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To have a competitive advantage, you must create an edge over your competitors. In the aggressive business world, especially in today’s economy, every advantage counts to establish your business in the top of your industry. Gaining a competitive advantage takes strategic planning and extensive research.


Analyze your target market and identify your competition. Your target market is “a specific group of consumers at which a company aims its products and services” (Entrepreneur). A target market is distinguished by socioeconomic, demographic, and common characteristics or needs that make them the best audience to focus on selling to. To uncover your target market, answer the following simple questions: What am I selling? Who will most likely buy or consume my product or service? Before you can crush your competition, you need to know who they are. Find out which businesses are going after your same target market. How do they differentiate themselves from other companies in the industry? Where are they located? To find this information, business directories can be used to search free company profiles. Information included in the company profiles are company overview, contact information, location, key facts, employees, and company payment rating.


2Learn from your competition and your customers. Don’t be afraid of your competition, but rather use them as a learning tool and assess their business model. Learn your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses – imitate their strengths, and use their weaknesses to your advantage. Use companies that specialize in business information, such as Cortera, to construct and analyze a competitive landscape of the target market. The business information you learn from your rivals will help you develop the competitive edge you need to surpass them in your industry. Intimate customer knowledge is equally important as competitor knowledge. Gaining in-depth insights about your customer portfolio will allow you to maximize revenue potential, increase customer retention, and boost prospective customers. You can use a mix of many tools and methods to measure consumer insight and both your position in the market and the positions of your competitors. Along with traditional company information resources, consider social media analysis tools that allow consumer insight mining on a large scale.


3Create an “Economic Moat”. Take advantage of barriers to entry into the market, using them to dissuade competitors from challenging your marketing share. In some cases, an established company’s ability to manipulate hurdles to enter and compete in its market becomes an effective tool against new competition, further entrenching the business and preserving its profit potential for the foreseeable future.

4Stay on the cutting edge. Once you’ve gained a competitive advantage, your work is far from complete. To be successful, you will need to continuously maintain your competitive advantage. After all, your competitors are not going to sit back and allow you to steal their market share. You can maintain your competitive advantage by predicting future trends in your industry, constantly researching and monitoring your competitors, and adapting to your customer’s wants and needs. Sometimes you may need to take chances to keep ahead of the pack and differentiate your business, but with big risk often comes big reward – Just remember to do your research before diving head first into new ideas.5Use Business Information Resources. The information revolution is here – take advantage of it! It creates a competitive advantage by providing companies with new ways to outperform their rivals. Knowledge is power, and business information companies provide just that. Reliable business information companies include Cortera, Hoovers, Manta, Portfolio.com, and Goliath.