Wise words from one of my favorite bands (Rage Against the Machine), “know your enemy”. In marketing, you are competing with other companies, and even industries (look at how movie theaters compete against DVD, and television) for scarce money. In order to succeed, you need to arm yourself with all the knowledge you can about your competition. You need to know their strengths, weaknesses and strategies, so that you can develop your plan to defeat them. Great, so you already knew that. But how do you go about obtaining this information? Here are some quick tips for you…

1. List your direct and indirect competitors. How are you going to learn about your competition if you don’t even know who they are? As one of my old mentors (and good friend, you know who you are) would say, “make a list”. Don’t forget to include both direct (companies that provide similar products or services to yours) and indirect competitors (companies that provide products or services different from your own that satisfy the same need).

2. Pay them a visit. After you have your list, you should visit your competitors website and learn what you can. Not only will you learn about their products and / or services, you will also learn how they are marketing themselves, what they think of their own brand, and you will be able to get an idea of which type of customers they are targeting. You can also learn about their history, and the officers of the company. If there is a trade show, visit them and find out all you can. If they have a store, go in and patronize them. Find out what you can up close and in person. It’s important to do this early so that you will get a fresh impression of what type of business they run.

3. Dig a little deeper. Visit www.hoovers.com and check out their financials. If they are a publicly traded company, then there are tons of sources to go to get additional information. Go to www.dnb.com and check out a credit report. Remember those officers you learned about in the previous step? Google them and find out more about them. This will let you know a little bit more about how decisions are made at this company.

4. Set a date to follow-up. Like all marketing, competitive analysis is a process not a project (we’ll probably discuss this in detail in a future post). This means that you need to set up a follow-up date in your calendar so that you can go through the process again, and find out what’s changed. If you’re dealing with professionals, then your competition is looking at you just like you’re looking at them, and they’ll react to whatever strategy you’ve chosen to take them down. Do yourself a favor and stay vigilant.

Once you know all about your competition, you can use this information to find out what you can do better or differently than them. Develop your strategy and watch the competition suffer. We’ll talk more about how to take these suckers out in the future.

Hey, I’m not an expert on competitive analysis, so if any of you readers have anything to share, let me know in the comments, or email me at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com

Entrepreneurs drive the business world. They are the ones that take the big risks. They move fast instead of waiting for things to happen. They are way more action oriented than other companies. They have the tenacity and drive to succeed. So why then do so many start up companies fail. There are some obvious reasons, such as the usual barriers to entry; it can be difficult especially if you are trying to go up against the big boys without a tenth of their budget. But I believe there’s more to it than that. I think many entrepreneurs are so excited to start their business that they do so without giving the process enough thought and planning. This is especially true of online businesses, where the start-up costs are relatively cheaper (the cost of a domain is much cheaper than renting an office). Here are some reasons why I think many new bushiness fail…

1. Belief that being good is all that is needed to be successful

I live in a neighborhood where many people know how to cook excellent food. Yet, there aren’t many successful “mom and pop” restaurants. Sure, I see new ones pop up all the time, but they don’t really last very long. Having visited some of these places (hey I’m all about helping local business thrive) I can tell you the quality of the food is far superior to most places. However, quality is just not good enough in this day in age. You can have the best product in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you aren’t taking care of your other business responsibilities. Little things like bringing in customers, pricing strategy, customer service, location, keeping proper hours, etc. Having an excellent product is a definite must, but don’t forget that it’s only one piece of the business puzzle. Remember the basics… play to your strengths and passions, be objective in regards to your business, and seek help from others when you need it.

2. Lack of goals

Let’s face it, this is a problem even for the big companies. The difference is that they can afford to make mistakes, you can’t. One of my favorite movies of all time is “Deep Cover” (yeah, I said it), and there’s one part in that movie where a father turns to his son and asks him what he wants for Christmas. The kid shrugs and says he doesn’t know. The father then says something like “how are you ever gonna get what you want if you don’t even know what you want.” Exactly, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Setting goals is essential in life and in business. Sit down and identify your personal goals. See where they sync up with your business goals (spend more time with your family, more money, etc), visualize what you want to achieve, and then develop a plan to get there. Set up milestones (divide your big goal into smaller objectives), and timelines to achieve these milestones. Prioritize your efforts around these goals and milestones and you will be much more focused on what is important to you. There are rules for setting goals, but I’m sure we’ll get to that in a later post.

3. No process

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is that they have no systematic processes for anything. Most of them keep everything in their head, and never commit ideas to paper. Let’s face it, business is complex. If it wasn’t then we wouldn’t have to go to school for years to learn how to do it, and you probably wouldn’t be reading my posts. Put those ideas on paper. Write out your processes, especially for some of the more complex things. This will make it easier for you to identify where things can be improved. Also it makes it easier to train others whenever you get to that point. Remember, a good business needs structure, processes, and people. You need a plan, tasks, timelines, etc to reach that plan, and people to execute it.

There are probably more things that I’m leaving out, but these are the major factors. What do you think? Why do you think so many start-up companies fail? More importantly what can entrepreneurs do to make sure they succeed?