Competition Archives - Thoranna.is

Branding: Be Different, Be Brave!

Do you want to beat your competition? Do you really want to be the winner in your market?

Then you need to be clear on why people should choose you rather than the others.

Typical answers to the question “why should I choose you over your competitors?” are things such as:

“We are better”
“We have better customer service”
“We have better quality products”

These kinds of answers just aren’t going to cut it. Better according to who? According to what standards? Of course we should always aim to give our customer the best we can, within the confines of our positioning in the market. If we are going to be the cheapest, we are not going to provide luxury quality, but we can aim to provide the best quality within our affordable price range. But there is a fundamental flaw in choosing “better” as the main reason for choosing you over the competition. First of all, there are no universal standards as to what is considered good, better or best, it is all relative and it is all in the eye of the beholder. Secondly, these kinds of things can be imitated. If you are doing or providing something better than the competition, they can study you and copy what you are doing. They may not always succeed, but they will definitely try, and may very well succeed. So whilst I am not saying you should not aim to be the best at what you do (you should!) I am simply saying, that it is extremely unlikely that this is enough and you need more.

So why should people choose you over your competitors?

Simple. [Read more…]

How Do You Monitor Your Business Competition?

In a previous blog post we have established that you can’t ignore your business competition. But putting them under the microscope once and then just leaving it is not enough. Things change and develop very fast in today’s world, so you always need to keep your finger on the pulse.

Analysis of the business competition varies greatly between businesses and markets but there are always basic things to consider such as: [Read more…]

Why You Need To Analyze Your Business Competition

Recently I met with the CEO of a promising Icelandic startup company. When I asked him how their competitors did things, he said he didn’t care that much about their business competitors, he just wanted to focus on what they themselves were doing. I get it. Don’t get sucked into focusing too much on the other guys. However, here’s the problem:

In your marketing, you are trying to convince people to buy from you rather than someone else. [Read more…]

Content Marketing: Don‘t Build Things On Sand

Content marketing can be a very very strong marketing tactic for smaller businesses. It does require time and effort, but not necessarily that much cold hard cash – sometimes no cash at all. What it does require however is that you have already laid a solid foundation.

If you don’t know who you want to appeal to and if you don’t know your viewers or readers, how are you going to make content that appeals to them? How will you know where best to share it with them? How will you know what kind of content they want to see? – do they like text, video, images etc?

Also, you don’t want to only talk about what it is you do, you need to have room to talk about other things that your target group is interested in – otherwise you are just like that annoying guy at the party who can never talk about anything but himself and what he is interested in.

Therefore it is extremely important that you know your target group or groups and know and understand them very well. Oh, and if you have a number of target groups, you need to know what different things appeal to each of them, and how best to deliver the content so that it is effective, but also to make sure that content meant for one group does not negatively affect another group should they come across it. You need to be clear on all of these things for your content to be effective.

You also need to know who you want to be, what you want them to think of you, what feelings you want to evoke with them through your content. Your content is an extremely strong brand builder – but if you don’t know what you want your brand to be then your content can not be effective in building that brand. It can even do more harm than good by muddling your image and causing people to be confused about who you are and what you do. That will never work.

If your content is not consistent, if it does not convey the same overall message and brand, it will never be very effective – and we don’t have the time or the resources to be doing things that are not working as hard for us as we are doing ourselves.

We also need to realise how our content works within the marketing process. Content has a different purpose based on where in the marketing process we are using it. Do you want it to grab people’s attention? Arouse their interest? Get them to like you? Trust you? Give them a taste of what it is you have to offer? Clinch the sale? Get repeat business? Or help referrals?

That’s why I keep hammering on about the foundations, the strategy, because if your strategy is well thought out and planned, that will be your rock to build on and everything else you do in your marketing will be so so much more effective. If you build your actions on sand they will just blow away in the wind ;)