Today, whether you’re running a blog, eCommerce store, IT company, SaaS or digital marketing business, restaurant or offline store or looking to start a business. You will get small or large competitors and companies. Even you can start a business or survive with your talent and skills for some time. But when you choose to grow, you will be in competition.
You only get competition when you think big and when you try to grow your business. If you are doing business just for employment or basic needs you will not get competition. Sooner or later, you will be able to survive. Competitors do not care about you when you’re small. They only think about you when you stand or run along with them or think like them or think bigger than them. Some compete locally, some internationally and many do not compete. Few compete with their self and many compete with others.
If you are competing for the best quality, best service, and best performance then it’s great to compete.
Competition is important to become successful in business and also in life. Not getting competition means you’re not growing your business faster enough. And not having competition means there is a lack of resources for learning, research, and innovation.
Business competition is good for business, economic development and customer satisfaction, and problem-solving. Business competition is bad if it’s just to earn more money and defeat others. In business competing doesn’t mean you have to defeat others. You just have to focus to grow and make your business big and help more customers. And there is no competition for quality services, products, and problem solvers.
Everyone thinks about the competition differently. Many think about business competition as an obstacle to growth. And many think it’s important for growth. While many choose to start a business or launch a very unique product without or avoid competition.
Everyone’s Business development strategy can be different. And you can also use competition as a strategy for business growth. So, in this post, I want to share my personal ideas to compete with competitors in business. All of these ideas are based on my 9+ years of business experience and learnings.
I hope that the ideas, strategies, tips, facts, and examples shared in this post help you to become competitive in business. And if you execute these ideas with confidence and creativity you will be able to grow your business faster than ever.
1. Dare to Dream Big and take necessary action confidently to make them possible:
As a small business owner and startup, only dreams are the biggest motivator and direction provider for you.
Business competitors and continuous failures can make you depressed, confused, and lazy. These things decrease productivity and cash flow becomes negative. Many take loans to get back into the market. But still, they get failed. And too many loans and liabilities make things more challenging. And the situation becomes worst. At that time the biggest challenge is to survive in the market.
The only thing that helps you in this, is your confidence. You have to protect and increase your confidence. And dreaming and believing in your dreams is the 1st solution at this time. You have to work on dreams instead of working for needs. Needs and liabilities can’t motivate you instead make you nervous and compulsive.
You work with fear and take decisions based on compulsion and needs. And such decisions and works are mostly focused only on survival or avoiding the situation and challenges.
For example, you need to pay loan installments, you have to pay salary, you have to pay office rent, you have to pay accounts fees, etc. All these things are always there until you do not close the business. So, working to pay money for others whether it’s needs or liabilities will not give you the confidence to make bigger and bold decisions.
Many think of 1st getting free from liabilities and then take the decision. But no one is free from liabilities. Everyone has liabilities in a business. We’re not alone.
So, the point is, we do not have to think about liabilities and needs. They are there whether you think or not. And you have to pay them.
For example, if the needs or liabilities are $10000 dollars, you will only think about it. And next month you will again think about it and try to achieve this goal. And due to that, you do not get time to think about your dreams.
That’s why you have to think about $150000 or your dreams and that should not be a liability. Instead, that should be something that increases your income.
So, the 1st and most important thing that you should do to compete with competitors is to believe in your dreams, have confidence, and try to achieve your dreams instead of liabilities.
For example, when you try to earn $50000 or try to achieve bigger goals, then liabilities are automatically managed and look smaller.
So, the 1st and simple thing you should do is to focus on your closest dream related to business. It can be to double your website traffic, subscribers, views, sales, and anything that is important to achieve your dreams and goals.
That’s important for your confidence. And do not judge yourself, whether you can do it or not. At least write and think about it.
This will give you confidence, ideas, and excitement. And this is very important and urgent when you try to compete with competitors or when you try to grow again from failure.
2. Think about competition as a source of learning and research:
To beat the competition, 1st you have to research and learn the techniques that they are trying.
For example, what message they are trying to convey through their advertisement? Where they are advertising the business? What content marketing strategy they are using? In which keywords they are dominating the search results? How much traffic they are getting? Where they are getting referral traffic or backlinks etc.
Not just research and learn about their SEO and marketing strategies, but also study their customer support, supplier, frequency of content creation, and publishing.
You can study their technologies, tools, website, services or product features.
Before you compete with your competitors, 1st and most important work are to study and research their activities and pattern. Until you do not have enough information and data about your competition, you can’t compete with them.
And to get the data and information about your competition you can use competitive analysis tools and software such as SimilarWeb, SEMrush, Owletter, and many others.
Once you have the data, you can change or update your marketing and SEO strategies. Or you can create a better strategy. So, the point is to focus on learning and researching the good things that your competitors following and implement them in your business with more creativity.
3. Be creative and do the uncommon but important things:
You can’t ignore the power of creativity, imagination, and intention in business. No matter, how strong you research the market and competition. To compete in the saturated market, you have to look different and unique than your competition. For this, you need creativity, imagination, and intent to succeed. And you have to try uncommon or different or new things that you haven’t tried yet.
For example,
if you haven’t advertised on social media so far then try.
You haven’t used website heatmap tools to understand how users/visitors interact with your website. Where they click, which option they use etc. statistics help you to increase conversion rate, reduce bounce rate and improve user experience.
Similarly, you have created a google business profile and added the business on Google Maps. But you haven’t optimized it for more traffic, or contacts form, and haven’t tried google Maps advertisements.
Similarly, if you’re the only person calling customers for payments, now delegate that work to a freelancer or who is an expert in getting bills paid or money back.
So, the point is to do uncommon things that are important. This helps in getting the attention of customers and positioning your brand strongly on the web or in the market.
4. Focus on your customers and audience:
The best strategy to compete with competitors in business is to focus on customers or your target audience. You always have to think about the goals and dreams of your customers, their problems, and the solutions they want and afford. Because only customers/audience is the main part of the business. Whatever you do in business, you do that for customers or people.
If you’re building a website for business then you’re building it for customers. If you’re creating video tutorials and sharing them through YouTube then you’re doing it because you want to help customers.
If you’re adding your business on Google Maps, you’re doing it to provide directions to your business or office to the people. So, whatever you do you do it for customers. Do not forget your competitors are also doing it. But to compete you can do the following things:
- Make your website loading speed faster than your competitors.
- Try to get more traffic from a search engine than your competitors.
- If your competitors are publishing 3 blog posts on their business website per week then you should focus on publishing 5 blog posts.
- If your competitors hosted their websites on the shared hosting server, then you can host with managed hosting service.
- If your competitors close the office or shop at 7 PM then you should not close before 8 PM, so that you get a chance or extra hour to get a new customer or their customers to your shop as well.
- If your competitors open a shop or office at 9 AM then you should open at 8 AM. So that you’re always there more than competitors for people or customers.
- Market and promote your products creatively. If you can’t advertise then promote it through existing customers by providing more quality and after-sales support.
So, whatever you try to do in business, do that more and better than your competitors for people or target customers. Whenever you create sales, new products, stock or marketing strategy think about customers’ pain points, goals and dreams. Do whatever you can to help them.
And make yourself so much busy helping customers that you forget there is any competition exist in the market.
5. Play with your strengths:
Every human being, professional, and entrepreneur has their own strengths, unique abilities, and problem-solving skills. You have to identify your own strengths as well.
Find out what you do best or whatever you do, what is most liked by your existing customers in you, your products, services, and offers.
Is it the quality service or delivery speed? If it’s speed, then promote it. Many people want faster delivery. But also improve the quality.
- If you can’t spend thousands of dollars per month on social media ads like your competitors, then try to create free social media groups, automate the content publishing, build networks, and communicate with people to join your network.
- If you’re good at content marketing than SEO then promote your business with content.
- If your competitors using video ads, then you can also try to use email marketing.
What do customers like about your service and products? You must find that, and elaborate that more.
For example, there is one cricketer who makes runs with singles and doubles. While the other one looking to hit more fours or sixes. Both want to make runs, both have risks. The goal is to make the runs. So whatever the strategy team management or both players choose they have to play according to the situation and their strengths under pressure situation.
Similarly, in business you have to play and use your strengths, have to understand the situation of the business, and needs to take necessary risks.
One thing surely happens, either you will win or lose. When you know if you do not play you will lose. Not each day is the same, might this time you win, because this time you’re not playing to win, but you’re following the process that is important to win.
You’re taking small steps. You’re doing the small things one by one that is important to win the competition. For example, to compete in business, you have to follow the process that is important to win such as:
- You have to go to the office on time. No matter whether you go by bus because your car is not repaired yet.
- You have to use your every minute at the office. For example, if there are 5 hours of electricity cut today in your sector or area and you do not have the inverter or you can’t work on the computer or laptop. Then do not waste your time on gossip and do not go home. Instead, start reading business books. Check your last month’s accounts. Call your customers and communicate with them about their business.
- Promote your business on social media.
- Stay updated with the latest trends.
- Join online business classes and improve your sales and communication skills.
- Communicate with customers and suppliers effectively.
- Understand the market demand.
- Take the risk when it is important. See the mistakes of your competitors and their failures. Learn from their mistakes.
- Call your customers and do the necessary follow-up. Even if you know that they will say no. Still, try to convince them to say YES.
6. Understand your limits and bank balance:
Understanding the business situation, cash flow, accounts, and competition is very important. But before that, the most important thing is to understand yourself.
You have to understand and analyze your own mindset, habits, skills, aspirations, dreams, and family obligations.
If you do not understand yourself and your business situation then you can’t compete and grow. At least you must know where you’re in the competition. Are you on the 2nd or 10th or 100?
For example, if you want to get more traffic to your website. And you’re getting competition from other businesses for the top 10 search results.
But you do not know where your business currently ranking for certain keywords. What are those keywords in which you’re getting more impressions, and high CTR, and what are the countries from where most of the people visit your website? Which pages are lowing slow on your website? And what are those landing pages generating more revenue or leads?
When you know you’re ranking on 10 then you can plan to rank on 5 or 1. Even if you hire a freelance SEO expert you can let them know that your business website currently ranks at number 10 in the UK certain for certain keywords and now you want to take it to the top 3.
For this, you can use various SEO software and tools to analyze your website’s current statistics and data such as google analytics, google search console, semrush etc. This is an example to understand your current position so that you can compete with other businesses on search engines.
But if we talk about mindset point of view then you have to ask certain questions to yourself and answer them honestly such as:
- Are you too much negative or positive about your business?
- Are you working hard enough or just dreaming?
- Are you reading books or improving your business or technical skills regularly?
- Are you spending more time on gossip?
- Do you use YouTube for learning or as time passes?
- Are you using Facebook for marketing or a time pass?
- Are you doing more chatting with friends than with customers?
The point is that you must know what you’re doing right and wrong as per your own thinking and knowledge. So that at least you can improve and change if something you’re doing wrong. For this, you have to spend some time with yourself alone. And have to think about these things.
Similarly, you must know how much expenses you can afford. Where you can save money? Where you can invest money?
For example, instead of buying branded shoes or too costly shoes, you can use that money to advertise your business on social media. In difficult situations handling a business is challenging. But if you succeed in this then you will become legends in your city, state, and country.
So do the necessary calculations, how much money is required to achieve your dreams? What kind of software you can afford for accounts? What software you can use to reduce business expenses? How you can automate the marketing? How you can increase sales? How you can increase productivity?
You have to understand and plan these things as per your current budget. It’s not important to spend thousands of dollars on marketing and technology but at least spend at least even $10. And understand your limits.
Competing does not mean you have to copy your competitors. You just have to do your best and be better than others through your strength and what you can afford.
For example, today you can’t sell products to 100 people. But at least you can try to sell to 10 people.
Similarly, so far, you’re selling products offline or through a physical store. Why not you can spend some money by creating an online store website to sell products online. Even if you do not have money to pay for an eCommerce website builder, you can use WordPress to create an online store + content marketing strategy to increase sales or sell online.
I know that practically it looks difficult to invest in marketing or innovation when cash flow is negative. Yes, it’s a risk.
And as a business owner, your main work in business is to take risks. It’s great that you know how to create a website in WordPress or how to post on social media.
But if you do not know how to take and manage risks, then instead of learning how to create a website, 1st you have to learn how to take risks. It’s because 1st you’re an entrepreneur or business owner.
You can always hire a website designer + internet marketer or digital marketer to increase your sales and leads. So whatever strategy you will choose, at least you can execute it with confidence and plan. What you can do, is do that best. And accept your limits or lack of skills if you can’t able to do something. But do not get discouraged. Everyone has limits. But at least try to reach that limit.
7. Have patience:
Patience is one of the key strengths of humans. As a business owner, investor and marketer you have to nurture this power in you. Patience doesn’t mean procrastination. Sometimes when you launch a new product, publish a new post, or start a marketing campaign you will not get immediate results. You can’t become rich and successful in business in one day.
You have to work hard daily to follow the process and plan. You have to keep hitting the stone with power, skills, hope, positivity, and techniques consistently until it’s not broken. If have doubts, then take help. But do not give up.
If you see at history, you will find that most companies and business was not successful in their 1st year or 2nd and even 5th year. But today they are successful. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and even small companies of your friends and relatives were not successful due to one thing or in one day.
Think about your business like a tree. When you start it’s like a plant. Growing a business is like growing a plant. It takes time to grow. You have to nurture it each day.
- You will not become a programmer in one day. You have to learn and practice programming skills each day for years.
- You will not have 32K visitors per day on your blog within 1st year, you have to publish useful new blog posts regularly for years.
- You will not get 1000 sales in one day, but you have to keep working each day to achieve your sales goals.
So, if you’re thinking to compete and grow your business then always remembers that you have to work patiently each day.
- If your customer is angry you have to patiently listen to them.
- If your employees are not performing you have to patiently handle them.
- If you’re not getting the results you have to patiently analyze the problem.
Patience is the power. But if you keep yourself frustrated with each failure or each negative output you will lose control. You can’t get angry, frustrated, and negative in business. And having patience and self-belief in your abilities and future is the most important thing for you, whether you want to compete or grow your business, income, and sales.
8. Build your professional network:
When you have to do an important phone call or are in urgency, not having a mobile network impact communication negatively.
Similarly, in business when you need help to improve your situation, you rely on your network. Whether it’s to get a new project or hire new team members. Having a strong business and professional network is important.
Having connections with important people, bigger companies, managers, accounts, lawyers, web developers, web consultants, digital marketers and also with potential clients or customers have many advantages.
You get information, you understand the trends, you can communicate your problems, you can analyze others’ work styles or processes, you can take help, and many other benefits.
But not having a network with similar or bigger business owners like yours, have many drawbacks. You might be more intelligent than others. But you can’t rely always on your own intelligence and experience in every situation. You have to learn from others. Especially from those who competed in the market and become winners.
So building your strong network these days is most important for business growth in which you can include technical experts, CAs, Directors, CEOs and your bigger clients.
To build connections you can join business events, meetups, and webinars. You can use social media networks such as LinkedIn, and Pinterest. You can join online paid and free business, technical, and marketing communities for connection and awareness.
Without building or not having or using your business network it’s tough to compete with bigger or similar or small or bigger companies like yours.
If you do not get individual help at least you will get motivation, ideas and strategies. Not only you can learn from others, but you can also teach others about the things you do best.
In exchange for that information, you will be able to build a connection. And build connections with successful people and more powerful people you have to be humble, learners, and powerful.
No one like to talk with failures and procrastinators. People do not have time for failures they like to see winners. Each time when you meet with new or old people they want to see or expect to see a better you and a more successful you.
I am not saying do everything for the sake of appreciation. But actually, use this as a motivation and challenge.
9. Be aware of market trends, demands, and technological changes:
Staying updated means regularly understanding and watching customer demand and new product launches by others. You also have to stay updated about the latest technologies, accounting software, SEO Tools, and digital marketing tools that are cheaper, reduce cost and increase productivity.
Each day new solutions are coming into the market. You must be aware of them to use that in your business for clients.
10. Build leadership skills in team and employees:
Leadership skills are important in our life, leadership is important in the workplace and it’s important to improve the leadership skills of your team members. Good leaders are good followers. So, you have to build a team of leaders. So that each one can fight with your business competitors on different fronts as per their abilities.
For example, if you have leaders in the digital marketing team, you will be able to grow your business faster than ever.
But hiring leaders and experts is more costly. But if you can’t do that you can train your employee’s leadership skills.
11. Hire the right people and build your team strategically:
Hiring the right employees is important for business growth. Hiring means, building a team that can compete and wins the competition. You can’t win a tournament just with your own skills and capacity. You need help in the works on various fronts. So, hire people who are capable, have leadership abilities, a learning attitude, and creativity. And do not hire people just because they have degrees or technical expertise. You need to hire people who are passionate about the work they do. Such people do not need regular management and you never have to tell them what to do. Instead, they will tell you what to do.
12. Use Latest Technologies in Business:
There are various uses of technologies in business. The importance of the internet in business is bigger than ever. But not just use the Internet for online marketing and advertisements. Instead, there are many things that you can use the internet as a business owner.
You can use web applications or software to manage your customers and sales processes such as CRM tools. You can use cloud-based data storage solutions to organize your business, customer, and marketing data that help you to reduce the cost of data management and backup.
Read these posts for more details:
13. Learn:
If you’re looking for a one-word answer to the question “how to compete with competitors in business” then the answer is LEARN.
Learn every input, output, and application of your business. Learn new business strategies and skills. Learn the latest digital marketing skills to grow your business faster. Learn social networking skills. And most important to learn SALES SKILLS.
Only learning about yourself, your dreams, your business, and your customers helps you to get ideas to compete.
14. Take Action and be unstoppable
If you spend 20 years in learning and improving your business and technical skills still you will feel that you need to learn more. Learning is a never-ending process. And you can’t spend 1st 50 years of your life just learning. And when you reach 50 then start taking action. That’s wrong!
Instead, you have to start taking action from day one in your business. Each day and hour in business you learn new things. Take action on the things that you learned.
For example, if you learned and got information that you can sell products online then take 1st or small action today to start selling online.
If you learned that basic computer skills are important to use the internet and computer in business then start learning basic computer skills.
If you learned that you can manage customers through CRM (customer relationship manager) software then try to use the demo version of the CRM tool.
If you learned the Competitive analysis tool is important to create and build SEO strategies then start using that tool.
And in this post, you learned more than 100s things to compete and grow your business. But if you haven’t implemented at least 1 today, then you will not be able to compete with other businesses and never be able to grow your business.
Learning is only important and useful if your intent is to take action and grow your business. Else, just having knowledge without taking action consumes the memory of your brain and makes you bored and lazy.
That’s why to take action and be unstoppable. No matter whether you fail or succeed. Make the “Taking Action” mission of your business and life. Whenever your mind says, do that or do this, then believe in yourself, and if that’s good work or helps your business to grow then do that.
So, if you follow the above lesson, I am 100% sure that you become will the competition for your competitors very soon.