How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis for Your Business

For whatever business you are doing, there are competitors out there offering similar products to yours and are striving to be better than you in the business.

Now in the business field, knowing what they offer is not just enough, you have to be better equipped with as much information and insight as possible in order to gain an advantage over your competitors.

Thankfully, with the advent of new software and technology, marketers and business owners can take advantage of these platforms to know about their competitors.

This takes us to the question:

What is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis can be said to be an important part of your company’s marketing plan. It is an evaluation that can help you establish what makes your product or service stand out from the rest.

It helps you, evaluate your competitors by placing them in strategic groups depending on how directly they compete for a share of the customer’s money. Start by listing their product or service, it’s profitability, growth pattern, marketing objectives, and assumptions, current and past strategies, organizational and cost structure, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as size in sales of the competitor’s business for each competitor.

Who Benefits from a Competitive Analysis Framework?

This framework is important and beneficial for entrepreneurs, business owners, startup founders, product managers, as well as marketers.

Entrepreneurs, business owners, startup founders, product managers and marketers can benefit from its vast analysis of business metrics, product analysis and a marketing assessment, with the marketing being a little more detailed.

Why Should You Carry Out a Competitive Analysis?

Once a competitive analysis is well planned you are sure of having quantitative and qualitative data to back your own business decisions.

It can help you:

• Get benchmarks in which you can use to measure your growth against.
• It can help you develop your Unique Value Proposition.
• You can use it to effectively prioritize your product development by focusing on the aspects of competitor’s products that customers value the most.
• It is effective in creating a new product category as well as in identifying gaps between what your competitors offer and what the customers need.
• Discover market segments that are not fully served by competitors.
• It helps you improve your product by capitalizing on competitors’ weaknesses customers are complaining about.

How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis for Your Business

Identify Your Top Competitors

Start by finding out who your top competitors are. Like we stated earlier, no matter the field you are engaged in, there’s a competitor who are going after the same group of qualified leads.

If you need help in identifying who your competitors are, you can search through Google by entering the type of service/product you are offering and you will see a few of your top competitors pop up.

You can also use online tools like SEMrushwhich is a great software to get a look into what other companies in your field are ranking for your keywords and how you can compete against them.

What Products or Services does Your Competitors Sell?

After you have identified who your competitors are, then you can start your competitive analysis by searching further in order to gain a better understanding of the kind of content they are publishing.

Analyze their content to help you determine what opportunities you have to help outperform your competitors. Study the type of content creation your competitors focus on, like Blogs? Case studies? Premium content?.

After you have located their content, you can then determine the quality, and see how it compares to yours.

Check out the channels they are using for their content, see how it compares to yours. Also check for how frequently they are publishing, adding, and updating new content and the topics they are discussing.

If your competitors are publishing more frequently than you, then maybe it’s time for you to up your game and publish more often too about relevant topics.

Analyze their SEO

Here, try to focus on outsmarting your competitor. Look for that thing that is making your competitor’s content outrank yours and update on it,by offering more information than that of your competitor’s. Identify the gaps in the work of your competitors, and use the creativity and expertise of your team to fill in those gaps.

Study their Social Media Engagement

Businesses are currently using social media to share content in order to interact with users and fans.

Determine how your competitors are using social media and integrating it into their marketing and see how effectively they are using their profiles.

Find out the type of information they are posting, what is their frequency, and if they have cover photos and profile photos.

Next, find out how many clicks their post is garnering, if they have followers, are they often liked or retweeted are the photos they are posting showcasing events or company culture? etc.

All these questions and many more, are what you should be asking when going through your competitor’s profile. This will enable you to know what you can do better to outsmart them.

Identify Areas for Improvement

After you have carried out the competitive analysis, you are now in the best position to understand what your competitors are doing.

Use all the information you have gathered about each competitor to your advantage and identify areas of your own work that can be improved.

This will help you establish your company’s presence with potential customers.

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