In marketing and strategic management, the competitive analysis examines the strengths and weaknesses of present and future rivals. This research gives a strategic perspective on offensive and defensive chances and dangers. It should look at the features, market share, price, marketing, differentiators, strengths, weaknesses, geography, culture, and customer evaluations of your rivals. A competitor analysis aims to understand your rivals’ strengths and shortcomings in relation to your own, as well as to identify a market gap.
HOW TO DO A COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS?
With the help of competitor analysis you can:
- Attain a better understanding about the industry and market
- Explain your USP (Unique Selling Proportion)
- Set appropriate benchmarks
- Can understand the reason behind your competitors growth
- Get better understanding of your rival’s strategies
- Make a perfect marketing strategy to be on top of the competition
The competitive analysis tools assist you in benchmarking against your competitors, monitoring your industry, and discovering your competitors’ statistics and web strategy. These tools can assist you in identifying possible prospects, such as partners or leads.
TOOLS FOR COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
- Sprout Social
- SEMRush
- Phlanx
- Social Blade
- Ahrefs
- MozBar
- Buzzsumo
- Similarweb
- Feedly
- Mailcharts
- Owletter
- iSpionage
- Owler
Let’s explore a few steps how to do competitive analysis.
STEPS TO DO COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Below are a few steps to do competitive analysis:
- Set Your Goals
Competitor analysis helps to assess a rival’s strengths and shortcomings compared to your product. Without objectives, competitive analysis is useless. Knowing your goals will help you plan your research to fulfill those aims. It is also critical to have specific goals:
- Which decisions will be influenced by your competitive research?
- Do you want to improve your messaging?
- Play around with the funnel construction.
- Find ideas for A/B or multivariate testing.
Knowing your goals will help you plan your research to fulfill those aims.
- Determine your competitors
Knowing who your competitors are and what they provide may assist you in differentiating your products, services, and marketing.
- To find out who your main competitors are, do the following:
- Conduct a Google search and look at Google Trends, SimilarWeb, Compete, or Alexa.
- Study the list of presenters and firms in your field
- Ask your clients who else they considered.
It will allow you to set competitive rates and respond to rival marketing campaigns with your initiatives.
- Brand Awareness
This section examines how your brand awareness compares to your rivals. Knowing who your opponents are and what they provide may help you differentiate your products, services, and marketing. It will allow you to set competitive rates and respond to rival marketing campaigns with your initiatives.
- Conduct a competitive usability study
People compare prices. It is where comparative user testing may help. Request that participants review both your website and the websites of your top two rivals. (For participants, more than three website assessments might be burdensome.) To avoid biased comments, try not to reveal your company’s name and alternate the order in which you present the websites to participants.
- Contrast the value offerings of competitors
People may recall up to three reasons to buy from you or join up for your service after leaving your website. They’ll most likely remember only one—your primary selling point. What exactly is it on your website? Is it a reflection of your competitive advantage? To develop a value proposition that genuinely supports your differentiation approach, you must first understand how your rivals position themselves.
- Interview the clients of your competition
Customers of competitors are worth their weight in gold. They can not only tell you how delighted they are with a rival’s goods or services; telling why they chose the competitor in the first place. Ask the following questions to your rivals’ customers:
- What prompted you to begin seeking a solution?
- What were your top five purchasing criteria (in descending order of importance)?
- What were your primary motivations for selecting the firm you did?
- Conduct a design competitive analysis
While the design is only one piece of the conversion jigsaw, it is a critical component of total CRO success. As part of their creative process, growth designers constantly do competition analysis.
- Conduct a quantitative competitive analysis
SimilarWeb provides various information about your rivals, including traffic volume, significant traffic sources, and organic and sponsored keywords. You may use SEMrush to discover your rivals’ top-performing keywords. You may also learn about your rivals’ display advertising, organic and paid search, and link-building techniques. With your rivals’ most effective keywords at your disposal, you may create appealing copy variants.
- Carry out a functional investigation
The technological stacks of your rivals might provide insight into their degree of maturity as a digital marketing firm. You can also receive some tool suggestions for yourself. If your competitor receives 7-9 points, you should initially try ideas found on their website.
