How To Do A Competitive Analysis

1. Why Is A Competitive Analysis A Part Of A Marketing Plan?
2. Conducting Of A Competitive Analysis
3. Who Are Your Competitors And Where To Find Them?
4. Basis You Need To Know About Your Competitors
5. Examine Your Competitors’ Websites
6. A Final Word

A realization of an excellent high-qualitative competitive analysis is one of the best ways to care for your product, project or service that you want to be on top. You can ignore it only when you are going to promote something related to flying shoes or medicines for all diseases. Not everyone is lucky to have invented a unique product, but a competitive analysis will help you break into a new business space.

Competitive analysis can also show what features of a current production that your potential clients want to have. So, know your particulars, highlight the strongest sides of your work, and remember about your competitors as well as of fickleness of trends.

Why Is A Competitive Analysis A Part Of A Marketing Plan?

Achieving and holding enviable advantages in reaching and selling to your target market brings you ahead of this business templates competition. The right competitive analysis enriches you with knowledge of what a strategy and tactics to except for profitable results of a marketing campaign.

An in-depth competitive analysis will provide you with the following:

• An understanding of how your existing and potential customers rate your and your competitors’ chances.
• Positive monitoring of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
• A method of developing effective competitive strategies in your target
  market.

Conducting Of A Competitive Analysis

Step 1. Conduct Research

Step 2. Gather Competitive Information

Step 3. Analyze Competitive Information

Step 4. Determine Your Own Competitive Position

Who Are Your Competitors And Where To Find Them?

Competitors are considered everyone who product the same source of values and are interested in the same customers as your business company. To know them is necessary for:

• doing your work better than someone else;
• catching all brand new effective methods;
• being able to add some new options to your proposition;
• monitoring the price policy.

First, make your own list of competitors you determine as the most dangerous and those who tend to join the market.

Try to look at the market you are working on from the point of your client’s view. You can also classify your competitors according to their various competitive strategies. So, it will give you the understanding of what motivates them.

If you open a small shop, go your entire area along and across in search of something similar. If you have an online store and you are betting on SEO-promotion - do not stop at the first page of the search engines. Go further. Aren’t pages in social networks the main areas for sales? So, let your company be also present there. Use the actual words and phrases, don’t forget about hashtags.

As soon as you have grouped your competitors once, you can start analyzing them. Identify their strengths and weaknesses in four areas:

• The reasons behind successful as well as unsuccessful firms.
• Prime customer motivators.
• Major component costs.
• Industry mobility barriers.

Basis You Need To Know About Your Competitors

• The full list of products and assortment they propose (pros and cons, differences, categories).
• Find out if a quality work of your competitors is profitable, expanding, or scaling down.
• The time of your competitors’ presence in business.
• Accept changes in their targeted market segments.
• Positive and negative responses of clients about products of your competitors.
• Marketing and promotional strategy. Where and how does your competitor promote their company? Mark all activities and try to assess their budget, then you will be able easily to sift out what you cannot afford.
• Prices. Use your competitors to be competitive. Discover if their customers find their pricing structure reasonable or not. Verify which of their products are the most expensive and have the lowest price. Pay attention to what determines the price - size, the complexity of work, manufacturing speed or something else?
• Service. Try to check every detail - from the speed of response in social networks to loyalty programs. The best way to understand how the service of competitors work is to become their client. Write them in private messages about the purchase, leave comments under photos, make an order. Try to create a scenario that will show all sides of their service.
• Audience. Who is an average client of your competitors - their gender, age, marital status, income level, place of residence? How many followers do your competitors have in social nets? How active are they and why?
• Image. What is the most notable and cool thing about your competitors? What do you like personally the most? Be attentive to visual content, colors, style, packaging, business cards and even the manner of talking to clients of your competitors.
• Total sales volume of your competitors.
• Their growth rates.

Examine Your Competitors’ Websites

Don’t avoid analyzing your competitors’ websites. At least it could help rule out similarities of your pages and let you know how to organize your own online promotion.

To start, take a close look at the following items:

• How solid is their product photography? What use they do to display their products and help communicate details?
• Is there some video content?
• How detailed are their product descriptions? What information can you find there? And what information you would like to add?
• Where are their calls to action throughout the online shopping experience?
• Are they trying to build an email list with a newsletter sign-up prompt?
• Where are their social media icons fixed?
• Do they have a blog? How often do they post?
• Is their website mobile-friendly?
• What contact forms do they offer?
• How long does it take them to respond to email, live chat and contact form submissions?
• Do they have an abandoned cart saver feature?
• What kind of information is included in their marketing banners and callouts?
• How often are they running promotions?

A Final Word

Conduct a competitive analysis on a regular basis. May it be a part of your inventory and other business functions. It depends on the market your product is related to, but generally, such analyses can be arranged every two months or once a year.

The most important thing to remember is that your competitive analysis is never finished while you’re in the market. Every day, new ideas and trends, and the development of the economy can replace you with someone who is ready to accept them and be conversant with requests from customers. The same, as it has been already mentioned, this analysis can show the parts your work you need to be more persistent in to improve them.

So, let your competitive analysis be efficient to lead your big or small company to desirable results!

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