Do you really have any competition?
I often hear wedding and event businesses complaining about all of the new competitors in their market. I’m sure this is not limited to the wedding/event industry. Most businesses don’t want to see another competitor enter their market. Whether they’ve been in business longer than you, or are brand new, are they really competitors? What is your perspective on competition?
Listen to this new, 6-minute episode for my perspective on this, and hopefully it helps focus yours.
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– Do you really have competition? Listen to this episode and find out. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I was driving today and I had this thought about competition. People talk about their competition all the time. And I was wondering, do you really have any competition? There are certainly people in your market, in your category who do something that looks like you, but are they really competitors? I guess we could go to a dictionary definition of what competition is. A competition could be like a race competition or things where people are vying for the same thing. But when there’s an abundance of prospects out there, which there certainly is in the wedding and events industry, and there are certainly an abundance of people that could do the type of things that you do, if you’re able to fill your calendar with people who are looking for you, specifically you, then you don’t have competition because they’re looking for you, not someone like you. It’s when they’re looking for someone like you and now they’re comparing between different ones, yeah, you’re competing for their attention, certainly, with advertising, marketing, networking, et cetera.
You’re competing in the sense of, from a high level, you’re all going after some of the same prospects. But I don’t worry about competition. There’s enough business out there that if I can fill my calendar and you can fill your calendar, wonderful. And if some of the same people are looking at you and I? Great! If they can’t tell the difference and if they don’t want the results that I provide, then you should get that business. And this is the same with your competitors. If you can’t show them why they want your results, then the cheaper price is going to win because somebody else’s results, which could be just a lower price if that’s all they perceive the difference is, a lower price, that’s an easy one to lose because there’s always somebody cheaper. As a matter of fact, most of you when you were new in business, you were the one that was cheaper. So if you don’t want to have competition, you want to have as many people as possible looking for you, or by the time they reach out to you, they’re convinced that you, and maybe very few others, can give them the kind of results that they want for their wedding or event. And if you have any other kind of business that’s not weddings and events, this applies to you as well. I’m in the speaking business, this is not weddings and events, yet it’s the same exact thing for my business. I don’t worry about SEO, that was another episode I did. I said, “I don’t care about SEO, should you?” Because SEO is someone who’s looking for someone like what I do, not me specifically. And the more people you can have looking for you because of referrals, because of networking, because they saw you, experienced you at another event already, those people are, you don’t have any competition because they’re looking for you.
Now, truth is they might have been to other weddings and events and saw other people that did a good job as well, might have also gotten referrals to other people, but you still want to be in that very, very small group. So are you still competing? Not in the true sense because you can’t see the other people, you don’t know what they’re doing. Now, you can look at their advertising, you can look at their websites, you can look at their social media and you can see what they’re putting out there but you don’t know what’s going to attract that next person. You might think, hey, I have great photos, I have great text, I have great reviews and things all over the place, but that might not be what attracts that particular customer. Because think about all the people that you’ve done business with and think about all the people that you’ve had a conversation with and they chose someone else. They wanted their results, their shopping results their event results, and their post event results, they wanted what they got, perceived, I’m sorry, not what they got, what they perceived they were going to get from somebody else.
So, do you really have competition? If you’re doing things well, including your marketing, advertising, networking, asking for referrals, asking for reviews and all those things, you can limit the amount of competition that you have. I would say there’s very few people who don’t have anybody else who does anything like what they do. There are some people out there and that’s actually a tough business to be in, because if they, this is another episode that I did, if they don’t know what exists, how can they ask for it? And every time, in all my years in the industry, over 25 years, when someone’s come up with this idea, it’s like, wow I have never heard of that before, never seen that before, that’s really hard to market. It’s hard to market because people aren’t asking for it. They’re not looking for it. They’re not looking online for it. They’re not Googling it. They’re not looking on YouTube or Pinterest or Instagram for it because they don’t even know it exists.
So, that’s a tough business to be in because they don’t even know it exists. You might not have any competition, but what you’re competing still for is those dollars that they are going to spend somewhere else because they don’t know that you even exist to give them to you. But for the rest of us, if you want to limit the amount of competition you have, do everything that you do so that people are looking for you instead of someone like you. And if you can fill your calendar the way you want, profiting the way you want, that way, then you really have very little, if any, competition. Thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
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