Having understood and made your customer’s journey to your product. After that, it is important to recognize which other places this journey can take your customer. Competition is one of the key factors which affects any business positively or negatively. For instance, if you know your competition well and your consumers can differentiate between your similar product offerings, you’re on the right track.
Many consider competition as a bad thing, but that’s not true. Above all, Finding an unserved market is a more difficult task. For instance, if there exists an opportunity that is completely unserved, it could mean that the opportunity is not that big to convert into a full-time business. And in that case, customer creation requires a lot of money and resources. In conclusion, it is wiser and easier today to study a market and gauge the opportunity and find out how better you can serve customers’ needs.
Discovering and analyzing competition will help you in various ways. Below are a few of them:
- Consistently keeps you on your toes and makes you step out of your comfort zone
- Helps in building your confidence in your own business
- It teaches you perseverance and keeps you proactive
- Forces you to act smart and innovate
- Feeling of fulfillment when you defeat competition to increase business
- Helps you attract new opportunities and their customers
- Makes you a learner as there is always someone introducing better products.
What do you get to learn from your competition?
- Firstly, you learn about your customers’ needs and how well they are served
- Secondly, it helps decide what to focus on to help create a niche market for yourself
- Thirdly, after the first two analyses, you can build a product which makes your customer conclude that this is a better product.
Considering all these factors, let’s conduct a comparative study in detail to know where you stand.
You had already identified your potential customers’ pain points before and identified how you want to solve them through your business. After that, it’s time to recognize how your competitors are currently solving the same problem in a more detailed manner. The goal of this exercise is to recognize the factors that can help you gain an edge over your competition.
To understand it better and strengthen your findings with facts, I suggest you visit online customer forums, evaluate customer feedback and speak to a few customers about the product of your identified competitors.
By now you know reasonably well how your competitors are solving your customers’ problems and you have analyzed all possible ways to address those issues in a better manner. Let’s understand the key-value proposition that you will deliver to your customers.
