No matter what field you’re in, there will probably be other companies with similar products and services.
In a crowded market, it’s important to find a way to stand out from your competitors. Let’s take a look:
You can’t just know what they have to offer. Because of new software and technology, business owners and marketers can find out more about their competitors than ever before.
At different points in your business, you need to look at your competition to make sure you’re giving your customers the best product or service at the right price. Find out why you should do a competitor analysis regularly and what a competitor analysis includes.
What is an analysis of the competition?
Competitive analysis is a way to do research in which you look into the products, sales, and marketing methods of your biggest competitors. Using this method to make solid business plans will help you beat your competitors.
If you know how your competitors work, you can figure out how you can do better than them.
By keeping up with industry trends, you can also make sure that your product meets or exceeds industry standards.
So that your analysis is really helpful, you should:
- Pick the best competitors to study.
- Look at what makes a difference in your competitors’ businesses.
- Find the data where you can figure out how the insights could help your business.
- How important it is to look at your competitors
- To stay competitive, it’s important to do competitive analysis well, but many marketing teams don’t know how to do it.
Three out of four marketers say that competitive analysis is either very important or important for business success. But six out of ten marketers say they aren’t good at analyzing their competitors. As part of their business plans, only 4 out of 10 marketers look at their competitors.
Competitor analysis is important if you want to know how your competitors affect your business and how they can hurt your chances of success.
It can be used to:
- Validate or develop your unique value proposition
- Focus on making products that customers like more than those of your competitors.
- Use the problems that customers of your competitors have with their products to make yours better.
- Use benchmarks to measure your growth.
- Find untapped markets that your competitors aren’t serving. Find gaps between what your competitors’ products offer and what your customers want to buy, and make a new product category.
How to do an analysis of your competitors
Identify your goals
When you do a competitor analysis, you need to know what your goals are. What do you want to get out of it?
- Should your brand be better than those of your competitors?
- To make your USP better?
- Do you want to rank better for certain keywords than your competitors?
- To get more people to share and follow you on social media?
- To provide a better experience for your users than your competitors?
- To get more people to buy?
- You will be able to focus your competitor analysis if you first decide what you want to achieve and then decide what to do next.
Figure out what information you need.
As part of your competitor analysis, you will need to decide what kind of data to collect to reach your goals.
The goals you set will determine how you collect data and decide what to do first. When you’re trying to improve your video marketing compared to your competitors, data like video content, SEO rankings for videos, and social media shares for videos are of the utmost importance. For your competitor analysis to be manageable, you should put the types of information you need to gather in order of importance.
Know who you’re up against.
You should also cut down on the number of competitors on your list to make your competitive analysis easier to work with. When you run a business online, you may be competing with hundreds or even thousands of other businesses. Because of this, it’s not possible to research each one equally.
One of the easiest ways to find out who your top competitors are is to do a Google search for the type of product or service you sell and see which companies come up at the top.
A search analytics tool can also help you find your top competitors quickly. You can also find out who your competitors are with the help of a product review site or a market research report.
Get the information you need
After you’ve ranked the companies you think are your competitors in order of importance, you should collect the information you’ve ranked. Automation will make this step faster and better in more than one way.
Some of the data collection that can be done on the internet and social media can be done automatically. There are tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Twitter Analytics that can automatically collect data from each platform.
Using marketing software, you can combine data from many different places. Eventually, you should put all of your data in one database so you can study it.
Examine your data
After you have collected your data, the next step is to look at it. Your goals for analyzing your competitors should be linked to the KPIs you plan to use when you look at your data.
If your goal is to get more search engine traffic than your competitors, KPIs could be things like traffic volume, page authority, and unique backlinks. Set KPIs before collecting data to get the best results.
Do regular reviews of competitor analysis
By analyzing your data, you can find out if there are any ways you can improve and get ahead of the competition. To keep this going, a regular review of competitor analysis should be part of your standard operating procedures.
A good way to do this is to make a list with a schedule of when to do periodic reviews.
Things to include in an analysis of your competitors
- Feature matrix: Look at every product and service that your direct competitors offer. With a competitor insight spreadsheet, you can see how different companies compare to each other.
- Percentage of market share: This information can help you figure out who your biggest competitors are. Be willing to learn from your bigger competitors about how to do well in your field, because they have a lot to teach you.
- Pricing: Look at the prices and ratios of quality to quantity of your competitors. Keep an eye on the prices and stock levels of your competitors’ products to make sure you have accurate information to make pricing decisions that will help you make more money.
- Marketing: When it comes to marketing, each competitor has a different strategy. Check out your competitors’ websites, social media accounts, event sponsorships, SEO strategies, taglines, and current marketing campaigns.
- Differentiators: Do your competitors talk about the best things they have to offer? What sets them apart?
- Find out what works for your competitors and do that. Have good things been said about them? Do people know them?
- Find out what each competitor can do to get better. For instance, is their plan for social media weak? Is there no way to shop online? Is the site they’re using old? Having information like this will help you stand out.
- Reviews: Look at both the good and bad things that customers say about your competitors. Look for reviews with scores of 5, 3, and 1 out of 5 stars.
Bottom Line
Not only does a competitive analysis help you learn about your competitors, but it also shows you how to make your brand stand out. As a business, you have a set of things that can’t be seen or touched that make you stand out. You need to know a lot about marketing, branding, and the market. Compare yourself to other businesses based on these things.
Also, there are many tools on the market for competitive analysis that save you time and work. When you run online stores, especially on Shopify e-commerce platforms, it’s easier to find tools like Xpareto and Commerce Inspector and other solutions like dropship-empire, Loox, and Growave to help grow and scale your online business.