By posting content that's useful, relevant, and shareable, you can build a credible brand image that resonates in the minds of your competitor's customers. When it comes to your social media strategy, bear in mind that most consumers are looking for support, entertainment, inspiration, and interaction with your brand, rather than overt selling tactics. Social media enables direct, personal connections to be formed between businesses and individuals, creating virtual communities of like-minded and loyal supporters. However, as your target customers are constantly bombarded by advertising, getting heard above the noise is a never-ending challenge. With more people choosing to shop online than ever before, digital marketing is crucial to expanding your brand awareness and growing your client base. By upholding these values throughout your customer experience, you can ensure it's clear to potential buyers why they should switch to your brand. These traits, or Unique Selling Points (USPs), should be consistently promoted across your entire business, including its website, marketing and PR, packaging, and product design. These can be features such as your prices, delivery time, product availability, convenience, quality, or customer service. Once you understand what differentiates your business from its competitors, and the post-pandemic shopping habits of your target market, you can begin to promote the desirable and unique qualities that make your brand stand out in a crowded market. Providing you're quicker to adapt your products or services than competing brands, you'll instantly be ahead of the game. Conversely, younger audiences are increasingly concerned with a brand’s ethical values, particularly the transparency of its supply chain.
By taking a fresh look at your customer base, you can reposition your business to better serve the demands of prospective buyers.įor shoppers who have lost income during lockdown, pricing will be a key factor in their purchasing decisions.
If your brand's story, offering, and prices have fallen out of sync with your regular clientele, it’s unlikely you’ll appeal to those of your rivals. To win potential new customers, you first need to understand how your existing customers have changed. Adapt to your audienceĬonsumer behaviour has been irreversibly affected by the pandemic. As lockdown eases, your potential customers will be aggressively targeted by hospitality, beauty, leisure and entertainment businesses to start spending again, so you’ll need to persuade them that it’s your business they’ve missed the most. However, it’s also beneficial to research businesses with a very different offering, but who are vying for the disposable income of the same demographic. For smaller businesses that don’t have the budget to hire a market intelligence analyst, it’s still possible to learn a great deal about other companies with a basic competitor analysis.īusiness owners will often focus on brands that provide similar products or services to a mutual market segment. In doing so, you can identify your competitive advantage and maximize these strengths to attract new customers. The first step to overtaking your business rivals is to find out who they are and what they offer to your target audience. If you're looking to boost your sales by winning new customers from other vendors, follow these seven steps to outshine the competition: Consequently, businesses have a great opportunity to acquire new customers in this buoyant market. According to a survey by McKinsey, 44% of UK respondents had tried new brands or made purchases with a new retailer during lockdown, typically due to a lack of availability from their usual provider. Prospective buyers may need a compelling reason to consider your business over competitors, and will only switch if they see greater value. However, since lockdown measures began, consumers have become more willing to experiment with brands. Not only that, but they also need to compete for customers within the industry itself if they hope to capitalize on the recent surge in retail sales. Although Brits have more money to spend after lockdown, during which household savings and pent-up demand accumulated, retailers must now contend with bars, restaurants, theatres, beauty salons, travel agents, and other newly-opened businesses for their share of consumer spending power. The retail industry has seen promising growth as the UK approaches an end to social distancing, but there are signs of new challenges ahead.