Competitor Analysis

A competitive analysis tells business owners what their competitors are doing and identifies opportunities to outperform them.

Running a competitive analysis is about finding the strengths and weaknesses of the companies in your industry. By researching competitors’ products, sales, and marketing, you can decide how to move forward with your business strategy.

Competitors

Competitors make our products better—they create urgency and drive innovation by providing both motivation and a measuring stick. If your product is the only one in the market, you’re either first (but not for long) or trying to serve a need that doesn’t exist. Competition validates the market and provides context for everyone involved. Paying attention to what competitors are up to is important for everyone, but for product managers, it can be particularly valuable. Not only does competitive analysis illustrate a product’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to those from other vendors, but it can also inform the product strategy as well as how to sell and position the product.

Market Research and Consumer

In B2B, to understand the preference behaviors and challenges of the business, Discovery sessions with the clients and the key stakeholders are held, and based on the inputs the product is built

In B2C, to understand the preferences, behaviors, and pain points of individual consumers, Market Research in the form of competitor analysis is conducted to identify the trends and consumer insights

Steps included in Competitor Analysis

Select competitors

We should first identify our competitors there are clues to identify them and the following criteria can be considered

Companies that sell similar products

Companies that share a similar audience

Companies that are well-established in the market

Companies that are very new to the market

Companies that earn great revenue on similar ground

Having all the different categories of companies involved in your market research will help to get varied views

Documentation

Documentation is the essential step here. It holds as a source of truth or reference for the Competitor Analysis and also helps in demonstrating the use cases or making any critical decisions

I believe having the analysis in a tabular format enhances the readability of the user and also makes it easier to update any future modifications

Building the document based on different sections is very beneficial to the user

It may include different sections like Price Range, Product Offerings, Social Media Engagement, Marketing Strategy, etc

Competitor Advantages and Offerings

To date, the most successful companies are the ones that came up with unique patterns and ideas. It can be anything. An innovative idea or a new market trend but it should just be unique and have a distinctive experience

After analyzing the market, one has to understand where the actual revenue of the competitors is coming from. Which of the services are the ones mostly used by their customers?

Learning about the competitive advantages in your space will help you figure out where you should and shouldn’t try to compete.

Competitors Marketing Strategy

Successful e-commerce stores often outpace the competition through marketing, not with their products alone.

But don’t assume you need to compete across all marketing channels to stay in front of customers.

Instead, use your competitive analysis to find out how your competitors are reaching customers and where they focus their marketing resources.

Maybe your competitors are all about targeting customers through Instagram or capturing traffic with helpful blog posts.

Swot Analysis

SWOT is a competitive analysis framework that lists your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. SWOT leans into your competitors’ strengths and compares them to your business to find areas for improvement.

Strengths and weaknesses are elements of your business that you control and change over time, including:

• Product offering
• Partnerships
• Intellectual property
• Number of employees
• Market share
• Assets

Conclusion

Competitive intelligence is vital when starting a business. By doing market competition analysis on an ongoing basis, you can stay on top of your competition. You’ll be able to break into new markets, launch new products, and keep tabs on your competitors’ customers—giving you a cutting-edge approach that keeps your business or startup agile.