7 Business Tactics To Stay Ahead Of Competition
For any startup business in 2023, it’s important to make yourself stand out and stay ahead of the competition. According to a recent survey, there are around 5.1 million registered companies in the UK, with a further 4.6 million on the effective register. So that’s a lot of companies to compete with!
Standing out from the crowd does not have to be too difficult, however. For businesses, both large and small, there are several key strategies to distinguish yourself, ensuring you remain front and centre for your target audience, no matter how many competitors move into the fray. Starting with the most obvious:
Know Your Competition
It can be easy to stay narrow-minded in your goals and motives – to the point where you’re not paying attention to what your competition is doing. If you want to fight off competition, however, you need to know everything about them. What are they offering? What are they doing differently? What are their biggest strengths, and what are their biggest weaknesses? If you identify these traits, then you will have a far clearer picture of how to distinguish yourself.
Inspire Your Channel Partners
A huge portion of UK businesses trade through channel partners, but not all of them put the work in to ensure they are getting the most out of their investments. A strong partner ecosystem is all about driving Channel incentives and making sure that your partners are inspired to push your business to the next level. There are so many benefits to inspired channel partners, including increased brand awareness, boosted revenue, and an expanded market, so treat your ecosystem carefully to get the most out of it.
But Get To Know Your Own Customers
Having said this, it’s important to get to know your own customers outside of your channel partners. One of the mistakes many businesses make is leaving customer service and one-to-one relationships with their channel ecosystem while remaining outside of the fray as a brand. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, make sure you’re getting to know your customers, what they like, what they don’t like, what they want for the future and how they want your company to evolve.
Focus Your Social Media Marketing
In 2023, social media marketing is one of the biggest markets in the digital advertising space, and for a good reason. It gives companies a way to market to a vast range of people, helping them to target new audiences and effectively spread the word.
But it can be easy to go a little too far and put all of your efforts into attaining more customers. One of the best things about social media is that it can put you on the same level as your customers and allow you to form a closer relationship with them. A good way to stay ahead of the competition is to utilise that and focus your marketing strategies on creating engaged customers rather than more customers.
But Keep Things Real
Social media isn’t the only way you can do this, however. With the rise of digital marketing, many of your competitors will be bypassing in-person events, choosing instead to carry out the majority of their operations online. But in-person events are still a great way to delve deeper into the business landscape, get to know your customers on a closer level, and form deeper relationships with your partners.
Training, Training, Training
If you start falling behind the competition, it can be easy to think that the problem is a lack of employees. You then go through the process of expanding your employee base in the hope that key roles can be shared and productivity can be heightened. But most of the time, this is a mistake. Not only is hiring new employees expensive, but it is more beneficial to further train your existing employees and ramp up engagement.
A huge amount of UK employees are given training at the beginning of a new job, only to never receive training again – even when new methods and operations are introduced into the company. But training employees can give them new skills and help them to work more efficiently and with greater accuracy.
Update Your Image For The Present And The Future
Lastly, it’s always important for a company to update their image and ensure they are standing out from the crowd in a visual sense. This can include updating your website, taking a look at your branding, your social media platforms, your packaging – everything that a consumer looks at, make sure it’s updated for the present and the future. This will help you to capture the attention in 2023 and beyond.
Business Tactics – Other useful links from our Knowledge Centre:
How To Know If Your Marketing Agency Is Ready To Expand
Why Should You Consolidate Your Business Software?
Useful Tips for Finding Cheap Car Insurance
Remember to Compare Your Business Costs is here to help your business every step of the way from business advice, or saving you time and money on your business purchases such as: