Irrespective of your industry, analyzing your competitors is necessary in order to fulfill your business goals. Conducting a routine competitor analysis will help you identify other contestants in the marketplace and assess their respective strengths and weaknesses. Along with this, it will also help enhance product and service quality, improve customer engagement, and generate profits.
Let us understand the specific components of a competitor analysis.
Through a thorough and well-researched competitor analysis, it becomes easier to navigate the market and understand the competition.
What Includes Competitor Analysis?
It is important to analyze your competitors at various stages to ensure that you are providing the best products and services at the right price to your customers. A good competitor analysis will help you learn more about your business and your competitor’s business from the customer’s point of view to pinpoint the areas where you can improve.
Feature Matrix
Find the features and specifications of your competitor’s product and maintain all this information on a sheet. Do this for every competitor and merge the data. This will help you visualize how companies stack up against each other.
Pricing
Check how much competitors are charging for their products and services to analyze where they fall on the quality vs. quantity spectrum.
Market Share Percentage
This will help you learn about your main competitors in the market. Never exclude big competitors in the market, as they will teach you how to succeed in the industry.
Marketing
The next thing that you need to analyze is the marketing strategy that your competitor has implemented. Check their social media accounts, websites, the types of events they are sponsoring, their SEO strategies, the types of campaigns they host, and how promising their tag lines are.
Differentiators
What is unique about your competitor, and what type of qualities are they highlighting. Find out what their key focus is and what needs of the consumer they fulfill.
Strengths
Identify what is good about your competitors and what is working for them. Do they genuinely have superior products? Or do they have the best marketing strategy and brand awareness?
Weaknesses
Identify where your competitor is missing. For instance, do they have a weak social media strategy, or perhaps their e-commerce strategy is weak? Could it be an outdated website?
Geography
Check the location of your competitor and the market they are serving. How many brick-and-mortar stores do they have? Or are they grabbing most of the customer’s attention online?
Culture
Evaluate your competitor’s work culture, customer reviews, and employee satisfaction. Read employee reviews to know about the company culture. Has their business strategy altered since they entered the market? See what employees like and dislike about the firm.
Customer Reviews
This one is crucial in order to get more insights into your competitor. Read their customers’ reviews on all available platforms, like Google Reviews or any apps they might use. Make sure to carefully filter through each review to determine whether it is genuine or not. Look for ones that have a detailed review with photos and perhaps a reply from the business itself.
Why Competitive Analysis Is Important?
Competitive analysis is important to analyze the competitors throughout the product lifecycle to help a business grab information about market saturation, business opportunities, and industry best practices.
Competitor analysis will help the firm develop an offensive and defensive strategy. Comparing competitors’ businesses with your brand shows where you can improve and where you are excelling from the competitors. It will help you to know about new strategies that will help your business become a leader in the industry.
