There is a lot to be said for benefiting from the efforts and successes of others. Not having to spend resources such as manpower, time and money on developing new products and services and trialling marketing campaigns is very valuable. And you can do this by researching your tradie competitors to see what they’re offering, what they’re not offering, what they’re good at and bad at, and what opportunities there may be for you.
1. Identify Your Tradie Competitors
Firstly, you need to find out who your real competitors are. Some of these you will most likely know already, but a little bit of digging may reveal others you didn’t know about.
Start by doing what 95% of people do these days – conduct a search online.
Example
In this example we’ve typed “electrician Bathurst” into Google. (Do this for your own trade and area).
This brings up a list of electricians in the Bathurst area that could very well be your competitors if you were an electrician in Bathurst! There may be others too that you know about, but perhaps they don’t have much of an online presence, so they’re not showing up on page 1 of Search Engine Results Page (or SERP as it’s known). (People usually don’t move past page 1 – so this is where you want to be!)
So what does this show us?
| Results in red boxes | These are paid ads – Google Adwords ads. These companies are willing to pay be on the front page for this search term. They will pay a fee every time someone clicks on their listing. The fee will depend on how competitive this search term is, and might be anything from 20c to $10 per click! |
| Results in blue box | These are Google My Business listings. This means that these companies have “claimed” their free Google listing and optimised their Google Plus page, to appear in this position. This is something you really must do! |
| Results in green box | This is what’s known as organic results. This company has worked hard to make sure their website has been properly Search Engine Optimised (SEO’d) for the keyword term “electrician Bathurst”. |
| Results in purple boxes | These are directory listings from the big directories such as Yellow Pages and True Local. People who click on one of these will be presented with a list of electricians in Bathurst who have a paid or free listing on that directory. Of course the paid listings usually appear at the top! |
2. Analyse Your Competitors
Follow our 4 steps to find out what’s going on with your competitors, and develop your strategy to beat them.
- Step 1 – use our template to complete a SWOT analysis to discover your competitors strengths and weaknesses
- Step 2 – discover your opportunities. Every competitor will have gaps you could be exploiting
- Step 3 – tackle possible threats from competitors and external forces
- Step 4 – research the entire customer experience – this is often where your competitors are beating you
Full details on how to do this in your trade business, including examples and templates to follow, are provided in Module 1.2.
