How can you analyze your competition?

Published in

KastStories

5 min readDec 21, 2016

Comparing your business to competitors is a great way of seeing where you are in the market.

For example, who is your biggest competition? Is their customer base growing faster than yours? Do they have the majority of the market? How does your market share compare?

Typically companies have relied on SWOT methods for competitor analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s a great way of pinpointing internal and external factors that affect your company. You can find threats, work on weaknesses and promote your strengths, allowing you to get your market share of the business.

Unless you’re the only company doing what you do, or offering a service, you will never completely resolve threats, which is why you need to keep an eye on your competition.

Although you will never be savvy to all aspects of a competitor’s marketing strategy, below are some best methods to start your competitor analysis.

Positioning Comparisons

This is a matter of branding and general positioning. How does your brand behave, act and present itself in the market? And how does your competitor?

By comparing both, you can tell where are the strongest features of your brand and have insights on how to develop them furthermore.

Best tools for Positioning Comparisons

Gartner Magic Quadrant is the name of a series of market reports. The reports contain a vast amount of research done on four types of technology providers in fast-growing markets: Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players, and Challengers, allowing a broad view of your competitors and market share.

Product Comparisons

Advertising campaigns, discounts, and specials are common knowledge, easily found on websites, brochures, TV advertising, etc. What are you competitors offering that you aren’t? What discounts or prices are working for them and how do yours compare?

Best tools for Product Comparisons

What Runs Where is a handy tool for monitoring your competitors’ ads. It covers many ad networks and countries, allowing you to track competitors worldwide.

Websites

These days, customers google your business or go directly to your website before you even know they’re a customer. So, analyzing your competitor’s website is a great place to start.

Is their website user-friendly?
How many pages do they have?
What’s on their home page?
How does your site compare?

And most importantly, how do you know whether their website is successful?

Best tools for Website Comparisons

WooRank helps to better your website based on the results of a project analyzing either your site or your competitors.

What do you need to analyze?

SEO

There are numerous tools to help determine how your website performs. There are also ways of measuring keywords and key terms, all of which drive site visits. If you can measure something, you can improve it. To get a better view of your market share, you can analyze your competitor’s site traffic too.

Where do your competitors rank in a Google search?
How many more website visits do your competitors receive?

Best Tools for SEO Comparisons

Try Google Insights to understand industry trends, consumer insights and content possibilities. It’s a good way to compare yourself to the market and see where your brand is placed.

Google Trends is a great place to research your online development and compare it to others. Just throw in your website and add your competitor’s in the search area: they’ll do the rest.

And with the information coming from Google, with access to the most data on the internet, it’s pretty accurate.

SEMrush lists key phrases and rankings for terms most used on your competitor’s site (as well as your own). See where they’re ranked, how you can rank better and get extra access.

Social Media

A key factor in this marketing climate is analyzing the integration of social media into their marketing strategy.

Does their website have social media share buttons?
Does your competition have an Instagram account followed by millions?
What are they posting and why?
Do they engage with customers through Facebook or Twitter?
How often do they post, when do they post, and what do they post?

The above things to monitor aren’t important solely in themselves, but monitoring their social media followers — and the growth of this following — will give you an insight into whether your competitor’s marketing strategy is working.

Best Tools for Social Media Comparisons

Google Alerts is a simple tool that sends updates every time your competitor is mentioned online.

InfiniGraph keeps you up to date with trends in your specific industry. It’s beneficial for both competitor analysis and improving your own content.

Perhaps the best tool to monitor social media traffic would be Google Keyword Planner. Because of course, it’s provided by Google.

Blogging

Is your competitor driving website traffic by blogging?
How often do they blog?
Does the content represent solely their products or spread industry knowledge?

Subscribe to your competitors’ blogs. Check out customer engagement through shares and comments. Are your main competitors’ blogs full of dynamic well-written pieces worth sharing, or pictures and fun stories? Find out what makes their blogs successful.

Best Tools for Blogging Comparisons

SocialMention focuses on blogs and social media, tracking keywords and company names, allowing you to keep track of what’s said across social platforms — and with what sentiment.

Analyzing your main competitors gives you insights that allow your marketing strategy to develop based on what successfully works for your target market. You’ll always need a point of difference, but being aware of what your targeted customers like puts you closer to gaining more market share.