A competitive analysis is a strategy that involves researching major competitors to gain insight into their products, sales, and marketing tactics. Implementing stronger business strategies, warding off competitors, and capturing market share are just a few benefits of conducting a competitive market analysis.
A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works, and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them.
It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards.
Let’s dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses:
- Helps you identify your product’s unique value proposition and what makes your product different from the competitors’, which can inform future marketing efforts.
- Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your product and your marketing campaigns are outperforming industry standards.
- Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out new, unique marketing strategies they haven’t taken advantage of.
- Learn through customer reviews what’s missing in a competitor’s product, and consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs.
- Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your growth.
How to do a Competitive Analysis
- Determine who your competitors are.
- Determine what products your competitors offer.
- Research your competitors’ sales tactics and results.
- Take a look at your competitors’ pricing, as well as any perks they offer.
- Ensure you’re meeting competitive shipping costs.
- Analyze how your competitors market their products.
- Take note of your competition’s content strategy.
- Learn what technology stack your competitors’ use.
- Analyze the level of engagement on your competitors’ content.
- Observe how they promote marketing content.
- Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms.
- Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.