If
your small business is going to prosper in a hard economy, you need to
continue to expand your customer/client base – and that means drawing in
customers from your competitors.
How can you do this? By offering something more or something different than your competitors do. Research your competitors and see what you can offer to entice their customers into becoming your customers. 
Let me give you a scenario. If I can remember, mobile networks in Nigeria
launched a New feature that allows subscribers keep their existing
number while switching to different networks in 2013. What this means is
an MTN subscriber who wishes to use 9mobile does not need to buy a new
SIM card or get a different number. He or she just need to take the SIM
to the network customer service agent to port. They call it “SIM
Portability.”
Prior
to this time, Mr. Afeez Oyetoro (a.k.a SAKA) has been Etisalat’s
household ambassador. And if you can remember, Etisalat just slashed
BlackBerry bundles to N1000. Another strategy that helped them penetrate
into the Nigerian telecommunication market.
For
MTN to get their own share of the market, they needed to develop a
strategy to win their competitors’ customers. To achieve this, they
signed Saka who was then Etisalat’s ambassador.
In
the MTN Advert, Saka sang and danced on stage – teaching other network
users how to PORT from their existing mobile networks to MTN without
loosing their number.
This
move generated a lot of buzz on social media with some folks blaming
Saka for not having loyalty for Etisalat while others were saying there
was no contract tying Saka to Etisalat.
I
know your business might be small, and you can’t afford signing top
celebrities in order to win your competitors’ customers. But there are
other strategies you can implement to win your competitors’ customers.
It can be through promo, providing better customer service, by creating brand loyalty, giveaway, showing up more, smiling with buyers more, by lowering your price, discount, nice in your neighbourhood, and other means to entice them into buying from you.
Iziaq, S. OLAWALE
