In a competitive market place, finding marketing strategies to create contrasts between yourself and your rivals is important to building a thriving company. Developing a plan for promoting your products and services is one of the key tasks a successful business owner needs to do to ensure their venture thrives.
There are three basic concepts involved in successful marketing: identifying your customers, satisfying their needs and keeping them coming back for more. Applying these concepts to your business takes research and hard work, but improved sales figures and a more comfortable cash flow situation make it well worth your while.
Doing Your Homework
Creating marketing strategies for your business begins with understanding your market. You’ll need to find out who your customers and competitors are, and how best to deal with them. There are a variety of ways you can research your market; you can look at existing publications and internet research about your industry and your geographic area, you can conduct surveys of your customers or potential customers, you can visit competitor businesses and see what they have to offer or you can hire a market research firm to do the leg work for you.
No matter how you do it, the goal is to define who your customer base is and how you can serve them better than potential competitors. When you evaluate your competition, factors you need to consider are their pricing, the quality of their products and services, unserved or underserved niches your competitors are missing out on, geographic location and business reputation.
Developing Strategies
Once you have an idea of who your target customers are and who else is after them, you can begin developing marketing strategies to bring customers to your business.
Pricing is one area that may allow you to compete with your rivals. By having lower prices across-the-board than your rivals, you may be able to draw more customers into your business. This may not be feasible, but another pricing ploy you may use is offering a significantly lower price on a popular product to lure customers in, and maintaining average or slightly higher pricing on other goods or services.
You can market your products and services by providing offerings that your competitors don’t provide. If there’s a niche product or service in your industry that the competition isn’t providing, you may gain an advantage over your competition by offering it. However, be sure to identify demand for this niche product or service before launching it to ensure it’s a success and not a time and money-consuming flop.
Beefing up the quality of your products and services is another way to create positive contrasts between your business and your rivals. Give your employees customer service training and insist on positive results. Buy better quality goods or offer a wider or more in-depth range of services.
Using promotional products is another way you can compete. Most customers will appreciate an extra laser pointer, stationery pad, flashlight or pen included gratis with their purchase or available at your store or office. These products provide tangible reminders of your business to consumers and help keep your name on their minds when a problem your company can solve arises.
Finding innovative ways to promote your products and services can also help you gain an advantage over your competitors. Using social media, traditional advertising methods and guerrilla marketing techniques can help you reach customers and convince them that your products or services are the right fit for their needs.
By researching your market and finding marketing strategies that fit your business, you can improve your financial figures and thrive in a competitive market.