What you don’t know about your competition WILL Hurt You!
Not long ago I was talking with a woman who offers personal training services. She asked me to take a quick look at her website and then tell her what I thought.I took a look and and when we got together again, I told her that her website was “OK but it didn’t really grab me.” So she challenged me to list the websites that DO “grab me.” The ones I mentioned that were relevant to her profession were Weight Watchers, Prevention, and Oprah.
“You can’t compare me to them,” she said, annoyed with me, “those are giants! I’m not even a blip on their radar.”
She was right, in a way. I doubt anyone at Weight Watchers or Prevention is losing sleep about my colleague’s personal training business.
But she’s defining competition in a way that may get her in big trouble: from the her point of view–not her client’s point of view.
If you own a small business or are a professional service provider, I urge you
to redefine competition in from your customer’s point of view.
Your Customers are the Ones Who Define Your Competition
Your real competition is defined by your customers based on the choices your customers have to solve the problems you solve.
Let’s use the personal trainer as an example. What problems is she helping her clients with? One problem she mentioned was helping women aged 40+ who were suddenly gaining weight even though they hadn’t changed their eating habits and whose figures, as one client put it, “are jiggling in places I didn’t know could jiggle.”
So what are the choices these women are considering to help with their weight gain and figure problems? The short list is usually something like this:
- Go on one of the hundreds of popular diets: Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, etc.
- Do more aerobic exercise through everyday activities like walking
- Join a gym, take a class or two, and other group activities
- Buy work out tapes
- Hire a personal trainer if they think they can afford one
If you asked my colleague who her competitors are she would name a few local personal trainers, maybe a yogo instructor, and maybe the YMCA or Bally’s Fitness.
But if you look at the solutions her prospective clients are considering she’s missing some biggies: popular diet programs, getting more exercise through everyday activities, and buying tapes.
Your Marketing Needs to Help Prospects Identify You as the Best Choice
To appeal effectively to her ideal prospective clients, the personal trainer’s marketing needs to address why the common options her prospects have tried aren’t helping them lose weight.
This doesn’t mean bashing the competition. But it does mean explaining the limitations of alternative approaches that her solution addresses. For example, in her brochure or on her website, she needs to say something like this:
“The first thing most women do when they want to lose weight is eat less calories by going on a diet and doing calorie burning exercise.
But as you age, you lose muscle and muscle is what really burns calories. If you take two women of identical weight and activity level, the one with more muscle can eat far more than the other without gaining weight.
This means diet and exercise are no longer enough to lose weight. If you’re 40+ you also need to begin regular strength training to rebuild the muscle your body is losing.”
The brochure would then go on to explain why personal trainer gets better results than going to the YMCA or buying weights and trying to go it alone.
Without acknowledging what her prospects see as alternatives, she doesn’t make as strong a case for why she is the best choice.
Steps to Understand Your Real Competition
Step 1: Focus in on one specific problem that you solve for your clients or customers.
For example, if you own a fast food restaurant you may be offering a quick, cheap way for customers to satisfy their hunger.
If you’re a high-end restaurant you may be offering an entertaining alternative to a boring night of television, or an opportunity
for a man to feel more important and interesting when he takes out a client.
Step 2: Ask yourself what alternatives your customer is really considering
With the fast food restaurant, alternatives may include bring their own lunch, eat at a competing fast food place, or
even microwave popcorn when really pressed for time.
Step 3: Ask yourself what makes you the best alternative for your ideal customer
With the fast food place, it may be that you offer hot, homemade sandwiches that are more satisfying than typical fast food fare,
just as convenient, and no more expensive.
Step 4: Talk about what makes you the best alternative in your marketing
When it comes to fast food marketing, few companies have done a better job as setting themselves up as a better fast food alternative than Subway. Regardless of how you feel about Subway and their food, their campaign positioning themselves as the healthier fast food alternative has been a spectacular success.
Bottom Line:
Your marketing is only effective if it addresses the alternatives that your customers see as solutions not the competitors that you believe they are considering. If your marketing doesn’t address real alternatives it won’t deliver on positioning your business as the best choice, I can guarantee you will see the effects in your bottom line.
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