As the holidays are fast approaching, we wanted to gift you some great tips to help you grow your customer base and business during what can be a slow time for a lot of home improvement businesses.
It’s no secret that this time of year can be slower and less profitable than other seasons, especially for home improvement businesses. But, its what you do during the slow months that counts. So, it’s important to use the extra time on creating new strategies and using specific tools that can help you grow your business and reach more customers.
One tool that can help create new opportunities for you and your business is a competitor analysis. Conducting a competitor analysis is a great way to bring in more customers. Seeing what your competitors are doing allows you more insights into your industry to determine what works and what doesn’t.
There are many ways you can use competitor analysis to help increase your revenue and profitability. We’ve narrowed them down to the 3 most effective ways a competitor analysis can be used to improve your home improvement business.
1. Identify gaps in the market
When conducting a competitive analysis, you are able to identify current gaps in the market. Part of the reason your competition is called your competition is that you’re all competing for the same customers.
What if you could change the playing field completely? Analyze where your competitors are focusing on. What markets, industries, and customer segments have the most competition? What are some industries that aren’t being prioritized?
Maybe other home improvement businesses are only targeting high-end, wealthy clients?
For example, you could potentially target the middle market, where the clientele isn’t as wealthy but there are a lot more customers. It might be here where you can find your niche and specialize in serving a specific set of clientele better than your competitors.
This holiday season, you should use competitor analysis to look for new markets and potentially hone in on and redefine your unique value proposition.
2. Minimize risk and maximize gains
Another advantage of competitor analysis is that you can analyze what works well for other companies to implement into your strategy and remove what isn’t working well from your strategy.
Knowledge is power and the more you know about your field, the better you can promote your business to prospective customers.
This can be done in a number of ways. From your marketing strategy to service range to deciding future investments, keeping your finger on the pulse of your competitors is a great way to increase your revenue and minimize your costs.
For example, you learn that one competitor invested in a certain marketing strategy or piece of equipment that didn’t resonate with customers and wasn’t a good return on investment. Now you know not to make that mistake in the future which can save you future costs and time further on down the line.
On the flip side, say one competitor had a kick-ass social media campaign that brought in a lot of incoming customers and business. You can learn from what they did right to bring into your marketing strategy so you can reach more customers.
3. Improve your range of products and services
Following on from the previous point, adapting your business strategy based on your competitors is a great way to keep your business active and moving forward.
It may be tempting to hold your stance and stay stagnant, but with seasonal trends and shifting consumer preferences, it’s imperative that you are able to change so you can better serve customers.
Competitor analysis can help you improve your range of products and services as by learning what your competitors are doing that works and doesn’t work you can potentially change what you offer based on that.
Say some of your competitors have started doing guttering services and they’ve seen a good influx in business because of it. You’ve never done it before but you know that you could do it better.
It’s time to start considering if you want to implement that in your business’s list of services. This again can help you with your unique value proposition, you do it better than the competition. How you can separate yourself from your competitors as well as being adaptable is the best way you can reach more customers for your home improvement business.
The holiday season can be slow, but we at conXpros thoroughly recommend taking the time to do competitor analysis so you can improve your business and reach more customers.
We hope you found our holiday gift! For more home improvement sales tips, check out our Sales Tip Center. conXpros can also help your home improvement business generate more leads with our trusted lead generation system. Learn more about our lead process today!