When starting my marketing career, one of the things that I found most daunting was having to do a competitive analysis. It felt like so many moving parts, and it wasn’t always clear where to start. But with a little guidance, I soon realized that doing a marketing competitive analysis doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Following the steps discussed in this post can be quite straightforward.
Marketing Competitive Analysis
A marketing competitive analysis is an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors to identify opportunities and threats. This analysis can be used to develop a competitive advantage.
Regular competitor analysis is a benefit for every brand. You can:
- Identify market gaps
- Develop new products or services.
- Uncover market trends
- More effective marketing and selling.
As you can see, learning any of these components will help your brand achieve its goals.
Let’s now look at some steps to perform a complete competitive analysis.
How to Perform a Competitor Analysis
- Find out who your top competitors are.
- Find out their product offerings.
- Study the sales tactics and results of your competitors.
- Look at the pricing of your competitors and any perks they offer.
- Make sure you compare your shipping rates to those of your competitors.
- Analyze the marketing strategies of your competitors.
- Pay attention to the content strategy of your competitors.
- Learn about the technology stacks of your competitors.
- Analyze the engagement on content from your competitors.
- You can see how they promote marketing content.
- Check out their social media strategies and go-to platforms.
- Conduct a SWOT analysis to find out their strengths or weaknesses and opportunities.
How to Gather Competitors’ Information
Gathering information about competitors
It’s not necessary to hire a marketing research company when all of your competitors’ information is easily accessible
Before looking for potential sources of information, be clear about what you want to know. This will allow you to allocate your time more efficiently. Ask yourself these questions about your competitors to get started:
- What is their full range of services and products?
- Do their services or products appeal to the same target audience?
- Is my competition profitable?
- What are their promotional and marketing strategies?
- What are the negative and positive attributes of these features to customers?
- How do they rank their price, quality, and sales? Style, image/, value, market share, name recognition, customer service, convenience, location, and more?
Next, consider these questions:
- What’s your competitive edge?
- What do my customers think of my business? How does it compare to the competition?
- How can my company stand out from my competitors?
Where can I find the information?
Information originally created for another purpose but made available to the public, such as sizing up your competitors, is secondary data. Here are some examples of secondary data sources:
- Advertising. This will give you information about your competitor’s price and product and indicate their entire promotional budget.
- Most college and public libraries with business resources can provide free access to databases and reference books. Here are some examples:
- Government sources include the Quarterly Financial Report for Mining, Manufacturing, and County Business Patterns, Trade Corporations, and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and Economic Sensus.
- Publications of state agencies, like industry directories and local industry statistics, can be found on the State and Local Government on the Net site.
- Examples of commercial data include the Dun and Bradstreet Million-Dollar Database.
- Your employees who work in other areas of your business may access information about your competitors. This type of data is most important to your sales staff.
- Talking to your competitors. A friendly conversation can help you gain a lot of information. People enjoy sharing their concerns and stories with business partners.
Once you have identified your competitors, what information you need about them, and where you can find it, it’s time for you to begin your analysis.
It can be hard to conduct a competitive analysis of your market if you don’t already know who your target customers are.
Example of a Marketing Competitive Analysis
How do you compare to the competition? What is the difference between you and your competition? This is the purpose of competitor analysis. Understanding the differences between your brand and competitors will help you make better strategic decisions to grow your brand.
It’s one thing to understand the benefits and another to perform an analysis that produces actionable results. We’ve got you covered. Here’s a quick example.
Sony vs Nintendo: Not all fun and games
Let’s look at Sony and Nintendo’s most popular gaming systems companies. The Playstation 5 is Sony’s latest offering but has been plagued with supply shortages.
However, the Switch console by Nintendo has been around for a while and is still a popular choice among teens and children. This is a familiar scenario for both sides of this coin.
Some companies have introduced new products to compete with market leaders, while others are trying to maintain reliable sales.
Tools For Conducting A Competitor Analysis
Traditional competitor analysis and similar studies were outsourced to agencies. These studies were expensive and took a long time to complete. They also didn’t provide real-time data and were difficult to access. Technology advancements have given brands greater access to tools that allow them to conduct this discipline in-house.
Complex data and processes have been greatly simplified, so everyone can now be an expert with instant access to vital insights.
Qualitrics (quantitative as well as qualitative)
Qualtrics BrandXM can get you up and running quickly, from usage and attitude studies to segmentation, brand perception, or awareness and perception tracking. You can save time collecting and cleaning survey responses and spend more time listening to and acting on your insights.
Qualtrics can also pull all of your qualitative data at large, giving you a comprehensive view of your competitors to help you understand how they compare. We also work with partners to give you the best tool for competitor research. These partners can collect feedback from your customers about the competitive landscape in qualitative and quantitative formats.
Qualtrics will allow you to see a complete, unified picture of your market position and a host of suggestions for improving it.
Qualtrics research services
Qualtrics research services are available for those who don’t have the resources to hire an in-house team to manage their data. Our team of experts will manage everything for you, including designing your studies, finding the right respondents, and launching your surveys. Then you can concentrate on improving your business. We are there for you every step of your journey.
Livinglens (qualitative)
LivingLens captures and analyzes video content via speech actions, sentiments, and sentiments, translating human behavior into insight. This makes it easy to work with video and lets you quickly extract insights from it.
Voxpopme (qualitative).
While focus groups are still very valuable, new methods are being developed at large that are changing how we market research. Voxpopme is one example. It “helps brands connect with consumers through real-time video feedback.” Voxpopme provides qualitative insight at speed and scale for various use cases. Make the most of
Voxpopme’s community on-demand, or access your audience to capture, analyze, and share insights with your customers worldwide.
Brandwatch (qualitative-social listening)
Qualtrics integrates with a few partners, including Brandwatch. There are many tools that can be used to help with social listening. Brandwatch provides “structure and meaning to billions of voices, so you can make decisions that truly match with the buyer and consumer needs.”
Social listening is a great tool for those just starting to analyze the market and competitors.
This is because it can (helpfully) challenge what you believe to be true. Learn what customers say about you and your competition in their context. Brandwatch can also perform scene analysis using sources such as photos to help businesses understand their context.
Competitor Analysis Templates: Marketing Competitive Analysis
It can be difficult to conduct competitive analysis, especially when evaluating multiple products and companies simultaneously. We have created ten templates to help you see how you compare to the competition and what you can do to increase your market share.
Let’s take a look at the SWOT analysis template. Here’s how it looks:
Strengths– Identify your strengths. These could include unique products or intellectual property or a workforce that is more productive than the rest.
Weaknesses It’s worth looking at potential issues around pricing and leadership, staff turnover, new competitors, and market share.
Opportunities This section can be used to identify new market niches, changing consumer preferences, and new technologies being developed or marketed by your company.
Threats These could include new taxes or regulations for existing products or an increase in the number of similar products within the same market space. This could negatively impact your overall share.
How’s Your Business Doing?
To get an accurate comparison of your business with your competition, you first need to establish what your baseline is. This will also help when you are performing a SWOT analysis.
Review your business, sales, and marketing reports with the same metrics you would use to evaluate a competitor. Doing so will help establish an accurate baseline for comparison.
Record this information just like you would with a competitor and use this as your baseline to compare across the board.
Benefits of a competitive analysis
No business can expect to be preserved in the digital age. Companies can vanish overnight if they fail to pay attention to emerging trends. Blockbuster’s disastrous mistake of dismissing Netflix’s services at first is a clear example.
Netflix is today a global juggernaut, while Blockbuster has almost vanished.
Even if your industry isn’t susceptible to this type of seismic change, knowing what drives your clients’ decision-making is worthwhile. These trends can be identified by keeping an eye on your market through a competitive analysis.
- Changes to existing products or services of competitors that make them more appealing
- You could also offer your competitors new complementary products or services that you could alter or add to their offerings.
- New market entrants and transformative products pose a threat
Rovner stated that you might sometimes find yourself at a competitive disadvantage. You may need to make changes to maintain your sales volumes in such cases. In other cases, you might find that you have an advantage that can allow you to make a profit or increase your sales.
Conclusion: Marketing Competitive Analysis
As you’ve seen, doing a marketing competitive analysis is not as hard as you thought. Following these steps, you can simplify the competitive analysis process and develop a plan of action to help you achieve your marketing goals. So don’t be intimidated by the task – roll up your sleeves and get started!
