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Keep Your Enemies Close, Part 2

Small Business Marketing

Keep Your Enemies Close, Part 2

Written by Jay Shapiro for Gaebler Ventures

In business they say competition is healthy, but it's only healthy if it urges you to step up your game and combat it. Harsh though the attitude might be, it's as well to look upon your competitors as enemies. And it's wiser still to look at the different ways you could defeat them. This is part two of a two part article.

Bear in mind that any advertising you put in place should be designed to reach out to each category of competitors, so that really means you'd need to create three separate advertisements.

Creating an advert to target Category #1 - Your direct competition:

Your aim here is to garner customers who are already buying the same or similar product from your competitors. On the positive side you know they are potentially receptive as they are already buying weight loss products that are like yours. The problem is that they aren't buying them from you. So how do you persuade them to do just that? You need to specify in your adverts why your product is the best. This can be done in a number of ways. Perhaps your product is less expensive. Maybe you use superior ingredients or can boast a better success rate of weight loss amongst your existing clients than that of your competition. Remember, the people you are appealing to don't need to be sold the concept of weight loss products - they are already buyers. What you need to out across to this group is why your product is better than the one they use now.

Creating an advert to target Category #2 - Your direct competition:

Things get a little more tricky here. Remember that your target now is interested in weight loss, and they are already buying, but they aren't buying products that are similar or the same as yours. So it's not simply a question of persuading them to switch to your product as with Category #1. This is more complicated because the products are different even thought they are all designed to achieve the same thing - weight loss. So slightly more persuasion is needed here. You are not only trying to convert the customer to a new company, you are asking them to change the route they take in order to lose weight.

The aspects that need to be outlined here are why your product is more convenient, less expensive, etc. Emphasis can be on any aspect that will change the customers' way of thinking about their preferred method of losing weight.

Creating an advert to target Category #3 - The apathetic group:

This is the hardest group of all to convert. The best way to think about this group is to consider them lazy. That's why they aren't doing anything. So your strategy here is to make things really easy for them. Outline how simple it can be to take one of your diet pills a couple of times a day. Explain that life is easier when you aren't carrying extra weight. Make purchase simple too by offering every means to allow them to buy from you. For example, when you are looking at online advertising make sure that payment systems are quick and easy to complete. Transactions that take too long to process will have the category #3 group clicking away and losing interest in an instant. Literally offer everything on a plate to this group.

So, knowing your competition in this way can help you to fine tune your marketing to add significant numbers of people to your client bank. Just keep in mind the different groups when designing your campaigns.

Jay Shapiro is a freelance writer based in the UK. Jay has a particular interest in the emotive aspects of the entrepreneur's character. "Alongside the nuts and bolts of business, the character of the person is often the ingredient responsible for success."