How to Create a Competitive Advantage

A competitive advantage is a special advantage that you have over your competitors, which helps to increase sales or attract customers.

It essentially is the thing all businesses are looking to develop when in a highly competitive market. Finding that one competitive advantage is fairly simple, so today we will go over what you can do, to help find that advantage.

Study Your Competitors

Before you can decide on a feature of your product or service, that could be used as your competitive advantage, you need to see what sort of perks your competitors offer. The best thing you can do is to go on your competitors’ websites FAQ pages and their amazon pages. You can use the FAQ page to easily see things like their return and shipping policy, while you can use amazon to see the reviews of their products and jot down the pros and cons of those products.

Figure Out What You are Good at

Now that you know what your competitors offer, see what your company offers. Note your shipping costs, shipping time, return policy, etc. From their, you want to compare with the list you made of your competitors. The goal is to find a unique advantage, so cross out all of the similarities. If for any reason when you cross out all of the similarities, and you are left with no unique advantages, then look back at your list and see what feature you could possibly tweak, to make it more attractive then what your competitors offer.

Choose the Right Competitive Advantage to Implement

After narrowing down to a few select options, now you need to see how viable each advantage could be. For example, if you saw that both you and your competitors have free shipping that takes 5-7 days to ship, your possible advantage could be faster shipping that takes 2 days, but is still free. With this tweaked or blatant advantage you already have; you need to see if it is financially viable, if it can be easily copied, if it is “ad friendly,” and if this feature can be used against you. If an advantage satisfies these posed questions, then it is something that could be implemented.

Once you choose a competitive advantage, you need to brag about it. Talk about it in all of your social media pages, advertisements, and promote it all throughout your website. You want people to easily see this advantage, so they know that you are offering the best product or service.

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