The 5 competitor analysis strategies that will edge your business over others.

What is a competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is a method for locating, evaluating, and classifying important competitors. This research frequently focuses on the sales, product, and marketing strategies of competitors. You may pinpoint your own flaws and strategies to strengthen your firm by assessing competitors and determining how they relate to your industry. Your chances of gaining an advantage over your rivals will increase as you gain a deeper understanding of them.

Competitive analysis reveals market trends, aids in sales team performance improvement, and helps you pinpoint your company’s strengths and weaknesses as well as potential possibilities and threats. You can successfully sell your goods, reach your target market, and grow your customer base once you’ve conducted a competitive study.

Need for competitive analysis.

By seeing how competing organizations are doing, you can identify the advantages and disadvantages of your own business. Knowing your brand’s advantages helps you understand your position within the marketplace and how you would like your target customers to perceive your business. The use of readymade business google slide templates helps in presenting and analyzing the core strategies and increase the success rate of your business. It’s crucial to explain to prospective clients why your service or product lines are the greatest available options.

If competition analysis is done correctly, it will provide you with a wealth of quantitative and qualitative information to support your own business decisions. This helps to

• Define (or validate) your unique value proposition.
• Prioritize your product development by concentrating on the features that consumers most appreciate in your competitors’ products.
• Elevate your position within the targeted product category.
• Live the knowledge necessary to design upcoming marketing initiatives. – more effectively communicate your strengths to potential customers.

Most used competitor analysis frameworks.

The following are the most commonly used competitor analysis strategies or frameworks.

1. SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis involves evaluating your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which is a crucial component of a competitive study. A perfect data presentation with the help of SWOT templates will reveal the things like What are they good at? What could they improve upon? What are the areas where they are superior to you? What are the areas where you are superior to them? Has your rival discovered any market opportunities?

2. BCG or the Growth-Share Matrix

A growth-share or BCG matrix is a diagram with four quadrants used to categorize goods or company units:

Stars are goods that have a large market share and rapid growth. Spend more money on these.

Question mark: Items with a low market share but high growth (often new products). Choose whether to continue investing in it or give up if you are confident it will succeed.

cash cows: Products with modest growth rates but large market shares are sometimes utilized to finance investments in celebrities.

Pets/Dogs are a low-growth and low-market-share product. Choose whether to try again or give up.

3. Customer journey map

The sum of all customer interactions with your business and brand is known as the customer journey. A customer journey map template captures the entire customer experience instead of focusing on a single transaction or event and helps present this data to identify areas of opportunities and improvements.

How to perform an effective competitive analysis?

1. Identify your top competitors.

Making a list of competitors is the first step in a competitive analysis. Make a list of the businesses that your consumer base would use if they were unable to purchase from you. The best method to do this is to conduct a search on a search engine for your industry or type of good or service, then review the results. Any business that offers a comparable commodity or service is your rival. Think about the businesses that appear in the organic listings and the businesses that spend on advertising on that search engine.

2. Categorize, Analyze & Compare your competitors.

Start leveling up your competitors once you have a general understanding of who they are. Consider your major competitors to be your direct rivals. The most important thing to do is track their behavior because you’ll be competing with them for their audience or goods. The next category is “secondary competitors,” who target a different market or provide products at various price points. Even while you might not be keeping an eye on them as carefully as your main competitors, you should nonetheless be aware of the many methods they are connecting with their audience and marketing their products.

3. Analyze their website, products & pricing strategies.

It’s important to go deeper into the information at hand once you’ve determined which competitors are the most pertinent.

Consider how rivals present their products on their websites. Find out what information they provide. Look over the ratings and comments to see if there are any hints for product marketing and branding there. Check YouTube for your competitors to check if their CEO or other employees have performed live demos, interviews, or interactions about their products if they haven’t done so on a competitor’s website.

Definitely, customers are the most important factor in the expansion of your business. Because of this, compiling consumer feedback research is an essential part of your rival analysis. Additionally, it gives you in-depth knowledge of your niche, which you may utilize to develop innovative marketing strategies.

4. Delve deep into their social media and marketing strategies.

Analyzing what, when, and how your rivals are using social media is the next stage. In addition to checking to discover if your rivals are using social media, you should also look at how well they’re utilizing their profiles. Learn more about these social media networks and how they might benefit your brand if your rivals use them and you don’t. If you want to know whether joining up is worthwhile, look at the involvement of your competitors. Do people click on their posts? Do they possess supporters? Do they get a lot of likes or retweets? Are they publishing images of occasions or workplace culture?

It’s also crucial to consider your competitors’ sales strategies, if appropriate. Are there product demonstrations? How do I get in touch with a representative? Can you call this number at all?

You can enhance your client service by examining that of your rivals. Customer service at big businesses is frequently practically non-existent; for a start-up in the sector, that’s a tremendous opportunity to profit from. If it applies to you, be sure to emphasize on your website how good your customer service is.

5. There is always room for improvement.

Utilizing your newly acquired knowledge to advance your own firm is the final and most important part of a competitive study. Find the key areas of improvement. Choose the areas of your business that require the most attention now that you know what your rivals do and how they succeed in the market. It might be time to employ fresh selling techniques or recruit more content producers. Review your business plan, set improvement targets, and keep tracking your growth.

Make a list of specific areas of your own business that could be improved using all the information you acquired about each rival. You’re sure to find something if you look hard enough.

Final Words

Competitor analysis can be very time-consuming, particularly if you are still determining where to begin. However, by just recognizing your direct and indirect competitors, you may do a thorough and effective analysis. Following the identification of your rivals, you can analyze their advantages and disadvantages in order to enhance and improve your marketing plan.