How to Maintain Competitive Advantage in Business: Tips You Shouldn’t Ignore
You have to understand that every business, whether large or small, needs a competitive advantage to survive in the market space. It is essential to distinguish your business from the competition, no matter how little it might be. In today’s business world, every advantage counts to shoot your business at the top of your industry. It will be a futile effort to run your business exactly how the competition does. Your consumers and customers alike will find it very difficult to differentiate your product and services from the saturated market.
Also read: How to develop a good market penetration strategy
Maintaining a competitive advantage in your business will take strategic planning, robust research, and massive investment in marketing your products and services. As an entrepreneur, have you stopped to ask yourself, “what is my competitive advantage?” If you are seeking how to gain a competitive advantage, then you are in the right place. Creating a competitive advantage requires a great deal of work, which I will help you to understand how it is done. The primary task is not only about developing a competitive advantage; it lies in maintaining your competitive edge.
There are many competitive advantage strategies that will definitely suit your business; you only need to identify the ones you need. Just like in the game of chess, you need to maintain a competitive advantage until the very end to win the game. In a game that everybody knows the rules and the strategies to win, you will need to develop a strong track record, and unrelenting innovation is the best strategies to adopt.
Tips On How To Maintain Competitive Advantage In Your Business
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Thoroughly study your business and customers
You cannot develop and maintain your competitive advantage in the market if you don’t have a good understanding of your business, customers, and competitors. Creating a competitive advantage in your business involves your product must be attractive with excellent benefits. Aside from understanding your business, you need also to understand your customers. What type of consumers do you sell your products to? Are your customers young, old, male, female, married, or single? What is the distance between your business location and your customers?
Do you share the same group of customers with your competitors, or are they different? If you fail to understand your customer behavior, you will never know their reason for patronizing your business. You can discover more about your customer demographic information through surveys and customer interaction. Ensure you have identified your business’s unique strength before you go seeking how to gain a competitive advantage.
When you understand and know what your strengths are, it allows you to build on that to develop a competitive business. You need to ask yourself why consumers and customers buy from you in the first place. Your answer will tell you the value you provide for your customers. For example, if you offer clothing products, the quality, location of your business, and maybe the speed of delivery, all add to the reason your customers choose you over your competition.
Also see: How to source funds for your startup
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Study your competitors
To have a competitive advantage in business, you need to understand your competitors so that you offer what they don’t provide for the customers. You must know what your competitors do very well and those that they don’t.
To create a compelling competitive advantage, you to consider your competitor’s products, services, prices, location, and marketing plan. Try to put together a list of reasons why you think customers would go for your competitors’ products and services. Then you compare the list with your business advantages. What the strengths and benefits of your products and services have that the competitor does not. Ensure you come with a different product or service. It wouldn’t serve your business interest to imitate your competitor 100 percent.
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Reduce cost and improve product and service quality
Cost reduction is an excellent way to create a competitive advantage in any business arena. The average consumer is susceptible to price, so reducing your price while maintaining quality products and services is an excellent way to create a competitive advantage. Before you move to adopt the price reduction strategy, you need to review your production process. You wouldn’t want to reduce the price of your product to end up with a poor profit margin. Consider using technologies that can reduce the cost of production.
Make no mistake; service delivery may be the only key factor that differentiates competitors in the market. In such a case, you need to come up with a quality customer delivery service that will set you apart from your competitors. You can consider hiring better staff, improving your training standards, and offering rewards for outstanding service delivery. It is important that you maintain product quality while reducing the cost of production.
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Develop an economic moat
You can take advantage of a barrier to enter and retain a competitive advantage in a particular market. Your ability to bypass hurdles can turn out to help your business establish a useful tool against new competition. For instance, you can own an African-themed restaurant in a mall. This automatically provides an economic moat since it will be unlikely for the mall to have another African-themed restaurant in the same location.
To create an economic moat for your business, you should try to negotiate a site monopoly on the product or service that you provide.
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Stay innovative
After you have gained a competitive advantage in the market space, it doesn’t call for you to relax your guard. To be successful, you must remain competitive by coming up with new and innovate products that serve your customer’s needs. You need to know that your competitors will also want to usurp you and your business. There are times that require you must take chances no matter how little if you want to stay ahead of the competition. The major thing you must never forget is to conduct quality research before delving into any new business strategy or approach.
Conclusion
Your ability to achieve and retain your competitive advantage in business is entirely up to you. This article has provided virtually all you need to make that happen; now, it is left for you to apply them in your business.
You can also share your thought in the comment section, as I would be happy to also learn from you.
