Competitive analysis is a process used to assess and benchmark your company against your top competitors. It’s a broad way of determining where you stand relative to your industry rivals, and it also provides critical self-inventory and potential opportunities to push your competitive advantages further.

Every company will perform a competitive analysis at some point. Use the following steps as a reference to begin.

Steps to a Competitive Analysis

Competitor analyses should offer an overview of a rival’s critical business information:

  • Product/Services
  • Key value propositions
  • Target audience
  • Market share
  • Pricing strategies
  • Geography and region-based elements (when applicable)
  • Company culture
  • Customer reviews and perceptions

There’s a lot to cover – so how do you begin?

Step One: Competitor Selection

Start by selecting a competitor. You’ll likely assess multiple companies later, but for now, narrow your focus and get your assessment methodology squared away with a single target.

Ideally, this candidate will be as similar to your own business as possible and act as a direct competitor for your market. Check for overlaps in product offerings, target audience, branding strategies, and physical location.

Step Two: Gather Data

Next, you’ll gather what publicly available information you can on this competitor. Review their website, revenue reporting, product libraries, and any other details you can find. You can even sign up for their email blasts to get an inside look at their customer outreach strategies and timing.

Step Three: Assess Marketing and Sales Tactics And Pricing

Here, you’ll take the above data and start establishing which marketing and sales tactics, strategies, and channels are being effectively utilized by the competitor. This topic is too big to get into here, so we recommend that companies leverage the skills of a trusted digital marketing agency for help with this step. A good agency would be able to analyze the competitor’s content, assess if and how they are leveraging PPC online advertising, Facebook advertising, and what tools they might be using for marketing automation and customer engagement etc.

Step Four: Review Technologies

Which platforms and tools do your competitors use? This can be a tough area to find info on, so work with your digital marketing partner who would have access to web tools and assessment techniques that can reveal how a site is built along with any plugins they may be using for eCommerce, analytics,

Step Five: Observe Their Engagement

One of the final steps in this process involves monitoring your competitor’s engagement with their market over time on social media. Monitor how often they publish content, how many users engage with that content, and how they promote their content. All of this provides valuable contextual data you can use to benchmark the competitor against your own marketing.

Conducting Your Own Analysis

Repeat the process for a few more competitors using the same process and don’t forget to do your own analysis and benchmark it against the competitors. This will help you identify what your company needs to do in order to measure up against them or surpass them and win!

If you need help conducting a competitive analysis for your company, contact us here.