Marketing is hard, it takes time, money and lots of effort planning and optimising to succeed, even if you have the best product, you can still miss out to a competitor with better sales and marketing.
And lets face it, startups don’t have time, or money, or sometimes even talent to really compete head on. The cost of cutting a new path is high.
But, there is a more efficient way. All businesses have direct competitors, indirect competitors (indirect competitors don’t compete with you per-se but the use of their product means you may lose out), and ‘adjacent competitors’ (adjacent competitors don’t compete with you, but they do target the same audience and can be a cross-sell to you, in the best case they could be your partner)
Luckily, most startups are disruptive, there are incumbents that exist, generally larger, and generally ‘not as good’, but also, generally have been around for longer, doing marketing for longer. And this is an advantage, why carve a new road when, with a better business, you could simply take advantage of the existing path?
Your competitors have already spent heaps of money building out their marketing efforts and sales funnels, but they aren’t perfect, they are going to miss out of sales and leads in their funnel, and if you’re positioned as a better alternative, you can effectively piggyback the competitors efforts and capitalise.
If you’re competitor has a Linkedin account, user their follower list to hunt for leads. Your competitor has sales reps, contact the sales reps connections. Competitor is doing content seeding? reverse engineer their SEO efforts to find out which sites they seed into and leverage that list for your own efforts. setup retargeting campaigns on competitor URLs.
Capitalise on your competitors well trodden path.