Small Business Owners: The Importance of Always Keeping an Eye on Your Competition

Small Business Owners:  The Importance of Always Keeping an Eye on Your Competition

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Are you a small business owner?  If you are, whether you run an online business or a storefront business, you will need to make sure that you keep an eye on your competition.  After all, your competition and their success will actually have a huge impact on the success of your own business.

When it comes to keeping an eye on the competition, there are many small business owners who wonder why it is so important to do so.  As it was previously mentioned, how your competitors runs their business will actually have an impact on your business. For instance, if you and your competitors sell the same type of exercise equipment, but one of your competitors is having a huge sale on their exercise equipment, you may notice a slight decrease in your sales for the week. That is why it is extremely important that you know exactly what all of your competitors are doing at all times. In all honesty, if your business is a profitable one, your competitors, even the large ones, are likely to keep tabs on you as well.

Above, sales were used as an example. You will want to make sure that you keep up-to-date on any sales that your competitors may be having.  This is important because if you notice that one of your competitors is having a sale, especially on products that you also sell yourself, you may want to think about offering a similar sale.  Of course, to protect your reputation and your respectability, you do not want to have the exact same sale, but a similar one should be okay.  You should definitely use this approach if you are considered to a specialty store.  With keeping with the above mentioned example of a sale on exercise equipment, if your specialty is just selling exercise equipment, a massive exercise equipment sale from your one of your competitors may seriously hurt your business’s sales, even if it is just temporarily.

If you run an online business you may want to check out your competition’s websites and compare them to yours.  Is your small business’s website just as attractive as your competition?  Also, is it easy to navigate? If you know that one of your online competitors is having more success that you, you may want to try figuring out what they are doing right, as it may make it easier for you to figure out you are doing wrong.  As with the above mentioned monitoring sales, you are advised against stealing ideas or web designs from your competitors.  Actually, doing so could land you in hot water, as many businesses, especially large corporations, copyright their entire website content. 

If you run a business that has a physical address, instead of a .com address, you will want to think about visiting the competition to check out the appearance of their establishments.  If you are running a retail store, you will want to checkout other local retailers that can be considered your competition.  You will to examine the cleanliness of the establishment in question, as well as the way that everything is set up, product wise.  Many larger retailers have complex systems that are used to determine where products should be placed for sale in a store. Since you may not have the time or the knowledge to come up with these same results yourself, you may want to get some ideas from your competition; especially your competitors that you know are successful.  

As outlined above, there a number of different ways that you can go about keeping on eye on your competition, as well as number of different reasons as to why you should do so.  As long as you do it in style, you should not cause any problems or raise any concerns.  In fact, what you may learn from scouting out your competition may actually help make it easier for your business to be a successful, profitable one; one that will a tough competitor for years to come.