Even if you know your audience, examine multiple marketing strategies and communication tactics, and point out your best practices, your efforts can still elicit poor results if you don’t benchmark against and learn from your competition. This is why competition analysis is an essential process.

In this guide, we will take you through an actionable workflow for conducting a well-functioning competitor analysis that would help you to strengthen your marketing strategy.

What is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis, also known as competitor analysis is the process of observing and evaluating your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses by analyzing their marketing strategies. This can help you to know how to avoid their mistakes, replicate their achievements and let you stay one step ahead of the competition.

It’s not only about replicating your competitor’s actions but also gathering enough information to take the guesswork out of your own marketing decisions. By discovering what works for your opponents and what doesn’t, and paying attention to how audiences react to various messaging, targeting, and other marketing techniques, you can avoid important mistakes.

Steps to Perform Competitive Analysis

Here are the steps that need to be taken to conduct a competitive analysis.
● Identify who your competitors are: The first step is to identify your competitors. There are two kinds of competitors i.e. Direct customers and Indirect Customers.

A direct customer offers similar products or services and targets an equivalent customer base as your business. Whereas indirect competitors sell similar products or services but target a different sector of customers, or sell different products and services but share the same customer base.

● Analyze competitors’ online presence: Once you have identified your competitors, check out their online presence by evaluating how functional their websites are and how engaging they are with their audience. With strong digital marketing strategies, your business will get a great opportunity to stand out amongst your competitors, easy to use, robust website, and engage customers on social media.

● Check online reviews: Visit online sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts and see how your competitors are replying to their customer queries and negative comments.

Reviews provide insight into the customer experience with the company service or products. By browsing negative reviews, you can understand where these businesses have gone wrong and determine what you can do to prevent such situations. And by browsing positive reviews, you can focus on where the company has outshined and determine how you can offer even better customer service.

● Speak to the competitors’ customers: Along with browsing the online reviews and comments, take note of the people you would like to know more from by reaching out to them. Talk to them directly and ask them about their experiences.

Just think of it as a relationship, and learn from other mistakes. If any sort of thing is lacking in their bond with your competitor, make it understood that you will fulfill those unmet business needs. After the conversation, you can thank them for their time and offer them better customer service through your business.

● Identify their strengths and weaknesses: Once you have completed your research, assemble it in one place and classify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Use this data to improve your own business and focus on specific areas where you can efficiently capitalize on. Maintain the analysis so that you can look back again and compare it whenever you want to perform another round of competitive analysis.

● Use Adequate Research Tools: Conduct the best-in-class competitive analysis to grow your business well. It might be a bit time-consuming if you are looking for multiple competitors. Many online tools will make you perform the process easier and more efficiently. These tools will help you identify your precise competitors, follow their content and analyze the results. Some of the best competitive analysis tools are Quick Search, BuiltWith, WooRank, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and so on.

Benefits to Conduct Competitive Analysis
Let’s dig into the benefits of executing a great competitive analysis.

● Fine-tune and develop your unique selling proposition(USP)

Competitive analysis will provide you with a vision into what other brands define as their “why”. While correlating your competitor’s unique selling proposition(USP) to your own, adequate points encompassing your business brand will arise, helping you to distinguish from the competition.

● Improve Owned Products and Services

As your brand expands, your customers’ needs and expectations will also expand. One aspect to fulfill those goals and requirements is to analyze your own customer review as well as your competitors’ customer review. Comparing will enable you to tap into the market gaps and fulfill your customer’s needs and expectations.

● Establish a Brand Benchmark

Benchmarking is the process of building a foundation for measuring growth. Startups and established companies can get huge benefits from benchmarking. This computation unlocks and analyzes chronological data associated with how consumers view you and your competitors.

● Identify Gaps in R&D and Hiring

Having a good awareness of whom your competitors are hiring as well as the knowledge of the company expansions will help you to sketch a larger resemblance of the upcoming trends.

● Discover Potential Threats

Due to the vibrant significance of the analysis, you will be able to revamp and well-function the challenges that your adversaries and the market are facing. Competitive analysis will aid you to understand the possible market fluctuations, risks, and campaigns that can be rebutted.

If you are looking for assistance in performing a competitive analysis as part of your wider marketing strategy, DIGITAL PUZZLE can equip you with the best Digital Marketing Services, SEO, Web Development, Paid Advertising, Designing and Branding, and many more. To find out how we can work for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.