Don’t copy your competitors but do learn from them

Published on December 10, 2008 Don’t copy your competitors but do learn from them

However unique your product or service mix, chances are that you will have some sort of competitors either already strong in the market or emerging. Ensuring your website business is as successful as possible means ‘benchmarking’ against them to work out whether customers are likely to buy from them or from you.

Mystery shopping, visiting your competitors and observing what they do can all be useful tools in improving your own online performance.

We do NOT mean you should copy off your competitors as this is not original and customers will see through it. What’s more it is a fast way for your shopping cart software provider to close you down for breach of copyright – or even worse be in front of the ACCC or Commerce Commission for unfair trading or ‘passing off’.

But you can learn a lot from your competitors without copying them and use that information to improve and refine your own product offering. Here is a quick checklist:

1.  Do a search on Google for the key words that are used in your industry. Note if you see any results for their business and if they have any ‘sponsored link’ advertisements pointing to your competitors. This will give you an idea of where and how they are promoting their website.
2. Visit their website – keep a spreadsheet every month with your key competitors and what promotions they are running (along with your comments about them). Over time you can review this spreadsheet to draw some conclusions about their marketing strategy and promotional success (or lack of it)
3. Read their product descriptions
4. If your products are not specialised and expensive put in an order to your competitors. See how they treat you, how they package their products, whether they keep you informed about your order and the quality of their products.
5. Time how long it takes to load pages on their website. Do they have lots of high resolution product images or ones that are more suited to websites. What would your customers think of this?
6. What is missing from their product offering? If you were them what would you be unhappy about? Can you provide it?
7. Ask your web ecommerce company for a competitor report. They may be able to tell you more about who links to them and how they are performing on the keywords that are important to you
8. … and so on.

This is just a list to get you started. You can see the technique that is being employed: look at what they are doing and use that information to improve your own offering.

But remember: Don’t waste too much of your time worrying about what your competitors are doing. You need to devote as much time as possible to your own products and service. Competitor reviews are intended as a complement to your activities to help you refine your strategy – they should not be an end in themselves or else you will not have the time to get on with your own business.