Competitor analysis is the process of analysing the competitive landscape of a business to seek opportunities which could lead to business growth.
When done right, competitive analysis will help you answer questions like:
Who are your competitors?
What products or services are they offering?
What is their unique selling proposition?
How much funding do they have?
What is their market share?
Who are their target customers?
What are their strengths and weaknesses?
What are their marketing strategies and channels?
The information you’ll gain from performing analysis on your competitors can guide you on a lot of the decisions you make as a company.
Why is Competitor Analysis Important?
Instead of using guesswork, analysing your competitors will give you both quantitative and qualitative data you need to make better and informed decisions for your company.
Competitor analysis can help you with how to:
Differentiate yourself from your competition
Improve your offerings by capitalising on the weakness of your competition
Identify gaps in the market and fill them
Put together a better marketing strategy
Pick and avoid battles
How to Conduct Competitor Analysis
Most people think conducting competitive analysis is as simple as visiting your competitors’ websites and their social media pages.
The fact is, it goes well beyond that.
We’ve broken down the process into 5 simple steps for you:
1. Identify your Competitors
The first step to conducting competitor analysis is to identify your competitors. You can’t analyse your competitors if you don’t know who they are.
There are several ways you can identify your competitors. The first of them is to do a quick Google search.
By searching for the type of product or service you offer, a lot of your top competitors will likely show up on the first page of the SERPs.
Additional ways include checking industry news, social media, and online communities.
Select at least 7 - 10 of your competitors for your analysis.
2. Check their Product Offering and Market Positioning
After identifying your competitors, the next thing is to check their product or service offering.
At this stage, you would focus on answering questions like:
What are they selling?
What is their unique selling proposition?
What is their pricing?
This will give you a fair idea about how they’ve positioned themselves in the market and also give you an idea on how to better position yourself to compete against them.
3. Analyse their Website and Marketing Strategy
The next step is to analyse their online presence and marketing strategy.
It’s 2021! Every company has a website. You would want to check out your competitors’ websites.
The things to pay attention to include the look and feel of the website, usability, and page copy.
Whilst at it, you also need to figure out their marketing strategy.
SEMRush has a great competitor analysis tool. From organic research of your competitors to their backlink gaps to monitoring their brand, this platform offers more than ten features to keep an eye on your competitors. It offers data about their website traffic, analyzes the keyword gap, uncovers keywords that can boost your sales, conducts an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s backlinks, and provides details on link-building opportunities.
With this great tool, you can also discover all the advertising efforts of your competitors and even spy on their display ads.
SE Ranking is a great tool with detailed insights into your competitor’s business. You’d love how much time you save by using this tool for competitor analysis. By simply entering a website in the search bar, you get data about your rival’s website traffic, their keywords, backlinks, popular pages and their organic vs paid traffic, and even the ads they run. All this data helps you compete better.
The tool also offers SEO, B2B features, and social media management.
Serpstat is of great help in conducting competitor analysis. The platform can conduct website analysis, do competitor analysis in organic and paid search, check backlinks, and offer much more.
It has 5 different modules and makes days worth of work possible in seconds. With Serpstat, it’s simple to dive deep into your competitors' SEO and PPC efforts, their domain traffic, all of their ads, and even their estimated budget. The detailed SEO report offered by this tool offers everything to find the ranking gap.
One of the important things in competitor analysis is keeping an eye on your competitors’ marketing efforts; from where they get their clients, which marketing channel they use, and which of their products are most popular? Answers to these important questions help you stay one step ahead of your rivals. Brand24 helps with all this. It also draws a comparison of your marketing efforts vs those of your competitors’.
Brand24 also has features like brand mentions, sentimental analysis, audience engagement, and analysis of marketing and PR activities - all of this, just one click away.
Other tools include: Sprout Social and Similarweb
How Can We Help?
Do you need help figuring out your competitors? Why not give us a call and we’ll match you with a team that can set you in the right direction?
In the meantime you could head over to our training courses and learn tips and tricks that you’d be able to implement today!
