Competitor price monitoring is the only way you can be sure your business is not failing to keep its finger on the pulse of your market. When trends arrive or when seasonal goods fall in and out of favor, price trends follow suit. By analyzing and monitoring the market as a whole and the prices that go with it, you can build a picture of how and when to raise and lower your prices.
Let us use the holiday market as an example. Accommodation in a British seaside town has a range of pricing structures, which come into effect at different times of year.
Why?
The importance of competitor analysis is very much; as it shows that everyone else drops and raises their prices according to season. So if you don’t, no one will come and stay with you except in the height of summer.
And increasingly, in the holiday industry, it’s an ability to pick up all the traffic that comes in when it isn’t summer which really raises your overall profitability. So you keep an eye on the wider business environment in which you trade and you drop your prices in accord with everyone else. If you’re clever, you drop them slightly more than everyone else or you introduce offer also based on competitor price monitoring which allow you to get the edge.
For instance, you can waive any car parking fees in low season. Monitoring your competition, you can see who drops his or her price to the lowest levels then match it but throw in a waived car park charge to get the interest of the consumer.
In this industry, as in any other the old adage applies you can think your pricing is right as rain but if you have an empty campsite you’re doing something wrong. Competitor price monitoring is intended to ensure that you don’t fall into the trap of complacency of assuming that these years’ prices will hold next year. Next year might be a harder one, weather wise. Or the economy may have dwindled, meaning people feel less happy about spending and when they do spend they count every single penny.
You can spot trends like this in advance, by listening to the news and keeping your eye on all the external factors that impact on your business and your service provision. But to keep your prices agile within your market, you must then align what you have seen in your wider research with a competitor price monitoring program. If you fail to do this, you can have all the knowledge you need to accept the key piece how has the competition reacted to the environment you have identified?
The longer you analyze for, the better your pricing system will become. Because year on year analysis of the factors affecting your business (and that includes the prices the competition is setting) helps you to get a clear picture of overarching trends and long term fashions. Now you can easily resolve on your own as well the importance of competitor analysis. For more information on competitor analysis, please visit the website www.botscraper.com now.