This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Marketing Plan" by William Luther. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Are you looking to grow your business? Do you want to know how to beat the competition in business?
When selling a product, you’re going to have more than a few competitors out there. Luckily, William M. Luther’s book The Marketing Plan has advice on how to succeed in competitive markets.
Here are Luther’s four strategies to beat the competition, plus four more strategies from other business experts.
Strategies to Succeed in Competitive Markets
It would be ideal to find a market with few competitors. However, your ideal market may already be saturated with competitors. In this case, it’s possible to outmatch those competitors who have low market shares and inadequate resources by attempting to better them. Luther suggests that you can learn how to beat the competition in business in just four ways:
- Provide a better product or service by investing in business operations such as manufacturing and quality control.
- Pretend to provide a better product or service by investing in effective marketing strategies to make your product appear more valuable.
- Provide a cheaper product or service by increasing efficiency and cutting costs while maintaining quality.
- Provide better customer service by adopting policies that promote customer loyalty and repeat sales.
How to Analyze and Improve Upon the Competition
Business experts offer complimentary advice to help you beat the competition in business: Seek out your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They suggest four ways to learn more about the competition so that you can generate ideas to outmatch them:
- Attend professional conferences and trade shows: Visit competitors’ booths to see what they offer and how they interact with customers.
- Analyze their website and SEO strategy: In addition to visiting competitors’ websites, use SEO tools to analyze the keywords and Adwords they’re buying, their site traffic, and website ranking.
- Examine their social media presence: Find out what platform they use, what type of content they post and how often they share it, how many followers they have, and how responsive they are to customer queries and concerns.
- Sign up for their newsletter: This will give you in-depth knowledge of their email marketing strategy—what kind of content they send and how often.
Use this information to refine your product or service until it outperforms what’s currently on the market. Here are some examples of how this information complements Luther’s methods:
- Your product or service: If a competitor’s customers request specific upgrades or features, include these upgrades and features in your product or service.
- Your marketing: Differentiate the benefits that your product or service offers and make use of endorsements and free trials to provoke a more positive response.
- Your costs: If your competitor’s customers aren’t using some of the existing product’s features, remove them from your product to reduce your costs.
- Your customer service: If your competitor is slow to respond to customer concerns on social media, plan ways to strengthen your own social media approach.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Marketing Plan summary :
- How to build a team and motivate them to work together
- How to hire the right people—and keep them
- How to share and reinforce your vision
