As soon as you open your business on the market, you’ll be facing a massive amount of competition. Don’t believe us? Just try searching any random phrase or word in Google and see how many businesses come up. You’ll find thousands of them, all selling the same or similar products and services. The market is so crowded these days which it’s difficult to get any attention at all. Even if you are running a local service business, they’ll be at least four other shops in a ten-mile radius trying to sell to your customers. We’d like to tell you that’s an exaggeration, but it isn’t. As such, you need to win against your competitors. The best way to do this is to beat them at their own game.
Contact Their Customers
This is perhaps the most direct way to steal customers from your competitors. You just need to interact with them and find out if they’re getting all they want from that business. You can do this on the street by speaking to them as they leave the store. If you think you might be recognized, hire people to do this for you. A customer will happily tell you what makes their business more appealing compared to yours. You might not like the answers, but you can certainly use them ti win over these consumers. You can improve your business by giving exactly what their customers want. It’s quite a basic form of market research. If you want to go deeper than this, you can.
Use Competitor Intelligence
Have you ever heard of competitor intelligence? Well, you have now. This is the process of getting professional private investigators to monitor your competitor. They’ll keep track of their latest movements on the market. A private investigations team might be able to tell you if a competitor is about to release a new product on the market. Or, when they plan to reduce their prices. If you think this information is under lock and key, it isn’t. You might have noticed in a store a list of prices near a till. These tell employees how much products are selling for with dates for the change. A private investigator can easily get their hands on information such as this.
Engage On Social Media
You may want to think about occasionally retweeting competitors or bigger players online. You might think you’re giving these businesses free promotion, but you’re not. Instead, you’re attracting the interest of their customers. Customers who previously may never have heard of your company. Now they do, and they might investigate. They might start to wonder whether you’re offering something more compared to the company they’re already using. Just getting customers to ask these questions will lead to benefits for your business.
Negative SEO
Or finally, if you want to go dirty to take down your competition, there is a way. You can hire a marketing agency to launch a negative SEO attack. It’s a nasty practice but will be a killer blow to your competition, and there’s nothing illegal about it. You may even hit them so hard that they are unable to recover.