For any good marketing strategy, it’s always wise to analyze your competitors and their strengths. This will help you to make your business unique and attract more customers. Learning from their mistakes is also vital.

Your competitors are bound to make some errors or the other and you need to make sure that you avoid these slip-ups as much as possible. If you are planning on doing a competitive analysis, make sure to stay away from these mistakes.

Not researching your competitors

Prior to any product launch, it’s vital to do some background research on your competitors. Many companies fail to do this and later end up losing sales. Competitive research is a vital part before any kind of launching and you have to keep a few basic ideas in mind.

• Proper naming of the product- How to make the name unique so that customers get attracted
• Product development- Avoid mistakes that your competitor brands have made while developing the product. Check your unique value proposition.
• Launching- What are the strategies used by your competitors when they launch their products? Keep a close eye on them.

Not making the most of your opportunity

So your competitor brand has made a mistake that is costing them a lot of money and reducing their sales.

Instead of celebrating this as an immediate win, you must view this as an opportunity to win. The moment you get overconfident and stop learning from your competitor’s mistakes, you are bound to make mistakes of your own.

So, view their errors as a potential chance to make the most out of your situation. The important thing to remember is that you don’t just sit still and do nothing. Get proactive and do the needful. Your sales won’t simply shoot up just because your competitor has made a mistake.

Not conducting a project idea verification

This is another crucial thing to keep in mind. Whenever you develop your business, it’s important to conduct a project idea verification using keyword research and generating a Google Trends report. Did you know that 71% of marketers believe that using strategic keywords was their number one SEO strategy?

You need to check what your competitors are ranking for and what keywords are being used by consumers on search engines. Moreover, a Google Trends report can help you to see if the interest in your competitor brands has increased or decreased over the years.

Not gathering data

You always need to keep a watch for the customers you attract and the sales that your brand makes. If you see your competitors not gathering enough data or gathering incorrect reports, you can see this as a chance to up your own game.

One of the best ways to keep a track of this is to use a website screenshot service. You can take full-page screenshots to check the current trends and even the future ones. Many competitor brands don’t keep a record of their screenshots which can later cause a lot of legal or marketing troubles.

So remember to capture screenshots of your website, your competitors’ websites, and anything else that might be necessary.

Not being original

Another big mistake many brands make is blindly copying their competitors or parent brands without incorporating any kind of originality.

You definitely want to avoid this mistake because being a copy of another brand will not only destroy your brand image but also reduce sales. It’s fine to adopt an idea or two from your competitor brands but make sure you add your twist to them.

For example, if another brand has started an online food delivery service, you can adopt an online food delivery and grocery delivery service.

Plagiarizing or stealing content and copying it is also considered a punishable offence that can land you in legal trouble. Learn from your competitors but never make the mistake of simply doing what they are doing.

Over to you…

Capitalizing on your competitor brands’ slip-ups doesn’t always mean jumping in and taking public action, even if the idea seems attractive. You should take measured and calculated approaches to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes as them.

There’s always something to be learned when another brand makes an error, however big or small, and taking lessons from that error should be your main objective. Irrespective of which category your brand deals in, you should always be respectful and better yourself.