4 Reasons Why it is Vital to Study Your Competition

As a business strives to win over customers and enhance market share, there has to be a well-defined strategy to go about it, and conducting research on your competitors is a vital part of it. Without looking at what your competitors are offering, their strengths, weaknesses and how they are attracting and retaining customers; you will not be able to gain success. Studying the competition means you should learn from their success and failures. For instance, if a competitor is offering great customer service, take inspiration from it and instead of copying their idea, come up with a plan on how you can excel in improving your service. Also keep a look out for the latest industry trends. Here are five prime reasons why you need to study what your competitors are doing.

Competitor Research Gives You Better Understanding of Customer Expectations

Studying what competitors are doing will give you a thorough insight on your customers’ expectations. It is likely that your competitors are selling the same product at a lower price or offering better service without charging the customers any extra amount. So while you keep a track of such things, you can lower your product price or focus on improving your service. Knowing what your competitors are offering would help you better understand customer expectations and hence you can modify the experience accordingly.

Competitor Research Gives You a Better Insight about Your Flaws

The greatest advantage of studying your competitors is that you get a better insight about your flaws. Your competitor might be selling an improved version of the same product or they might be better with building customer relationships. Analyzing helps you identify loopholes in your product/service which you can work on. For instance, if you are running a cosmetics brand and research reveals that your competitors are offering more variety which is why customers prefer them, you need to start introducing new products. Gathering customer feedback on how to improve your products is essential. Feedback can be collected via different channels such as social media, telephone, or live chat.

Competitor Research Allows You to Improve Your USPs

Analyzing the competition will help you improve your unique selling points. For instance, if you own a casual clothing brand for women and by studying your competitors you learn that other brands are selling their clothes by highlighting low price and trendy designs, you can come up with different unique selling points like online store, monthly sales and fresh arrivals every week. Similarly, competitor research will enable you to create USPs for your new product. Therefore, before launching your new product you should thoroughly analyze the USPs of your competitors to come up with something better.

You can learn from the Success and Failures of Your Competitors  

While you study your competitors, you get to know about their success and failures which can be used as inspiration. You can avoid the mistakes that led a competitor to failure and should learn from the practices that have contributed towards a competitor’s success. For instance, if you are opening up a new restaurant, you should make a list of the reasons why some competitors failed while others succeeded. Based on that information you can take up the best customer service practices from successful competitors and should try to avoid mistakes that became the cause of your competitors’ failure.

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