There’s one vital thing you need to understand when you’re planning for business success, and that’s what your competitors are up to. It doesn’t matter how much work you put in to appeal to your customers, to make great products, and to produce tempting adverts if you’re not aware of when your closest competitors might be planning to come out with something spookily similar. They don’t even need to be better than you, necessarily, but if they release before you’re ready they could occupy all the space in the market, and all the customer attention and hunger that you were relying on exploiting.

Today we’re looking at how you can plan around your competitors and find your own space for success.

Identifying the Competition

Before you can make constructive plans you need to know who your competition actually is. A competitive market analysis helps you identify who’s meaningfully competing for the same customers as you and prioritise them. Businesses trading a long way from you or targeting a market segment you’re not interested in are not threatening your share of the market in the same way that businesses nearby (or with a global reach, like Amazon for retailers), who are advertising to the same people to encourage them to buy similar products are.

Prioritising those direct competitors means ranking them by their ability to affect the market and cut into your share of customers and revenue. A nearby business with a much smaller marketing budget, inferior products and overall lesser brand penetration should be a lower priority for you than a more distant one that’s more able to advertise persuasively to what could be your customers.

This kind of ranking exercise is known as competitive benchmarking, and shows you how you compare with the competition, and not only who you have to worry about, but who has to worry about you, exposing bigger competitors who’s market dominance could be vulnerable. It’s rare for small businesses to know how to conduct competitor analysis, so it’s well worth getting expert help from consultants at this stage.

Finding the Time and Space

One of the most important things you can do is try to get inside your competitors’ calendar to find the time you need for your own products and projects to shine. If you launch a product in the same window as a competitor you force your customers to choose between you, and inflate the costs of your marketing as you both bid over similar advertising space and key words.

Anticipating their actions allows you to find the white space for your own projects to flourish and get a fair hearing from your public, locking in browsers to be loyal customers for years ahead.