What Is Competitor Analysis?
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 a 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.
- How are they getting traffic to their website?
- How are they attracting customers?
- Are they doing SEO?
- Have they invested in content marketing?
- Are they running any paid ads?
These are all questions you need to answer.
You can use tools like SimilarWeb and Ahrefs to see how their websites are getting traffic or the keywords they are ranking for respectively.
4. Analyse Their Social Presence
Social media is a must these days. If your competitors are not on social media then they are doing something terribly wrong.
If they are on social media, then you must check out what they are doing.
- What social media platforms are they using?
- How many followers do they have?
- What type of content are they posting?
- What is working for them and what isn’t
The goal is to capitalise on this information to create an even better social media strategy to attract customers.
5. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
The final step would be to conduct a SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Once you’ve completed this part of the research, your competitive analysis should be complete.
You should have a good idea of how you compare to the competition and how to better position yourself.
Tools to Help You Analyze Your Competitors
There are a few tools that can help you with the different aspects of the competitor analysis process.
The tools included next will not only help you check how you measure against your competitors, they'll also save you a lot of time doing so.
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!
