For your small business succeed, you need to know almost as much about your competitors on your business and your customers. Unfortunately, many small business owners make the mistake of waiting until a competitor has opened a store across the street and make a notch in profits to wonder who he is and assess the competition.

A competitive analysis allows you to identify your competitors and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. By knowing the actions of your competitors, you will have a better understanding of the products or services you should offer, how you can market them effectively, and how to position your business.

The competitive analysis is an ongoing process. You should always be in the process of gathering information about your competitors. Check their websites. Read the documentation and brochures on their products. Put your hand on their products. See how they present themselves at trade shows. Read what is said about them in the magazines industry. Talk to your customers to see how they feel about products or services of competitors.
Click on the steps below to learn more about how to analyze your competitors:

Step 1: Identify your competition
Step 2: Analyze strengths and weaknesses
Step 3: Look at opportunities and threats
Step 4: Determine your position

Step 1: Identify your competition

Every business has competitors and you must take time to discern who your customers can go to obtain a product or service that meets the same need as yours. Even if your product or service is truly innovative, you should see what your customers can purchase one for accomplishing this task. For example, it may be that you open a Web site offering bingo online. Your competition would be other Bingo sites, other Web gaming sites, the Bingo hall down the street and any business that competes for the same entertainment dollars.

Start by studying your major competitors. These are the heads of market leaders, companies that currently dominate your market. They are those against whom you will encounter in your search for new customers. If you’re a florist, it would be other florists in your area. If you’re a computer consultant, what would be other consultants with the same specialty.

Then, consider your secondary and indirect competitors. These are businesses that can not confront you directly, but targeting the same general market. Also in the florist, it may be a small local shop that only sells roses delivery service or national floral radius of plants and flowers of your supermarket or your discount store nearby.

Finally, look at potential competitors. These are the companies likely to enter your market and you should prepare yourself to compete. For example, if you have a separate kiosk that sells frozen yogurt, you should prepare yourself against the national franchises frozen yogurt, even if they are not yet in your market.

Step 2: Analyze strengths and weaknesses

Once you’ve figured out who your competitors are, determine their strengths and learn about their vulnerabilities. Why do customers buy their homes? Is it price, value, service, convenience, reputation? Focus on both the strengths and weaknesses “perceived” than real. For customer perception may actually be more important than reality.

It’s a good idea to make this analysis of strengths and weaknesses in tabular form. Enter the name of each of your competitors. Then set up columns listing every important category for your business (price, value, service, location, reputation, expertise, convenience, personnel, advertising and marketing, or anything else that is appropriate for your business). Once you have this table, write down your competitors and make sure to comment on why you’ve given them that rating. You might even want to put forces in red and weaknesses in blue so you can see at a glance where everyone is your competitor.
Step 3: Look at opportunities and threats

Strengths and weaknesses are factors that are often under the control of the company. But when you study your competition, you must also consider how it is prepared to respond to factors outside its control. This is the opportunities and threats.

Opportunities and threats fall into a wide range of categories. There may be technological developments, regulatory actions or lawsuits, economic factors or even a new potential competitor. For example, a trade photofinishing needs to know how its competitors are prepared to cope with the advent of digital photography. Or, a company that sells over the Web should analyze how its competitors are prepared to face the problems of online security.

Again, one effective way is to create a table listing your competitors and external factors that will impact your industry. You can then see how they can deal with opportunities and threats.

Step 4: Determine your position

Once you have determined what are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, you must determine where to position your company relative to competition. Part of this may seem obvious in light of your analysis, but it is also beneficial to examine closely the operation of your business.

The most effective way to achieve this is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats for your business. Organize your business as you did for your competitors. This will give you an even clearer picture of where your business in this competitive environment. This will also help you determine the points where you need improvement and what characteristics of your business you should emphasize in order to win new customers.

Conclusion: looking for ways to leverage your strengths and take advantage of the weaknesses of your competitors.

Know where you go, work to get there

My joy is great, the day I will learn with surprise that you have made your company the “greatest miracle of the entrepreneurial world. It may be political, social, economic and this will be a business. Do you dream at this point really. Do you have such faith? At least you know where you are, why you fight? Do you really then you run. If it’s just to make money, do not you think it means yd’autres much faster? If it is only for power do not you think it means yd’autres much faster?

Very few entrepreneurs (social, political or economic) are able to say what they will in a week in six months, two years in five, ten, twenty years. But how do you know if you move, the way you have to do if you can not know where you go. The problem is that you could not reach the goals you will set (does not happen by chance, it fails not by luck). You will not find what you searched. If I do not know what I need how can I enter when the see. You can trace the path of your success yourself. Tomorrow when you see, no one will cry “Surprise”. Someone will say: “I’m not surprised him.”

Have a vision

Someone once told me “We admire that if both the good things we do not always want. We let dazzled by their splendor forgetting they are works that we can do too. Just wish, to want, and you can do it. ” And I think he’s right. Something very banal: Many people admire the owners of beautiful homes and nice cars. But very few of them wish to own nice houses, nice cars. They think that this is not for them. You can have anything you want to do strongly. You will do nothing great, nothing special if you do not!

Have a vision. Think about it. Anticipate, anticipate, imagine, realize the infinite possibilities, see the world in general. Think what you will be tomorrow, in a more distant horizons. Think about what your business, what will become your work, you will become. Forge your vision by answering the following questions:

* What is my greatest idea?
* Why do I fight?
* What do I leave as an inheritance?

Imagine the structure of what you want to build. Imagine in the vastness. From this moment your life becomes like a vast field waiting to plowing a field dressed waiting to construction – say the realization of your vision. But the process can not be activated until you know what you want, what suits you best. The will, but also desired. You will then understand that the field is extensive and must be compartmentalized, take portions.

Setting goals for success!

You know where you go. Extensive field! This is the destination, the ideal pattern that we see on the horizon, the idea. But the goals we set ourselves to achieve is the substance that supports and illuminates our horizon. When it’s too far, it is often unclear. It must rays to penetrate this blur. These rays, that our goals closer to home, more or less below the horizon as we foreshadowed.

As simple as it sounds, a purpose is just what you want. But as such goals contribute significantly in various forms to develop your business. The process of setting goals forces you to think about what you want to achieve for your business and check each time if you plan means to this end you will actually achieve. This is an opportunity to vary the options, consider different directions for the development and growth of your business, you maximize the chances of achieving the goals that you’ll be set.

The reason is the thing in the world better shared, is not it? Just when you try to analyze the link between your goals and means of achieving them, you necessarily know if it works or not. A friend told me one day: “I like my ideas, sometimes they make me mad, blinding me. But I’m still lucid enough to know when they do not work. It is as if a mad logic that always exceeds my follies. A madness of logic arises only when I accept each of my goals in more specific goals, connecting each time to the final goal to see if it sticks. ” By working your goals, you create – sometimes unconsciously, the setting in which you thrive. You see more clearly and to eliminate As actions or efforts that do not contribute to the achievement of your goals. Already the scheduling of more specific objectives requires you to set a timetable for implementation. This will require more action because you understand each time what is the condition for the achievement of each goal set. Be as ambitious as you can, but with ridges means of achieving your ultimate ambition your initial ambitions and so on.