2.3 Build Competitive Situations & Goals

Any marketing plan has to be a good fit with a current competitive environment. This means positioning your value offering in the context of competitors. No matter what business you're in, chances are someone else is already doing the same thing. So it's key to make yourself stand out. Not only that, it's critical to directly differentiate yourself from competitors and clearly demonstrate your superiority in a specific way. Building competitive strategies is really an exercise in contrast, you'll need to begin with specific fact and merit data points about your own business. And then comes the difficult part, you'll need the same insights about your competitors. This data gathering varies in complexity based on the public availability of that information. But even if it's hard to find, it's absolutely key to do it. If you can't set yourself apart and visible and verifiable ways, who would buy or invest in the product. Fortunately for us, the project proposal template from Envato Elements has competitive situation slides ready to go. I'll find them here, as you can see, these series of slides boldly offsets our business with everyone else. It invokes visceral reactions and helps us show off undeniable competitive advantages. The very practice of filling out these slides will help you to consider how your business is different and ways that you can compete. First up, I'll change the title text slightly by renaming it Competitive Situation. I'll then substitute in the Everylytics name for the word we here to make it our own. The key element of the slide is the task box here in the middle. This is where you can discuss a certain product, feature, or service that only you can offer. In our competitive landscape, the first thing is a full mobile suite usable on any device. So in that box, I'll type in full mobile suite. In the descriptive text below, I'll add a brief sentence further emphasizing this offering. Let's say that our robust platform makes analytics accessible anywhere. The giant placeholders on each slide boldly reinforce that only Everylytics offers this differentiated service. I'll jump to this next slide here, and as you can see, it has two placeholder blocks just like on the previous slide. I can simply repeat the earlier steps, dropping in my own content in the boxes. For our second advantage, let's focus on 24/7 support and for the third smart report folder. And finally, it's time to talk about price competition. The next slide here is built just for that. Of course, it's best used only if your pricing is superior to your competition. In our case, it is, so let's drop in the pricing for the Everylytics base subscription here on the left side. When contrasted with our competitors pricing model, the choice should really become clear. As you can see, it's easy to emphasize your competitive situation using a custom elements template like this one. Again, the very practice of going through and filling out these slides, helps you to consider how you can differentiate yourself from your competition. Finding that competition really just shows that there's already a market available for what you're doing. So don't worry if you do find other competitors in your space, just like the slide says the choice is obvious, isn't it? Thanks for watching.