5 Easy Ways to Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Whether you want to admit it or not, we all have competitors and they’re after our customers.
Competition is actually a really important principle of Economics.
Competition encourages businesses to obtain or maintain a share of their market by varying the elements of the marketing mix: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place (4Ps of marketing).
In simple words, when a business has competitors it’s pushed to develop better or innovative products, different pricing structure, alternative promotions or to consider new markets.
Knowing your competitors enables you to determine:
1. How you compare in terms of price, product, promotion, and market.
2. How your product/service differentiate versus your competitors?
3. What you could do better and what you could offer that your competitors don’t have.
4. What they are doing wrong, so you don’t do the same mistakes.
5. How and where they promote their service/product
Understanding your competitors, what they offer, their positioning, etc. and monitoring them on an on-going basis is key to growing your business.
Competitive analysis can differ depending on what you’re trying to learn about your competitors. You might want to do a competitive analysis around a specific aspect like their pricing, or you might do a high-level look at your competitors’ marketing activities as a whole.
You’re probably already thinking that competitive analysis is complicated and that you would need to hire a third party to do that for you. You are wrong!
You can easily conduct competitive research yourself.
Here some tools and ideas on how you can start collecting information about your competitors.
1. Research their online presence.
Look for articles, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos they have been posting. Check their website or any directory, marketplace, etc. they are utilizing to market their services and products and observe their branding, tone, message, offering, etc.
2. Visit exhibitions or events
Visit events where they are exhibiting or speaking. Check their stand, their promotional material, and the type of audience they are attracting. Speak to them and find out what they offer, their pricing, promotions, shipping methods, customer incentives, etc.
3. Check their social media presence.
Use tools like Socialmention to find out what’s being said about them across various platforms and look for ways to put what you learn into action. Use Google Alerts to monitor the web for mentions of your competitor’s brand from third parties.
4. Monitor their marketing activities
Use Google search to see whether they are running Adwords campaigns, and use platforms like SpyFu to find out what keywords they are buying.
Look at their Facebook page and use the “Info & ads” feature to see if they are running any Facebook campaign.
Test their sales funnels, sign up to their webinars, and download their freebies. Purchase a product to check the product itself, but also their shipping times, packaging, etc. Add an item to your cart and abandon the checkout process to monitor the follow-up sequence.
Sign up to their Messenger bot sequence and observe how they are using them and what information they are sharing through the bot.
Use platforms like Buzzsumo to analyze what content and channels perform best for them. Read some of their high ranking articles to understand how their content compares with yours.
Check their web site’s traffic sources through services like Alexa.com and Follow.net.
Sign up for their newsletter and follow their blog to get an understanding of the type of communication they have with their customers.
5. Look at their customers reviews
Leverage sites like Udemy, Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. to check their customers reviews and note what services, features, etc. that may be mentioned and any positive or negative feedback associated with them.
Once you have gathered all the information you should be able to determine the following:
- What you can do better in terms of pricing, how you market and deliver your product/services;
- What services and products neither of you is offering;
- What new market or niche you could serve;
- Whether there is a saturation in certain areas — which might require you to focus on less competitive areas.
Draw up a list of everything that you’ve found out and put together a strategy that hones in on your competitors’ weaknesses, market opportunities and enables you to offer the right product, in the right place, at the right time and price.
Remember, there will be always competition, no matter the business.
Denying its existence will only affect the overall potential for success of your business.
