After establishing your business, you will come face-to-face with a hard fact—there are others offering similar services like yours & competing for your clients. Competition is ever-present, no matter which industry or field you observe.
The majority of your competitors will be hardworking, trying to make it on their own and selling the best quality products or services like you. Since the remodeling industry had annual revenue of $400 billion, it is natural that people want to succeed in this. Unfortunately, some take the dark route to achieve their goals. You will come across competitors who will use either unfair means or even directly badmouth your business to prove and establish their superiority in the market.
These tactics can de-stabilize your business model, if not dealt with correctly. Here are ways to counter such corrosive attempts.
React Fast
Stay on your toes, constantly looking out for such attempts. They can come through both offline or online channels.
The key is to identify the incident and react to it quickly. If it is a bad comment on your social media, try to have it taken down as a priority. The longer such negative words stay up, the more they can hurt your business.
What you don’t want to do is reply and make it a thread of defense. This approach will give them the traction they need, allowing more people to read it. The downside is people won’t necessarily read the whole conversation before deciding who is right.
Deal With Negative Reviews
A fact that is known to bring down a successful business is negative reviews. There are many reputed platforms like Facebook or Google which people use to gather information about a business. While social media can help your online presence, nowadays it is also possible to buy negative reviews against you. These are reviews from fake accounts posing as consumers.
The first option is to have them taken down, but with so many coming in, that may not be possible. Try to reply to the ones coming from credible users (like a verified one). Always use professional language while replying.
Avoid lashing out to prove your point as many customers judge you on how you deal with negative reviews; they won’t know the whole story but will surely make a bad impression.
Stealing Content
Your competitors can try to steal content from your blogs, advertisement campaigns, social media content, etc. Some software can copy the content from your website and paste it on random sites to decrease the credibility of yours. Do not panic as these tricks are hardly effective. Google has an inbuilt network to determine the source of the content; as long as your content was purely developed by you, you should not have to worry.
A serious form of such attacks can be directly hacking your website to steal sensitive information about you or worse, your clients! Equip your website with firewalls and keep changing the admin passwords occasionally. You can also enable services that will notify you whenever it encounters a suspicious activity or if your website goes down.
Finding your way around such problems can be good for you & your counterparts as they will have the opportunity to learn and grow. In fact, it is believed that competition is important for contractors to establish a reputation.
Stay tuned with CustomFin for more such tips. We also partner with home improvement businesses to help them finance their clients & improve ROI.
