5 Ways to Help Competitors Get Ahead

If strategic incompetence worked, everyone would be doing it; but when your marketing misses (or is missing in action) in the real world, it’s just a gift to your competitors. Here are five ways you may inadvertently help competitors get ahead.

Messing Up, Missing the Mark or Missing in Action: 5 Ways to Help Competitors Get Ahead

Savvy competitors will be watching closely in order to look for opportunities to take market share (a.k.a. customers!) away from others. Make sure that you don’t inadvertently help competitors get ahead by making any of these five marketing mistakes.

5 Ways to Help Competitors Beat You

Messing Up

For every customer complaint, there are twenty-six unhappy customers who haven’t said a word. (Lee Resource) Customer dissatisfaction can lead to customer defection. Make sure that you respond quickly, research the issue thoroughly and make changes when a customer complaint reveals a potentially-recurring flaw in the customer experience.

Have you ever returned to a favorite restaurant for a particular dish, only to find that it doesn’t taste as good as you had remembered? A change in vendors, a need to cut corners to cut costs, employee turnover – there are many factors change the “recipe” of the customer experience that could lead to a downturn in the quality of products or services being provided to customers.

If your choice of contractors, vendors or suppliers impacts the customer experience, even someone outside of your company could be causing customer dissatisfaction. Be sure that you have a rating and review process in place as well as a high standard for screening the vendors, suppliers and contractors that provide goods or services on behalf of your organization.

The bottom line: Before cutting corners, customer perks or quality in order to cut costs, weigh this statistic. A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%. (Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy and Mark Murphy)

Missing the Mark

“Everyone” in your city does not constitute identifying a target market. If you have failed to build buyer personas and ideal buyer types, there’s a really good chance that your marketing is missing the mark altogether.

Let’s say you do have buyer personas, a good idea of who your “ideal buyer type” is and you can describe the general segments that constitute your target market. It’s still possible to miss the mark in reaching them if you do not help them connect the dots between their problems and your solutions.

Maybe you have a clear idea when it comes to your target audience, you have identified the pain points likely to motivate them to buy and you have the perfect message in mind – only you deliver it at the wrong time. You miss the mark with prospects if you try to force them to buy before they are ready, you don’t have top of mind awareness when they are ready to buy, or you don’t have the ability to sell them what they want when they need it.

Missing in Action

Are you missing in action when it comes to the local community? Consumers are increasingly aware of, and responding favorably to, businesses that have a presence within the local community. This could come in the form of involvement in civic projects through your local Chamber of Commerce, by donating money, supplies or volunteer time to a local charity, by networking in neighborhood and city business groups and other community-based activities.

Is your business missing in action when it comes to online search? One mistake business owners make is believing that they can grow their business on word of mouth referrals. Often, this leaves them scratching their heads wondering why customer satisfaction is high but referral rates are low.

While there is nothing more powerful than a personal recommendation, it’s a 1:1 proposition, and even getting a recommendation is dependent on a more-than-satisfied customer coming across someone who is ready to buy and asks for a recommendation. Those are a lot of stars that have to align!

If you do not have a website that is optimized in compliance with the best practices advised by Google and Bing and/or you do not have adequate content on your site, your web site is not going to “get found” by local customers looking for a business like yours. You definitely help competitors by not showing up at all.

97% of consumers use online media to shop locally (BIA/Kelsey and ConStat) While referrals may bring in customers one at a time, getting found in online search by your “ideal buyer types” could bring new customers in droves.

Are you missing in action on your customers’ social networks and email inbox? Consumers expect brands to be present, active and working to engage them on social networks. Likewise, they expect that when they subscribe to an email newsletter, they will receive frequent updates and offers.

In fact, they provide their email address to brands primarily in order to receive special offers and inducements to buy – don’t disappoint them! 58% of consumers said they subscribed to brand emails in order to receive discounts and special offers. (Social Media Quickstarter and Chadwick Martin Bailey)

Mushing Things Together

If your marketing is not doing a clear, concise job of telling consumers why they should buy, and why they should buy from you, it might be trying to do too much all at once (mushing too many goals together). A prospect doesn’t need 100 reasons to buy from you, they just need one good reason to do so.

If your marketing brings a prospect to the threshold of buying but fails to ask for the sale, you might be priming them to buy from a more assertive competitor. When it comes to asking closing questions, don’t get mushy! You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. (Wayne Gretsky)

If buyers can’t distinguish your business from those of your competitors – they mush you all up into the same basket – then you have failed to deliver when it comes to creating or effectively communicating what differentiates your business from those of your competitors. You help competitors by saying there’s no difference between your brands or products. If they do not perceive that their experience as your customer will be better for them, they will probably simply choose the option with the lowest price or highest convenience (e.g., the closest store, next place they happen to shop at, etc.)

Making Mistakes

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” might be true for those seeking notoriety and who are unafraid of scandal, but it’s not true for a business. Don’t make the mistake of protecting your brand’s reputation online or failing to address negative reviews, customer complaints or negative comments on social networks.

Entrepreneurs can be impatient! Don’t make the mistake of trying to ‘one and done’ your way to the top. To grow; your marketing needs to be delivered on multiple marketing channels, consistently, over time.

Do not make the mistake of believing that customer satisfaction – and organizational growth – can be achieved without being devoted to employee satisfaction and engagement. “Sears measured that a 5 point improvement in employee attitudes drove a 1.3 point improvement in customer satisfaction, which in turn drove a 0.5% improvement in revenue.” (Source: The Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears, Harvard Business Review via Forbes.com)

No matter how friendly you are with business competitors, it doesn’t mean that they won’t take business away from you if you open the door. Grow your business and improve customer retention by addressing these five areas where it’s easy to lose ground.