One of the many challenges of digital marketing is the fact that everyone has access to the internet. This may sound contradictory because access to the internet means that more people can find your business, the challenge comes with competition within the market.
The internet allows your market and target audience access to platforms that as easily utilised your competition as you. So how do you deal with all the competition and challenges that your business faces?
Handling online competition can take your business to the next level.
Is competition really bad for business, though? How does competition in the market affect you, your business, services, or the products that you sell?
In this post, we try to shed some light on online or more popularly “digital marketing” standards, ethics and the challenges that come with it.
It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in, nor the size of your business; the truth is that all business owners will come face-to-face with competitors and various aspects that may throw a spanner in the works of productivity.
How Social Media Complements Business
Social media is the crème de la crème that reaches near and far and is also a key factor in digital strategy.
If you haven’t done so yet, you need to experiment to find the best platform that suits your business needs. While some people may prefer YouTube for their help and guide videos, others may choose Facebook to promote events and other news, and some professionals may feel that LinkedIn is the way to connect with others.
Why You Should Use Social Media Today
Simply put, social media is a series of platforms designed to share media, content and interact with the public. Clearly, it gives you some great opportunity to engage with your market on a one-on–one basis.
Social media has changed the game of business.
There are various reasons you should use these platforms to benefit and grow your business, these include the following:
Connect with Prospects
Social media is an online gateway to marketing better and it allows you to directly interact with prospective customers and even nurture warm leads.
Brand Awareness
It’s a great way for you to promote your brand, become discovered by your target market and gain their trust. As part of establishing your brand, you also get to showcase essential ethics of trust, quality and great service.
Increased Traffic to Your Website
While you’re focused on growing your business using digital marketing, you could also use social media as a means of increasing the views and visitors to your business website. It’s another way to generate leads and possible sales conversions.
Allow Self-Promotion
While the ability to share and “spread the word” exists on social media, your prospects and visitors are now able to share the word about your business, services, and products with people that they know. So too does the doors of opportunity open and you better your business’ chances of great things.
Challenges with Your Competition
Everyone has access to the internet as we’ve mentioned before, but now that this exists, you also face some other struggles when trying to promote your business online.
Competition is a healthy part of all successful economies.
Time is of the Essence
Time is of the essence indeed, but we don’t all have time to effectively market our business and follow up on leads amongst the many factors that come with digital marketing. Hence having a great marketing team in place allows you the time to focus on other parts of your business, while giving them the time to action effective marketing strategy.
Money Matters
Digital marketing doesn’t come cheap and you need to have a budget in place to help achieve your goals. Paid ads and email campaigns can generate revenue in return, but you need to pay to activate certain things like membership or digital tools for that matter. If you have staff working for you, salaries will need to be paid amongst other.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a large or small business, money is a key factor to get the important wheels turning. While money is needed in marketing, it is often the first department to be cut-off when making budget reductions, however, that doesn’t mean it has to be the end of getting discovered on and offline.
Must-Have Resources
For any digital marketing to be successful in the midst of all the competition, you need to rely on innovation and resources to achieve this. With a lack of the personnel to help on the marketing side, whether it is effective content or lead generation, you may find it difficult to compete with the rivals. Being innovative can be hard and the fact that your competing markets are thriving with ideas can easily throw you off your game.
Keeping a Cool Head
In the midst of all the “craziness” that’s become your constant world of business and competition, in all things, always remember to keep a cool head and stay professional.
While it’s easy to become tempted to talk badly about your competition in the attempts to win over customers, that sort of behavior won’t do you any good. In fact, you may just be shutting plenty of doors to more opportunity.
Always be professional, and while some folks don’t always play by the book, you should always consider that even when taking a calculated risk, everything has an outcome, good or bad.
Innovation Tips
In marketing, creativity is a major role player in staying ahead of your game, but this means you need to work extra hard towards achieving this.
Competition should inspire better ideas and drive innovation.
Here are some great tips that can make your social media marketing efforts shine:
- Interactive content – part of what makes content great is the fact that it’s interesting to read, it answers questions and it gets readers informed and willing to share it.
- Visual effects – adding a video makes things even easier for your viewers to understand. A video cuts the time taken to read and can make the experience much more exciting.
- Target your audience – amongst the many internet users that exist, not all of them are interested in your market and what you may have to offer. It’s important then to reach your audience because you’re easily speaking to more viewers and still managing to miss some potential warm leads.
- Be different – try to do things a bit different from your competitor in this way you’ll stand out from the competition.
- Find inspiration – moving away from all the work can give you time to become inspired with fresh ideas. Take a clean break and totally change your focus even if this means doing something completely different like going hiking, cycling, and paintball shooting anything, to help change and “reset” your original focus.
On the Plus Side
Sure, the competition can play on the ability to feel motivated and instead have a somewhat negative effect on certain people because of a fear that you may not make it through. While it may be natural to be concerned about competition, the truth is a good amount of competition really creates great opportunity.
May the best business win!
Healthy competition not only raises business standards but opens the door to various benefits such as.
- Eliminating a monopoly – with competition, you can enjoy a fair and equal chance to stand out from amongst peers and competing brands, because you’re given a chance to showcase your business without being limited to a monopoly. Competition eliminates monopolies.
- Affordability – with the monopoly out the way, you’re able to offer your customers more value for their hard-earned money, which makes you credible, trustworthy and more of a first choice compared to someone more expensive.
- Inspires innovation – with competition in place, it inspires you to become creative, and be different from the competitors you face as you’re all striving to win over the same potential customers.
- Focused market – with competition on the geographical scale, you’re more inspired to stay focused on your target audience to win more sales than your competitors.
- Stay ahead of the curve – stay ahead of your game and keep tabs on what are the latest and hottest trends in your industry. By educating your team on things to look out for when it comes to the competition, will help you better your chances within the market, let alone zone in on your audience.
The Takeaway
Just as you should learn to embrace your challenges, you should also learn to accept and thrive on strong business competition to benefit your company in the long-run, while knowing that opportunity comes in all forms.
While it’s tempting to constantly check up on your competition to see how they are positioning themselves in the social media and digital marketing space, remember that the last thing the consumer wants is more of the same. Be different. Believe in the value and quality your business is here to deliver, and show the world your unique strengths.
Authenticity sells, so don’t copy your competition but rather use them as inspiration to be even more creative and innovative.
It doesn’t matter if your competition has one million followers, just keep using the amazing free gift of social media to grow your business and your brand.
