Growing your business can seem intimidating when you do not have all the necessary information to analyze your progress correctly. However, to make growing your business more accessible than ever, we provide business owners with some strategies to utilize when conducting competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis is used to sustain business and fast growth. Companies can use competitive analysis to identify how they perform about their competitors. Meanwhile, it helps firms understand how to strategize more effectively to leverage themselves amongst their competition. Insights can help business owners identify their firm’s strengths and weaknesses and how their product or service is performing on the market. Market placement can be understood by analyzing factors such as competitor products, services, sales, and marketing strategies. Find out how your business is performing today.
Competitive analysis can generate innovation, provide benchmarks, and identify weak spots in your marketing strategies or operations. And by exploring what types of technologies and R&D practices other businesses are using, you can see how you stand against your competitors. You can identify whether or not you are at a competitive disadvantage. Incorporating new forms of technology into your business can also increase engagement and revenue.
Now enough with the benefits of competitive analysis, here is how it’s done.
7 Ways To Conduct Competitive Analysis
Competitor Identification
The best way to compete in any industry is by first understanding the prominent players and what other businesses are serving as your primary competitors. You can find competitors by conducting keyword research, products or services similar to yours, or by studying their digital platforms. After understanding your competitors, you can segment them depending on where they stand concerning your business. Primary competitors are your direct competitors, as they target similar audiences or sell similar products or services. Next, secondary competitors are deemed indirect competitors because they produce similar products or services, yet their target market differs from yours. And lastly, tertiary competitors are businesses that share your target audience but offer different products or services. Therefore the first step in all competitive analysis should know who you are against.
Review Service or Product Offerings
Essentially serving as another form of competitor identification, reviewing other businesses’ product and service offerings is another excellent way to conduct a competitive analysis. You can understand industry-wide pricing, delivery strategies, reward programs, and other production elements by looking at competitors that offer similar products or services. These aspects of product and service offerings can provide insight into how you outsell your competitors using various strategies. Gain a competitive advantage by implementing this type of research into your analysis.
Analyze Website Traffic & User Experience
As so many companies utilize digital platforms, website traffic analytics can provide helpful insight into your business’s performance. Understanding website traffic also helps business owners understand customer engagement, ways to improve brand awareness and ways to maintain target audiences. Data points that shed light on these insights include time on site spent by users, traffic sources, bounce rates, pageviews per user, and unique visitors. Meanwhile, while reviewing how your site is performing concerning other industry leaders, be sure to note if there are technical errors on your site, unresponsive pages, or other things that deter usability.
Create Multiple Content Strategies
With so many platforms for marketers, it can be challenging to stick out amongst your competitors. However, the expansiveness of digital marketing platforms is not inherently wrong, as they also offer business owners increased chances to market their content. Therefore, to gauge how your company is performing and creating, you can reference what other businesses are doing regarding content creation. Keep in mind what type of content your competitors are posting, who writes their content, is their content high-quality, whether it is accurate, and how often they post. By acknowledging these elements and using other competitive analytics, your business can create more compelling content strategies and better customer relationships.
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Review Competitor Pricing
When looking to price your product or service, it can be tricky. Yet, if businesses use pricing as a lens to analyze their competitors, they are more likely to be successful. For example, if you are selling the same product as one of your competitors, you can compare the price of your product to yours. After collecting pricing data, business owners can determine whether they should price their products or services above or below their competitors to gain an advantage.
Read Reviews
Customer reviews can offer insight into how other businesses manage and engage with target audiences. If your competitors receive positive reviews, analyze their strategies and find ways to outperform them. Customer reviews also can teach business owners about customer expectations and preferences. Additionally, if you provide a similar product to your competitors, you can see why people use their product as opposed to yours and vice versa. I think you like to read about 5 Tips to Boost Your Business’ Google Reviews.
Perform a SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis details a given company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Using this form of research, firms can look at internal factors to better understand; what competitors’ strengths are, what they are doing well in production, what their social media strategies are, where they are lacking, and what are competitors’ opportunities to leverage. Therefore, your business can use SWOT analysis to develop various techniques and data to improve a firm’s ROIs and strategy tactics.
If you need help growing your business and averaging 400% or more ROI from your digital efforts, give us a call today or schedule a free strategy session with one of our experts in digital marketing. You will have an opportunity to discuss your business and your marketing goals, and we will provide recommendations on what you should be doing based on our BOOST Method. This is a sales-pitch-free no-obligation meeting, just real advice.
