73% of businesses are investing more than 20% of tech budgets on intelligence and data analytics
It’s important to understand how your competition is marketing its products or service. What is their customer experience? What marketing channels are they using? You need to ask questions like these to find areas of opportunity for your marketing strategy. Not only will this help your marketing, but it will inform your sales team when dealing with prospects.
There is more to understanding the user experience (UX) of your competitors’ products or services than visual design alone. The entire experience a user goes through with your competitors is part of the buying journey. Understand what it’s like to go through the marketing funnel. Sign up for their services, download their apps, whatever it is. Go through the whole experience, and take screenshots and notes.
We evaluate how your competitors are presenting their brand, the marketing of their products or services, and the design of the products themselves. A strong strategy differentiates your brand and offerings within your competitive landscape. It’s also best to research indirect or out-of-category brands to find opportunities that your competition is not leveraging.
Getting a birds-eye view of where your competition is from a technology perspective can tell you if you’re ahead of or behind the curve for your market. Look into what technologies they are using to build their websites, products, services, etc. See how you stack up, and make adjustments as necessary.
Dive into each competitors’ content and take note of the frequency and quality of content created on their website and social channels. Just because they are posting a lot doesn’t mean it’s valuable to the market. Lastly, look into the engagement level of the content and how they are promoting it. These techniques will give you useful insights into how you can improve your content strategy.
During each step, we keep in mind the tried and true framework of a SWOT analysis. We constantly are thinking about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats throughout the entire analysis. In the end, we take a step back and look for key insights that provide the most value to our clients. As well as provide recommendations on how our clients can start taking action on these findings.
Determine the focus areas for the analysis. Typically analysis is broken down to design, content. marketing, technology, and UX.
Take time to create a list of both direct and indirect competitors. Then narrow your list down around 3-6. More than 10 can make the depth of the research difficult.
Get your hands on the competitors’ products or services. Take screenshots, recordings, anything necessary to document hard data.
There will be many findings, but some are more important than others. Some will be easier to take action. Reporting these key findings is important in takings steps toward improvment.
By analyzing your competition, you can not only learn their best practices but also avoid some of the mistakes that they’ve made. A competitor analysis will give you insights on how your competition positions themselves in the market, and many of the ways they are reaching out to their customers. Allowing you to make adequate moves to better position your business in the market space.
No matter the size of your company, we recommend performing a competitor analysis to get insights on your competitors, their services, and products. The data in the competitor analysis can help your business create robust business strategies that improve upon your competitors.
An indirect competitor is someone that provides a similar service or product that could satisfy a similar need. In many cases, there is a variation in prices or features. In some cases, they do not compete in the same market or advertise to the same clientele base.
A direct competitor is someone that provides the same service or product as an alternative for your service or product. Direct competitors compete in the same market and advertise to the same potential clientele base.
There isn’t one right answer here. It truly depends on the speed of your business and your market. Ideally, you want to perform competitive analysis as frequently as you need in order to find insights on how you can serve your customers better in your market. This could be annually or even as much as quarterly.
This list can be very detailed, or it can be small. It depends on what your needs are, whether you are doing a full analysis or a truncated one. However, here are a few of the main topics to consider:
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