(By Jeffrey Hedquist) Your client has strengths and weaknesses. Your client’s competitors do too. No business is perfect.
One of your first acts as a marketer should be to analyze your client’s competition for weaknesses. What are the competitors saying in their marketing? Where are they placing their emphasis? Are they using a slogan that states their position? What is their reputation in the marketplace?
Strength = Weakness
The competition’s point of concentration may be a strength for them, but that position can also be a weakness that your client can exploit and sell against.
If the competitor advertises the lowest price, your client can offer customers additional services at no charge, or promote a unique expertise or benefit. A series of stories demonstrating them can be a campaign for your client.
If the competition touts its extensive services, your client might offer no-frills products, savings for customers who will do their own delivery, or who expect less luxury. Motel 6 is a good example of an advertiser who takes this approach.
If the competition is proud of their convenient location, your client could offer to come to the customers’ homes or workplaces or to pay them for the time and fuel to visit. Or… make what your client offers so unique and enticing, that the inconvenient location (which you emphasize in their marketing) is worth the reward of shopping at your client.
If a competitor offers a huge selection, maybe your advertiser talks about the fact that they’ve narrowed down customers’ choices to the very best items, or that they specialize in a few unique, rare, or exclusive one-of-a-kind items.
A competitor that emphasizes their rich heritage and decades of experience can be sold against if your client is new, young, cool, and willing to do or offer things their old, dated, stodgy competition isn’t.
Analyze their customers
You can even do this analysis of your client’s customers. For example, one advantage consumers have is the ability to shop online, obtain advice, and compare prices, items, and services. The disadvantage they have is limited time. Your client has done the research and may offer a comparison chart, or other ways to help, both in-store and online that can save customers search time.
That “gift of time” can be the best bonus your client can offer. We used that very phrase for a high-end auto dealer with great success.
I think you get the idea. Every seeming strength of a competitor can be seen as a weakness and a marketing opportunity for your client.
Be a marketer
Your advantage: you are the marketer who did more than just put together a schedule or bring your client’s script ideas to life. You dug deep and uncovered real advantages for them that may just change the course of their business.
Jeffrey Hedquist, “Advertising’s Storyteller,” has won over 700 awards and brought in millions of dollars for clients. His articles, ebooks, seminars, and coaching have helped stations nationwide prosper. Got a question about radio marketing? Email [email protected]. Read more from Jeffrey here.
