A vital component of effective market research for your health and wellness business is researching your competitors.
Whether it’s a product or service they’re looking for, most of your potential customers will shop. If you catch their eye, they will likely consider you along with many other options, as you hope to secure the business of as many customers and clients as possible in your target market.
While there is a whole host of strategies for how to create and implement a marketing plan for your business, when you know the training options your potential customers face, you can create a marketing plan and build services that will communicate how why you are better than the rest.
Besides browsing their websites, how do you learn all you can about your competition? Here are seven ways to learn about your competition so you can identify and capitalize on your competitive advantage.
7 Tips for Researching Your Competitors (Including Knowing What They’re Shipping)
Follow them on social media
Social media Channels are a very useful way to access information about your competitors, from the services you provide to how they interact with potential customers. You can also see how people interact with posts so you can get a feel for the type of questions being asked, testimonials and experiences, and general impressions from followers.
By paying close attention to your competitors’ presence on social media, you can gain a better understanding of what doesn’t work for your competitors and how you can improve your training service offerings and marketing strategy.
Do secret shopping
What is the easy, low-cost way to learn about your competitors’ products, services and prices? Do some secret shopping. Act like any other lead, browse pages, request information and Download brochures and PDFs.
Mystery shopping is also a great tool for jotting down your user experience. When you’re a mystery shopper, notice how it feels to be talking to you, how easy it is to access information, whether your competition is communicating and how you’re meeting the needs of your target audience.
If you have more than a few competitors that you’re tracking, you can use a spreadsheet to create a competitive panorama. With this information, you can start a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
Set up Google Alerts
Google alerts are a useful way to monitor competition and even learn about competitors you didn’t know existed. Create Google Alerts for your competitor’s brand name or founder’s name. Additionally, you can subscribe to general industry alerts (such as “Postpartum Health Coaching”) to identify key opinion leaders, mention new brands, and more.
Watch out for ads
Thanks to the science of “cookies”, once you’ve navigated through your competitor’s website and social media pages, there’s a good chance you’ll target any relevant ads in the future. While those sidebar ads and ads in your email inbox can be annoying, they can also be very useful. If any of your customers have invested in web-based advertising, there is a good chance that you will receive news from them more often.
Instead of closing ad pop-ups and Facebook ads, write down and even click on ads for competing training and wellness services. You’ll learn what they’re promoting, the offerings they offer, and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors (yes, including you).
Consider how your brand will make use of the space, and what kind of space promotions You will run, and how to distinguish yourself from the competition.
Subscribe to the contest email list
Do you want to get information about your competitors? Sign up for their email list. You and their followers will learn about deals, new services, prices and marketing methods. You can also learn about the format, audio, and what they use for the email platform.
Use competitor analysis tools
This is as close as you can get to spying on your competitors in the digital world. With the growing importance of digital marketing, entrepreneurs and technology wizards have developed tools that “listen” to digital events related to a specific topic of interest, a public figure or a company.
Some of the popular competitive analysis tools include:
- social sprout: A tool that takes advantage of publicly available conversations on social media to get a better understanding of people’s feelings toward your competitors.
- Phelanx: If social media is an important marketing channel for your competitors, Phlanx is a useful tool. It helps calculate the interaction of your competitors’ social media accounts, including Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Twitter and TikTok. You can also track brand mentions.
- SEMRush: Among SEMRush’s set of features, the competitor analysis tool allows you to track backlinks to competitors’ sites, see how much of their links were organic or paid, and even provides a map to help you understand how your competitors rank for keywords.
- owl: Owletter is one of the only tools out there that allows you to strategize email marketing for your competitors. All you have to do is tell Owletter which websites you want to track and access every email they send and even how often it’s sent to spam.
do you want more? Neil Patel It suggests a variety of other tools to keep track of your competition.
Keep a tab on traditional marketing channels
Most marketing strategies include a vital digital component. In fact, many companies have abandoned traditional marketing altogether. However, depending on where you live and your competitors’ understanding of your target market, you may find that your competitors have turned to traditional marketing tactics to attract customers.
Some of the traditional marketing methods may include:
- Radio and TV ads
- Flyers and posters in gyms, clinics and health stores
- Advertising in public transport
- Direct messaging
- Newspaper and magazine ads
It’s harder to keep tabs on traditional marketing tactics for competition compared to digital marketing tactics (no hashtags or search boxes here!). Ask your friends and family to keep their eyes peeled for health and fitness marketing materials or ads to send to you.
How do you calculate your prices?
Newly graduated AFPA coaches often ask what they should be charging for their services. Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to this question. However, we developed a file Seven step technique Determine your training rates with confidence without worrying about losing money.
In case you want to know the gist of the strategy before heading out to read that article, we have summarized how to calculate the minimum hourly rate here:
- Calculate your business expenses.
- Determine your ideal hourly income.
- Set your profit goals.
- Set a sales target.
- Divide the sales goal by the number of hours you plan to work.
- Calculate the time invested for all your services.
- Determine the minimum number of clients you will need to secure for each service you provide.
Your hourly rates or the cost of your services may increase depending on your target audience, geographic area, nature of your services, and competition.
is reading Know your value: How to confidently determine your training rates For more detailed information on how to determine your training rates.
How do you want to compete?
Most marketing experts agree that there are three ways you can compete in the same market: price, quality, and differentiation.
When you compete based on price, You have a training service very similar to the competition, but you aim to attract clients based on a low base price or regular deals for individual services or service packages.
When you compete based on Quality of your services, the price may be higher than the competition for a similar service, but you are confident What you offer is of higher quality. In the world of coaching, a high-quality service may be related to your experience, your studies, or your methodology.
compete for differentiation It is a way to differentiate yourself from your competition so that customers feel that there is no real comparison. Your marketing strategy focuses on what makes your coaching services different from the rest, and ultimately, how that difference is best for your customers.
Home Takeaway
Knowing your competitors’ brand, communication, products, pricing, and marketing strategy is an important component of any market research strategy. Not only can you learn about possibilities, but you can also feel more confident while building and offering your services in the coaching market.
The market is constantly changing, so keeping tabs on the competition is just as vital while actively introducing your services in the marketplace as is doing research before launching your service.
Discussion about this post