A competitive analysis report helps me understand the brand’s position in the market, map competitors’ strengths/weaknesses, and discover growth opportunities.
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If you’re on the fence about investing time and effort in analyzing your competitors, know that it gives you a complete picture of the market and where you stand in it.
Here are four main reasons why I perform a competitive analysis exercise whenever working with a brand for the first time:
The bottom line: Whether you’re starting a new business or revamping an existing one, a competitive analysis eliminates guesswork and gives you concrete information to build your business strategy.
Competitive market research is a vital exercise that goes beyond merely comparing products or services. It involves an in-depth analysis of the market metrics that distinguish your offerings from those of your competitors.
A thorough market research doesn't just highlight these differences but leverages them, laying a solid foundation for a sales and marketing strategy that truly differentiates your business in a bustling market.
In the next section, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of conducting a detailed competitive analysis tailored to your brand.
Here’s a market landscape grid by G2 documenting all of Trello’s competitors in the project management space. For a leading brand like Trello, the goal would be to look at top brands in two quadrants: “Leaders” and “High Performers.” Image Source
This benchmarking exercise will involve a combination of primary and secondary research. Invest enough time in this step to ensure that your competitive analysis is completely airtight.
Check out this example of a competitor benchmarking report for workforce intelligence tools:
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Here’s how I benchmarked Asana based on these criteria using the information I could find:
Criteria
Asana
Quality
Price
Offers a free tier and paid plans starting from $10.99/month per user. Advanced features and integrations are available at higher price points.
Customer Service
Brand Reputation
Considered one of the best project management tools, with a slightly more robust feature set compared to competitors.
While the first few steps will tell you what you can improve in your core product or service, you also need to find how competitors market their products.
You need to deep-dive into their marketing strategies to learn how they approach buyers. I analyze every marketing channel, then note my observations on how they speak to their audience and highlight their brand personality.
Here are a few key marketing channels to explore:
You can create a detailed document capturing every detail of a competitor’s marketing strategy. This will give you the right direction to plan your marketing efforts.
The final step in a competitive analysis exercise is creating a SWOT analysis matrix for each company. This means you‘ll take note of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Think of it as the final step to consolidate all your research and answer these questions:
You can use tools like Miro to visualize this data. Once you visually present this data, you’ll get a clearer idea of where you can outgrow each competitor.
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Here’s a SWOT analysis matrix I created for Asana as a competitor of Trello:
To run a complete and effective competitive analysis, use these ten templates, which range in purpose from sales to marketing to product strategy.
First, you‘ll need to figure out who you’re competing with to compare the data accurately. What works in a business like yours may not work for your brand. Divide your “competitors” into two categories: direct and indirect.
Keep these brands on your radar since they could shift positions at any time and cross over into the direct competitor zone. Using our example, Stitch Fix could start a workout line, which would certainly change things for Fabletics.
This is also one of the reasons why you‘ll want to routinely run a competitor analysis. The market can and will shift at any time, and if you’re not constantly scoping it out, you won‘t be aware of these changes until it’s too late.
Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.
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Analyzing your competitor's website is the fastest way to gauge their marketing efforts. This is a great way to see how accessible and engaging their assets are, and if you can, try experimenting with A/B testing your landing pages or website as well. Take note of any of the following items and copy down the specific URL for future reference:
Then, take a look at the quantity of these items. Do they have several hundred blog posts or a small handful? Are there five white papers and just one e-book?
Next, determine the frequency of these content assets. Are they publishing something new each week or once a month? How often does a new e-book or case study come out?
Chances are, if you come across a robust archive of content, your competitor has been publishing regularly. Depending on the topics they're discussing, this content may help you hone in on their lead-generating strategies.
From there, you should move on to evaluating the quality of their content. After all, if the quality is lacking, it won‘t matter how often they post since their target audience won’t find much value in it.
Choose a small handful of samples to review instead of tackling every single piece to make the process more manageable.
Your sampler should include content pieces covering a variety of topics, so you'll have a fairly complete picture of what your competitor shares with their target audience.
When analyzing your competitor's content, consider the following questions:
As you continue to scan the content, pay attention to the photos and imagery your competitors are using.
Do you quickly scroll past generic stock photos, or are you impressed by custom illustrations and images? If they're using stock photos, do they at least have overlays of text quotes or calls-to-action that are specific to their business?
If their photos are custom, are they sourced from outside graphic professionals, or do they appear to be done in-house?
When you have a solid understanding of your competitor‘s content marketing strategy, it’s time to find out if it's truly working for them.
Understanding what types of technology your competitors use can be critical for helping your own company reduce friction and increase momentum within your organization.
For instance, perhaps you‘ve seen positive reviews about a competitor’s customer service — as you're conducting research, you learn the customer uses powerful customer service software you haven't been taking advantage of.
This information should arm you with the opportunity to outperform your competitors' processes.
To figure out which software your competitors use, type the company's URL into Built With, an effective tool for unveiling what technology your competitors' site runs on, along with third-party plugins ranging from analytics systems to CRMs.
Alternatively, you might consider looking at competitors' job listings, particularly for engineer or web developer roles. The job listing will likely mention which tools a candidate needs to be familiar with — a creative way to gain intel into the technology your competitors use.
To gauge how engaging your competitor‘s content is to their readers, you’ll need to see how their target audience responds to what they're posting.
Check the average number of comments, shares, and likes on your competitor's content and find out if:
From engagement, you‘ll move right along to your competitor’s content promotion strategy.
The following questions can also help you prioritize and focus on what to pay attention to:
The last area you‘ll want to evaluate when it comes to marketing is your competitor’s social media presence and engagement rates.
How does your competition drive engagement with their brand through social media? Do you see social sharing buttons with each article? Does your competitor have links to their social media channels in the header, footer, or somewhere else? Are these clearly visible? Do they use calls-to-action with these buttons?
If your competitors are using a social network that you may not be on, it's worth learning more about how that platform may be able to help your business, too.
To determine if a new social media platform is worth your time, check your competitor's engagement rates on those sites. First, visit the following sites to see if your competition has an account on these platforms:
Then, take note of the following quantitative items from each platform:
With the same critical eye you used to gauge your competition's content marketing strategy, take a fine-toothed comb to analyze their social media strategy.
What kind of content are they posting? Are they more focused on driving people to landing pages, resulting in new leads? Or are they posting visual content to promote engagement and brand awareness?
How much of this content is original? Do they share curated content from other sources? Are these sources regular contributors? What is the overall tone of the content?
How does your competition interact with its followers? How frequently do their followers interact with their content?
After you collect this data, generate an overall grade for the quality of your competitor's content. This will help you compare the rest of your competitors using a similar grading scale.
As you evaluate each component in your competitor analysis (business, sales, and marketing), get into the habit of performing a simplified SWOT analysis at the same time.
This means you‘ll take note of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats any time you assess an overall grade.
Some questions to get you started include:
You‘ll be able to compare their weaknesses against your strengths and vice versa. By doing this, you can better position your company, and you’ll start to uncover areas for improvement within your own brand.
Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.
