What kind of marketing do you need? Part 5: Competition

This is part five of a series on how to figure out what type of marketing your small business needs, focusing on five different dimensions: Demand, Trust, Relationships, Competition, and Sources. If you just subscribed, read the first edition here.

Competition is the marketing dimension that sounds the most self-explanatory. Everyone understands the concept of other businesses affecting your marketing.

However, the way most businesses respond to competitors is by copying them, which is partly OK, and partly problematic.

The more competition, the more you have to match the alternatives, and the more you need to stand out.

Some small businesses hyper-fixate on their competition, but are afraid to be different. That just makes it difficult for a customer to choose on anything other than price.

Some try to be different, but don’t meet the same standards as similar companies. Better branding usually doesn’t override an inferior customer experience.

Competition also functions like a volume knob. The more the competition is talking, the more loudly you have to talk.

I’ve seen lots of business owners underestimate how difficult it is to get their customers’ attention. This just leads to underinvesting time and money into marketing.

In this way, competition informs both the quantity and quality required across all the other dimensions:

• The more you need to compete to capture or create demand.

• The more you need to demonstrate trustworthiness. 

• The more you need to fight to earn and keep customers.

• The more creative you need to get with finding new customer sources.

Of course, figuring this out also requires you to measure and asses your competition, which is yet another planning step that many businesses don’t do in detail. It’s one thing to have an idea in your head - it’s another to have a detailed list comparing pricing, offerings, advertising, etc., that can help clearly identify your strengths and weaknesses.

So, the idea of competition may be intuitive, but it’s responding to it in these non-intuitive ways that allows you to compete.