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:

1. competitive strength
2. differentiation
3. sales efficiency
4. close rates
5. 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.

What does this decision depend on?

The nature of your product, the visibility of your competitors and their ability to retaliate and do material damage to your current business.

What are we talking about here?

If your company is in a highly competitive industry, there will be clear entrenched players and a large number of newer entrants seeking to take share away from the leaders.   Often newer players benefit from a better and more flexible business or technology platforms and boast superior features and higher value for clients.

The question becomes: do you attack your competitors head to head on your website?

The answer is the case of competitive industries is yes.    The easiest pickings for you to grow your customer base is to take them from your bigger competitors.   You’ll save huge amounts of sales cost because you don’t have to educate them on the benefits of your product category.   Your only hurdle is to demonstrate that your product has superior ability to address their core pain / need areas.

There are critical tactics that you have to incorporate into that competitive displacement strategy.   These include:

1) a clear head-to-head comparison from the perspective of the client’s need areas

2) an easy way for them to test (prove) that your product is superior (ie. easy transition and a well setup free trial).

When you have big competitors, every sale is a competitive one — so you have to meet the challenge head on with a precise, well executed competitive displacent strategy.