Why competitor analysis

Briefly, a competitive analysis is a living document that identifies and evaluates your competitors strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own products and services. More generally, understanding and applying the insights gained from a competitive analysis will help you identify strengths and weaknesses that relate to brand health, community management, content strategy, and more. Why your brand? This question is the deciding factor in separating you from your competition.

The best way to do this is to compare mission statements, products, services, integrations, and anything else that may yield distinguishable talking points that your brand can leverage over your competition. One way to anticipate those needs and expectations is to analyze owned customer reviews as well as your competitors' customer reviews. Benchmarking as defined by Entrepreneur Magazine , is the process of building a foundation or point of reference for measuring growth. Both startups and established companies can benefit from benchmarking.

With a competitive analysis unlock and analyze historical data that relates to how customers view you and your competitors. Indirect competitors sell a different product or service in the same category but target an audience similar to yours. Replacement competitors exist outside your product category, but they satisfy a similar customer need.

Of the 3 types of competitors, replacement competitors are the hardest to identify. When conducting a competitor analysis, you should focus most of your attention on direct and indirect competitors. Before you dive into your competitor analysis , take a moment to get organized. A competitor matrix, also known as a competitor grid, is a table or spreadsheet you can use to compile your research. This will make it easier to compare your findings across competitors and spot larger trends. You can also always add more categories as you progress through your research.

Once you have a list of competitors to research, start learning about their businesses. Look for the most basic information first, and then build your way up from there. Start by looking at company websites, social media pages, and any news articles that have been published about them.

This includes information such as founding date, funding sources, and any mergers or acquisitions they have been involved with. Studying how your competitors got to where they are today will give you a more complete understanding of their businesses. This will vary greatly based on your industry. For traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, your competition is likely highly localized. How many people do your competitors employ?

LinkedIn and Glassdoor are helpful resources for this kind of data. This information will likely be easily accessible online for larger companies. For smaller and privately held companies, you might have to make do with rough estimates. Knowing how large your competitors are will help you better contextualize the rest of the data you collect.

A company is nothing without its customers. Getting an idea of who your competitors sell to will tell you a lot about their businesses. To pinpoint the target customer for any business:. Use this information to construct a profile of who your competitors are trying to reach with their products or services.

These customer profiles will probably resemble your own target customers—these are your competitors, after all—so make note of even small differences.

This will require a deep dive into their marketing strategies. These questions are meant to be a starting point. Feel free to expand on them and tailor your questions to your industry and the goals of your research. Try to condense your findings into short bullet points that you can easily reference later.

Record your conclusions in your spreadsheet. Knowing what sets your business apart from the competition—and where it falls short of expectations—can help you better serve your target customers. Not sure where to start? It can be helpful to conduct a SWOT analysis , in which you evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This can help you sift through the information you collected during your competitor analysis and identify actionable next steps for your business.

Using a competitive analysis as part of your strategic planning is an ongoing process. You can always refer back to your research whenever you need to make an important decision for your business. You have to spend some amount of time searching and analysing the information, preparing the document, and implementing necessary changes. Competitive analysis is not about copying competition solutions. The process is about defining your strengths and weaknesses and increasing your market share.

Brand24 is a tool that will allow you to conduct advanced competitors analyses. While performing a competitor analysis you will gather a ton of data. Which should a competitor analysis framework include? You can use this posts as an analysis template to make sure you have all the information you need.

Conducting a competitor analysis research is the first step towards success. Hopefully, with our competitor analysis framework, the process will be less daunting and better organised. The difference between direct and indirect competitors is important to correctly assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That one is a no-brainer. When you want to know something, you google it or bing it or duckduckgo it. Of course, Google will only spit out uncategorised results.

Your job will be to divide the businesses into categories and check all other available information, for instance, when was it established, the number of clients, etc. Try to put yourself in the position of a potential customer looking for your products or services and search for terms related to your business niche. Prepare a list of keywords related to your industry and start googling. You should get a list of your competitors ready in no time.

Some of your indirect and direct competitors might not be interested in SEO positioning which takes some time and resources to develop. Instead, they will pay for promotion. Follow the same process as in the previous point, just take a look at ads, not organic results.

Media monitoring will help you with a few steps in the competitor analysis process. The tool will start gathering all the mentions from the Internet containing your keyword and organize them in one neat dashboard. Use Brand24 and conduct competitive analysis. Give it a spin during day free trial! You will not only get a list of your competitors, but will also see which companies people recommend and why. Your customers are a goldmine of knowledge.

Most of them, before they came to you, have done a ton of research to choose the best solution for their problem. You should tap into that knowledge! Ask what other options they considered and which feature made them sway into your direction.

Moreover, new companies will most likely try to tempt your customers to switch to their product. Keeping your finger on the pulse will help you detect early signs of a new rival on the market. You can ask your new clients to answer a few question, fill in a survey, or schedule a short phone call. Try to build an email list, so you can reach your clients easily. New entrants to the market will try to put their names on the map, so check the publications regularly. Once you know who are your direct, indirect, and tertiary competitors, you can start analysing various aspects of their brand.

An important piece of market research for competitor analysis will be the data about their funding. You can look up the number of employees on LinkedIn.

Of course, that will be just an estimate, but the number will give you an idea where your company is headed. Take a closer look at these aspects:. A thorough analysis of the product will help you identify gaps in your competitors offering. Once you identify the gap on the market, you ca try to fill it with your products. Are there any opportunities on the market for your products? Look for any affiliate programs they might run. Affiliate programs help spread brand awareness and boost sales.

Another aspect of competitive analysis, especially for tech companies, is to assess what technology they use. You can check it in two ways.

First, there are websites, for example BuiltWith, that will help you discover the technology behind the product. Secondly, take a look at job listings. Companies will list the stack needed for new hires, including programming language, email marketing services, analytics systems, and much more.

SEO stands for search engines optimization. An SEO analysis can be divided into at least two subgroups. How do their articles look like?

Are they using any interactive components, for example, table of contents? Is the text on a colourful background? How do they use headings? These factors may all sound a bit trivial but they all could have an impact on website positioning. You could try to tackle certain keywords and outperform your competitors. To rank well in any search engine, a domain ought to have strong authority.