy one of the most effective ways to keep your business thriving: Observing your competitors. The following reasons will help you understand why:
- Observing Competitors helps identify your product or business flaws. If both you and your competitor sell the same product but their sales are higher and customers flock to them more than yours, then there is definitely a problem you need to identify. By observing your competitors you can analyse which part of your product has defects or if the flaws comprise other factors such as customer service, and plan to improve on them. Your competitors’ marketing strategy, one you may not have considered, might have played a bigger role in gathering more customers. So perhaps their approach could successfully work for your business as well.
- Avoiding mistakes your competitors made. As we said earlier, things are unpredictable in business. You may be a success now but a failure tomorrow. While it is good to take inspiration from the success of your competitors as you continue to study them, you will learn more importantly from their mistakes to avoid doing the same. You may reference the mistakes that have hurt your competitors’ business to help you find a solution you can successfully apply to your own business.
- Researching your competitors helps improve your customer relationship. It may not hurt your business if some new customers shift to your competitors who are selling the same product as yours.But your loyal customers transferring indicates that the competitor offers a better product or service. You may ask about your customer’s opinion both for your product and your competitor’s and you may be surprised about their insights. It is highly likely that some of them already went out and tried your competitor’s products. By doing this, you have gained additional information from your counterparts and have noted other preferences and expectations of your customers.