Eat Your Competition!
(No … not THAT way!)
If you’re thinking of opening a restaurant, where’s the best place to open it?
Of course you know the answer: right next to another restaurant, right?
Why is that old marketing adage true?
Because, in the case of restaurants at least, you want to place your premises where you know people are already going looking for somewhere to eat.
Conrad Hilton is supposed to have said that the three secrets to a successful hotel were “Location, location, location,” meaning that he carefully and strategically placed his hotels where he knew wealthy travellers would be looking for rest, good food and a little pampering.
Whilst I suspect that there is a little more to the sustained success of a hotel, he made a good, (and memorable), point.
Restaurants and hotels are brick and mortar, though. What about us digital marketers?
A New View Of Competition
As a small business success coach, I get asked a lot how to beat your competitors online. Yet I come across two extremes of dealing with competition, both of which massively miss the point.
At one extreme are the folks who are afraid to enter a market because they fear there is too much competition. What you need to do is flip that logic over and look at it through the consumer’s eyes.
We are all consumers, so this shouldn’t be hard to do.
Let’s say you like wildlife documentaries, so you tune into the Discovery Channel and watch a great one.
The following week, your partner points out to you that there’s a new series of wildlife documentaries – and they’re going to show them on some other natural history channel.
Do you blow and snort in protest that you won’t watch them because they’re not on Discovery?
Of course not! And the second channel has realised there’s a slice of a pie they can have if they broadcast programmes of that kind.
Do you see? Far from fearing that natural history documentaries “have been done” the new channel will have done its research and seen that there is a market for that kind of programme. That’s far, far less of a gamble than coming up with some brand new kind of show that nobody’s ever seen or heard of before.
Now, you probably think that no television channel would be so stupid as to do that, especially if it’s a fledgling channel with a moderate budget.
Yet that is exactly what I see marketers do time and time again. They think they have to come up with some new thing, present it in a never-seen-before way and blow everyone’s minds with their genius!
Maybe Archimedes, Edison or Einstein could have come up with such ideas, but for the humble rest of us normal human beings, it’s just not going to happen.
Whilst it’s absolutely NOT okay to plagiarise, it’s commonplace to add your own twist to something that’s already working. It’s personal style and individual touches that often make a customer choose you over a competitor.
Go back to the restaurant example for a moment.
Let’s suppose you fancy Italian food and there, right next door to each other, are two Italian restaurants. Which one do you choose?
You may choose on the basis of price or reputation, but quite often a deciding factor will be a twist or something original on the menu. Restaurant one sells traditional pasta dishes, let’s say, whilst the other offers some kind of Italian home cooking and the restaurant has an ambience that just “feels” more attractive somehow. It can be as subtle and subjective as that.
The Other Extreme
The other extreme I see is when people try to enter highly competitive markets when they have no knowledge or understanding of it. I’ve seen this many times with people creating blogs and websites about “making money online” – a notoriously difficult and hugely competitive market – when they haven’t actually made a penny themselves!
When I coach them, I ask them if they can give me a reason why I would buy from their website when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of marketers who are making a lot of money online, whose websites are offering me something from their personal experience.
Of course, they cannot answer me. They naively believe that everyone wants to make money online and therefore that is the only market to be in.
WRONG!
At the very least be in a market that’s to do with something you like, preferably love, and know at least a little about. (You don’t have to be an expert, but it should be a topic you’d happily chat with friends over a coffee or a beer about.) Pets, sports, health, relationships, rearing kids, music, arts in general, geeky computer things … there are so many markets you’d never run out. Markets where people spend real money! One lady famously made a small fortune selling sewing patterns for curtains, (drapes), that she happened to know how to make!
Two Argentinian brothers who knew about nothing except farming, ended up crushing it online when they discovered that a lot of other people in their industry hadn’t figured out the benefits of keeping llamas! (Apparently, they keep wolves out better than any electric fencing, and they’re cheaper! Who knew?) So they created an ebook about that and it sold like hot cakes.
Trust Your Gut Instinct!
Whilst there are markets that are too obscure to really sell to, there are very few industries or institutions where money doesn’t change hands for some goods or services. Find out what that is, add your spice to it, and … easy market research these days … start chatting about it in Facebook groups to see if you can discover what people’s needs are in your chosen arena.
Once you find a need – you’re in! Just figure out a way you can fill it, (the principle is ONE problem, ONE solution).
What Next?
Take some action! Come up with something you’d be excited to get out of bed for if you were selling it for the foreseeable future, and begin looking to see what competition there is out there.
The more there is, the better you’re likely to do.
Then, use their ideas – again, don’t plagiarise, but ADAPT. Success, as Tony Robbins taught me, leaves clues.
If you’d like to know about an entire library of successful “swipes” for virtually any market, click here.
