Strengthen Your Strategy with a Competitive Analysis
The idea of "competition" is deeply intertwined in the business world. In these tough economic times, there is often a winnowing of competitors and the stronger will emerge stronger than ever when the good times return.
Naturally, any strategic plan must be preceded by a competitive analysis. There are several factors to consider and below is a sampling of options.
Direct competitors: What organizations or companies are competing on the same playing field as you? Who is targeting the same customers, in the same industry, playing by the same rules?
Indirect competitors: What is your business, really? Are you just in railroads or transportation? Are you in electricity or green energy?
Unique selling points: What edge do you have on your competitors? And what edge do they have on you with regard to production capacity, distribution channels and product features? What is your value proposition vis-à-vis your competitors?
Geography: What is the market share by region or country for you and your competitors?
Market research: What industry research already exists? When did you last survey your customers or target market?
Positioning: Which "rung of the ladder" do you and your competitors own in your customers' mind? Conventional marketing "positioning" theory applies as much to public relations as to advertising?
Media presence: How visible are you in your industry trade media compared to your competition? If your prospective customers never read about you then they may assume you are on the way out, which could erode your market share over time.
Internet: In the Internet age, what word or phrase do you or your competitors own? With the growth of blogs, social networking and even Twitter, the Internet is an invaluable tool for researching what consumers are saying about you and your competitors.
Patents and trademarks: Is there significant infringement of patents, trademarks, copyrights or other intellectual property by your competitors?
Standards, codes and regulations: Are there industry standards governing quality? Do products need to be certified to meet a local code before they can be specified? Are there environmental regulations that will affect your competitiveness?
Innovation: An original new product could bury the competition and it is vital to keep up with technology trends and support research within your own company or association.
Associations: Competitors need not be viewed as enemies. The word "competitor" is derived from Latin words meaning "strive together." If you aren't a member of an industry association with your competitors, perhaps you should be. Or if no such association exists, perhaps you should establish one.
Those are just a few factors to consider when doing a competitive analysis today. A complete competitive array should be considered before developing a strategic plan.
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Top 3 ROI Measurement Myths Unraveled
Just because it’s measurable doesn’t mean it’s accurate -- welcome to the ROI gray zone where the following myths alter major decisions on a daily basis. The increased ability to track electronic communications in real time and with real numbers is great, but some common measurement misnomers can easily send you down the wrong path.
ROI Myth #1: Click-Thru Rates are a Good Measure of Success
While in some cases this is true, keep in mind that a click-thru rate is only a measure of clicks to impressions on whatever web content you’re trying to measure. But, what happens if the number of impressions is exponentially increased relative to the clicks? It means your measure of success – the click-thru rate – appears utterly horrific. At first blush, the knee-jerk reaction is that the strategy in question is not working well and thus, the entire effort was unsuccessful. But, that’s because sometimes click-thru rates are the wrong item to examine. Why? Because it’s actually the click-thru itself that matters, not the number of times someone potentially could have clicked through – a commonly misunderstood dynamic that essentially places more weight on the drive-by rather than the walk-in.
ROI Myth #2: Your Web Traffic is Mostly Human and Not Artificially Inflated
By now, most people know that the measurement of “hits” has always been almost entirely useless. And since measuring web traffic is not an exact science, many people rely on unique visitors and page views to gauge their overall traffic levels. But, what happens if a large portion of your traffic is coming from non-humans – search spiders, content robots and information scrapers? Your unique visitors may be more unique than you think while simultaneously giving you a false sense of popularity. Secondly, page views have been a long-held staple in web measurement, but if your pages aren’t static and are being built by many component parts, you may be registering several page views on only one page. Sound familiar? It’s the same dilemma hits had back in the day. Check your page view metrics to be sure dynamically generated content isn’t artificially inflating your counts. It happens more than you may realize.
ROI Myth #3: Measuring Campaign Tactics is the Real Measure of the Campaign
When you have all the ingredients to make bread and decide to eliminate just the yeast, the end result is fairly evident. When executing a series of tactics to achieve a common goal, it’s natural to inquire about the success of individual elements. What response did the email generate? What about the full-page ad we placed? Or the press pick-up we got? Or the search engine optimization we did? It’s also natural to think that if some tactics don’t work as well as others that they should be eliminated to save money and time. But, what happens if it is all these tactics working in harmony that achieves the end result? Scrutinizing and fine tuning isolated tactics is important, but measuring the end result of your entire campaign is the ultimate goal. Be mindful that the tactic you eliminate isn’t the catalyst for the reaction in the first place.
Best regards,
Peter Rush, Chairman & CEO
Visit Our Web site: www.kellencommunications.com
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