Starting a business isn’t easy, and it’s not the right choice for everyone. You need extraordinary qualities of self-belief, resilience, and the capacity to learn from mistakes and grow if you’re going to succeed. It’s even more challenging if you’re trying to make space for yourself in a crowded marketplace, where lots of other brands are already competing for consumer’s time, attention and most importantly money.
Today we’re taking a look at some of the ways you can establish a place for yourself in your market, and co-exist with the competition.
Know Your Business
If you’re going to attract customers to your business you need to know it inside and out. You need to know how much work you can do, how far and how often you can push your employees to get results before you start falling victim to burnout, and just what customers see in your business that they don’t see in others.
Knowing your business capacity is a different task to understanding your USP. Knowing your capacity means you can over-promise – which sets you up for brand eroding failures. Knowing your USP means knowing what exactly you have to offer that other businesses don’t. Finding out what that is might be beyond your powers: it’s why it’s worth working with a market research firm. They know how to work with data and surveys to get you an objective assessment of what customers think of your brand and why.
Understanding the Competition
The other key thing for you to understand is the other businesses in your niche. Fortunately a good market research firm can also help you here. They can bring you insights into competitive intelligence that let you make your plans and commit to new product development without your competitors treading on your toes.
If your next big marketing push, product launch or sale overlaps with a similar effort from a competitor it can effectively force your customers to choose between you. Even if you win decisively, you’re still cutting yourself off from a significant pool of revenue.
Scheduling the major events of your brand’s year in a way that gives them their own breathing space, so far as possible, gives your customers the time to discover you and decide that they love you. It can also lead to an easier relationship with those other businesses: amiable competition is healthier both emotionally and financially than all-out war!