How to do competitive analysis?

Published at: 20.03.2023

When is the last time you pay attention to your competitors?

In any industry, competitors exist at all levels, however, few are neglected who may reach your level and above as a strong competition in the long run. So, it is always important to understand the efficiency of an effective competitive analysis. Have you been religiously doing it? If not then you are missing out on an important intelligence aspect that can be an effective tool for your business growth.

What is a competitive analysis?

To build a profitable organization, you need to stand out in the market. To achieve the result, you should have a thorough calculation about your competitors’ move. Competitive analysis is a business strategy includes researching competitors about their sales, products, and marketing tactics. The research efficiently points out potential opportunities where your brand can out-perform them. A thorough marketing analysis ensures that your organization is staying at the top of the industry trends and your product or service consistently meeting or even exceeding industry standards.

What is the purpose of a competitive analysis?

Finding and comparing key market metrics to identify differences between your products and services and your market competitors is the key purpose of competitive analysis. It has several benefits to be features as an effective marketing tool.

Identifies where your product or services are different from the rest of the market. This helps in claiming future marketing efforts.
Picks out the areas where your competitors is doing excellent. With this, you can stay relevant in the business world by outperforming industry standard marketing campaigns.
Tells where your competitors are falling short, which eventually opens areas of improvement for your business. It also tells what marketing strategy remain untouched and you can apply that for your organization to make a unique move in the market.
Provides you with where competitors’ product and services are lacking based on the customer reviews. This can be considered as a great advantage where you can customize your product or service features to meet those needs.
Gets a benchmark which helps to measure your business growth.

As you can already know the importance of competitive analysis from the above points. It provides a diverse benefit that aids business growth. When you have a thorough analysis of your marketing competitors, you can develop new products or services to fill up the gaps in the market. This helps in discovering new market trends and promotes effective marketing and selling.

Understanding the effectiveness of competitive analysis won’t work if you don’t to how to execute your market research properly. Let’s dig into that.

Identify your competitors:

identifying your competitors is the foremost step and the base of competitive analysis, start with this. First understand there are two types of competitors: direct and indirect. Brands that offers same products or services and is targeting similar consumer base as yours, is your direct competitor. Your indirect competitor will either sell similar product and target a different consumer base, or will offer different products or services but target your consumer base.

Analyze your competitors’ offerings:

Keep yourself updated with your competitors’ moves to identify any market shift and be aware of everything move your competitors are taking. Analyze their product or service offering in detail including the quality and pricing. While doing this part of your competitive analysis, you can tick on the below questions.

Are they a low-cost or high-cost provider?
Are they working mainly on volume sales or one-off purchases?
What is their market share?
What are the characteristics and needs of their ideal customers?
Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick and mortar?
How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?
How do they distribute their products or services?

Provide competitive shipping costs:

Do you know high shipping cost is the primary reason for cart abandonment? Try to analyze from the customers’ point of view. If similar products they find on multiple platforms they will go for the one who offers low pricing especially the shipping cost. Through competitive analysis examine the shipping costs of your competitors and make sure to meet those if not outperform.

Examine your competitors’ marketing strategy:

Run a thorough examination on your competitors’ website to understand their marketing efforts, starting from blog, whitepapers or ebooks, videos or webinars, podcasts, infographics or cartoons, side decks to FAQs, featured articles, press releases, media kits, case studies, online or offline advertising campaigns, etc. When you have the detailed understanding of your competitors’ marketing tactics, try to examine if that is benefiting them or not, and complement or omit your business strategy accordingly.

Understand your competitors’ engagement with their customers:

Understanding your competitors’ engagement with their customers is necessary to boost engagement between your business and your customer. Check your competitor’s comment section is negative, positive or a combination of both. Take a note of the number of fans or followers; and share, repin, and retweet counts.

Perform SWOT analysis:

While keeping the above mentioned components in mind when performing competitive analysis, get the habit of performing SWOT analysis covering your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By doing so, you will be able to major their weaknesses and strengths. This helps in highlighting the improvement areas of your business.

Competitive analysis works as an essential component in ensuring your business growth. However, the task is extremely tiring and time-consuming, especially when you are researching multiple competitors at one time. Brandbajade.com has a team of dedicated professionals who thoroughly understand your business needs and market dimensions. Through our competitor analytical procedures and branding services we evaluate your business, sales, and marketing reports. Further, we keep a track on market movement and complement your efforts as service providers for the betterment and growth.

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