Enterprise Hub Network - Case History
Aylesbury Vale Enterprise Hub
Martin Brassell
Learning from your competition
Finding out how your competitors secure business can be a useful way to grow your company. Martin Brassell, hub director for the SEEDA Enterprise Hub Network, examines how to learn from the marketing techniques of your rivals.
Let's face it: while we all like to think that we're the best in the business, we sometimes look enviously at the marketing achievements of other organisations in our sector and think, "How did they pull that one off?" The answer, often, is that if you can't beat them, you should join them – or, more precisely, try adapting some of their techniques and putting them to work on your own business.
Before diving in, though, it pays to think about your competitors' motivation and methods. For instance, I've sat round boardroom tables looking at rival advertising campaigns listening to colleagues saying, "look how much they're spending, they must be doing well". Subsequently, with the benefit of better competitor intelligence, we found that the opposition wasn't doing well: their advertising turned out to be a largely unsuccessful attempt to get their sales back on plan. If we had simply copied their behaviour, we would probably have had the same experience.
Apart from its uses for lead generation, advertising is also one of the ways businesses try to "look their best" in front of customers and appear bigger than they really are. It's an expensive way to make an impression, compared with the costs of creating quality promotional materials and getting a bit of design flair into your online presence. So your competitor might be making a splash, but how substantial are they really and how well can they back up their promises?
There are two easy ways to find out:
- Try posing as a prospective customer and submit an online enquiry via your competitors' websites. See how long it takes them to respond, and what with. (NB. It pays to assume that they are already doing this to you, and to temper the information you provide accordingly).
- Use the Companies House WebCheck service at www.companieshouse.gov.uk and invest £1 in pulling off a set of accounts. While most companies provide the minimum amount of information necessary, as abbreviated accounts, you can still glean some interesting insights (and if you're not sure how to interpret their balance sheet, you can always ask your accountant).
Here are a couple more "how do they do that?" aspects explored:
Web search engine rankings
How do some sites manage to get positioned so far up search engine rankings? While there is no single answer to this, there's no doubt that it has become vital to ensure your website is easy for search engines to "crawl" and index. Having made the site accessible, the content then needs to be as compatible as possible with the searches prospective customers are likely to be conducting.
There are a number of tricks your competitors may be using to improve their own rankings. One is to gather intelligence from aggregators on the most relevant search terms being entered (you can get this information from sites like www.goodkeywords.com - and it's free). Aim to get these terms mentioned verbatim at a high level on your site (not buried three sub-menus deep). The more times your site is referenced during these searches, the higher its ranking is likely to become.
Another trick is to increase the attractiveness of a site by giving stuff away free, and your competitors may be doing this to help position themselves as experts in a particular field. While it can be quite hard to turn a search engine click-through directly into business, you can improve the chances of a repeat visit by giving your visitors something for their trouble, even if this is only free information. If you offer downloads with a degree of perceived value, you may be able to get an e-mail address in exchange for them – providing you with a valuable source of direct marketing information.
Getting magazine/newspaper publicity
PR consultancies are fond of quoting the general rule of thumb that editorial mentions are "worth" three or four times that space's equivalent value in advertising. Whatever the equation really is, you can be sure that with most media, being in features and articles will give you a valuable additional stamp of credibility. If your competitors are using this technique, you need to understand what they are doing and apply it to your own business.
The main thing to appreciate is that most journalists are overloaded with opinion and "puff", but starved of real news and hard data with which to understand issues, trends and markets (I know, I used to be one). As one example, Nationwide Building Society produced the first house sale price index figures back in 1973, but it wasn't until the Halifax committed to producing these figures every month in 1984 that journalists really latched onto the subject. So you don't always have to be first in order to make the biggest impression. Could this be relevant to your marketplace?
Most businesses know about sending out press releases to promote new products. However, comparatively few take the time to cultivate relationships with the key journalists in their marketplace – yet this can provide you with openings that you just wouldn't get any other way. Ask what they are interested in and see if you can help them get it – if not from your own resources, then from your customers.
About the author
Martin Brassell is a hub director for the SEEDA Enterprise Hub Network, which helps the South East's high potential entrepreneurial businesses to get off to the best possible start through coaching, access to finance, market intelligence and support with intellectual property.
