When it comes to making business plans, it can be hard sometimes to come up with new ideas that you think will work to help your business grow and succeed. In these cases, it might be tempting to take the easy way out and copy what your competitors are doing instead of coming up with your own ideas. After all, what they’re doing seems to be working for them, so why shouldn’t it work for you? Right? In some cases, that might be true and it could be a good move. In other cases, it’s not that good of an idea.
So, when might it be a good idea to copy your competitors?
1. Media coverage
If you’re looking to find ways to get major media coverage for your business, whether it be in a newspaper or a large blog somewhere, then you’ll want to find out where your competitors are being featured. Then, figure out a hook that will help you to get featured with them, too.
2. Bettering something
This isn’t so much copying as taking something that already exists and making it better. So, take a look at what are your competitors doing and figure out how can you make it/do it better. Improving what already exists is great way to make a mark within the community and also a great way to build a great sustainable business that people will love.
Other than these ways, it’s probably not a good idea to copy your competitors. Why?
1. What works for them won’t necessarily work for you. You’re different businesses, after all. You may be in the same industry, but that’s about it. Keep in mind, also, that if you don’t know your competitors personally, you don’t really know how well they’re doing. It’s ok to experiment with some things they might be doing, to see if it might work for you or if you can do it better. Don’t just blindly copy.
2. The reason they’re doing things a certain way or have set up something one way (like a web page) is more than likely just random, or they’re copying a competitor. It’s highly likely they don’t really know what they’re doing or why something is working or not. If you blindly copy them, you could very well end up copying what’s not working for them.
3. Just copying your competition shows weakness. It shows a lack of creativity and confidence, and that you haven’t put much thought into things.
4. If you just copy your competitors, you’ll at best only do as well as them. You’ll miss out on chances to do something new and/or better and get ahead of the competition. Perhaps they’re doing something their customers don’t really like, or their website has features users don’t like, like a mandatory form to fill out to get information. If you copy that, you miss out on chance to change those things and make them better so that their customers/users will like you better.
It takes a lot of effort to do things differently. It’d just be easier to copy the other guy. But will it really be worth it?
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