Drive Competitiveness With Your Website
If your company is going to start 2010 with a challenging competitive environment, consider the impact your website can have in that situation:
Your website is the great leveler in a competitive situation.
Unlike in the real world, a few smart decisions and you can start to look as strong as your bigger competitors without a massive budget outlay. Try doing that in an offline ad campaign.
What advantages does your website give you in competitive situation?
- You can target your key customer segments more closely using your website
- You can spend more time educating prospects on your unique company and product advantage.
- You can set the tone in a sales process
Two key website tactics for competitiveness:
Targeting:
Give your key segments a more tailored experience, with content and branding information that more precisely meets their needs. Its tougher for bigger competitors to narrow their brand and sales focus because they usually have to worry about the “don’t turn anyone off” problem.
Positioning:
Using its visual and word combination, your website is the ideal vehicle for creating a strong competitive positioning perception with your prospects. What do we mean by “competitive positioning”? We’re referring to creating an understanding in your prospect’s mind of where your company fits in your industry.
Impact of Positioning:
Pricing resilience: If your positioning is stronger for your key segments than your competitors, you can create a situation in which a (moderately) higher price doesn’t deter them from buying from your company.
Trust: Lost sales and pricing pressure are often attributable a weak brand / positioning perception. Buyers are always looking for reasons to trust a company and how they can extract greater value from their offerings.
What are my options for positioning?
Your company has a number of different directions it can go in choosing a positioning approach. Through a defined process, you can prioritize the following factors:
- competitive strength
- differentiation
- sales efficiency
- close rates
- pricing pressure
Based upon that, you can consider a positioning strategy which best addresses your key concerns in your sales and marketing process.
We’d suggest that you take this opportunity to more clearly position your company in your industry. Done correctly, its impact on key parts of your business in 2010 can be dramatic.
