Competitor analysis is the process of analysing the competitive landscape of a business to seek opportunities which could lead to business growth.
If done right, competitive analysis will help you answer questions like:
The information you’ll gain from performing a competitive analysis can guide you on a lot of the decisions you make as a company.
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:
Most people think conducting a competitor 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:
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.
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:
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.
The next step is to analyse their online presence and marketing strategy.
It’s 2020! 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.
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.
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.
The goal is to capitalise on this information to create an even better social media strategy to attract customers.
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.
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!