Internet Marketing Is Only Growing: Is Your Business Ready?

Competition is unpleasant, but it is indispensable. It helps business improve their services and product quality. No matter what you are selling right now, there is always the chance someone is selling the same thing online, at a lower cost or with better customer services. With the easy access to hundreds of similar e-commerce stores, people often leave one and go to another at the slightest delay of order booking, or delivery. Not paying enough attention to your user experience (UX) is similar to hand-delivering your visitors to your competitors.

So, how do businesses deal with competitors? Some brands take measures that are outright unethical or illegal (like negative SEO), while others stick to more constructive actions including improving their website experience and customer services. You do not have to spend a fortune to optimize your customer experience. You can reduce the rates of defection by leveraging five simple steps.

Step 1: get to know your customer

Who are the visitors to your site? Are they middle-aged women? Are they seniors? Do you attract an exclusively hip and young crowd? To be able to attract the right traffic and keep them on your website, you need to know them like your childhood friends. Since you do not have the option of spending as much time as you did with your best friend, you can begin by working on their persona.

A customer persona is like a portrait of the typical converting visitor. It should portray their age, gender, occupation, likes, and spending capacity. Anything that influences the sales should be a part of the comprehensive buyer persona. Laying out a detailed image of the customer will not only help you understand them, but it will also help you attract them and serve them better. The persona should collect relevant profile data, activity data, business data, and support data.

Apart from the data, you should also include the different types of motivations in their buyer’s profile. The motivation can take two different forms – negative and positive. Positive emotions are the ones you should always leverage to push the customer towards the conversion point in the sales funnel.

Step 2: rendezvous with your competition

Which brands in the market are your current competitions? At this juncture, there is no room for assumptions. You need to find out who your real competitors are before you can device potential marketing strategies. As we have stated before, some brands are experts at offering a “friendlier service” or “better price,” but it is up to you to find out the deeper reasons behind these strategies. It is necessary to do some (ethical and online) spying on the brands. Visit Onlineimpact360.com to learn about the ways you can improve your competition research techniques.

Spying on any e-commerce service requires a selection of sophisticated tools. Most of them have free trial periods, but you will have access to only a couple of features that will limit your research. You need to buy the premium versions of these spy tools to be able to unearth the motivations and intentions of your competition. First, check out comprehensive spying tool reviews. Make a list of them for snooping around and then you can use them to unearth the success secrets of your competitor brands.

Step 3: convey your USP to your customers

There are several things a brand needs, but the one thing it cannot do without is a USP. Your business should have a unique selling proposition. It is the lifeblood of your business. Think of it this way – there are hundreds of companies that are selling similar stuff, but you have a dedicated set of customers buying things only from you. The reason they do so is your USP. The reason others don’t buy from you is they do not know your USP.

It is time to make a USP if you don’t have one, sharpen it and make it bold to attract the attention of your customers. Your USP needs to have dressing, garnish, and an exotic mix of spices to keep your customers hooked, while the competitors try to push their off-the-rack USP. Check out Harry’s official website. Their USP is simple, yet bold. They have made the process of picking all the items you need for shaving easier than ever. They have not only made it possible for all customers to remember them, but they have ingrained their USP in the website’s navigation as well.

Step 4: Convince your customers to buy more

It is not about upselling or cross-selling. However, research shows that people who spend more than the others hold the goods in high regards. It is the endowment effect in action. That translates to – when people own something, they tend to value it more. When they spend more money on it, they appreciate it more as well. That is a part of the perceived value effect that comes into action along with the endowment effect. In short, if you can manage upsells and add-ons, you have a better chance of retaining a customer in the long run.

Step 5: give them enough incentives

The world cannot run without rewards and incentives. People love receiving something in return for their actions. The moment you offer incentives, three things happen –

1. Your customers find something tangible to relate to the brand
2. Your customers do not defect as easily since you are encouraging them to try your products and services

• You can expand your current customer’s list by using your existing customers

This incentive can be in the form of cash back, coupons, discounts, and even free products. You can offer them in exchange for their services like sharing your website link on Facebook or messaging it to 50 friends. Some brands provide lucrative discounts to their existing customers if they can get their friends on-board the brand’s email list. Such brands include big names like BlueHost and Uber.

Sometimes, all your business needs is a touch of sophisticated competition research and the fine-tuning of their existing customer interactions. Your brand can outperform the competition as well with a little help from the experts, who know a thing or two about competitive digital marketing and SEO.