All You Need To Know About Competitor Analysis In 2021
Businesses only succeed when they can set their products and services apart from a sea of similar offerings. Sure, quality matters too, but what good is a superior product if no one knows of its existence or trusts your expertise? The answers can be found with competitor analysis.
Unless you are working in a new or seldom explored niche, the chances are that you have a monumental task of differentiating your brand ahead of you.
The first step is to figure out who your rivals are and what makes them better (or worse) than you. Explore their marketing and advertising strategies, and find out how they use social media and other digital marketing avenues.
Read ahead as we understand what competitor analysis is and how you can do it successfully.
What Is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis identifies and evaluates all your competitors, whether current or potential, to monitor the actions they take in all their primary operations. This enables you to compare your performance to theirs and use the information to develop better strategies.
Without a competitor analysis, you cannot determine your product’s demand in the market and find ways to make it unique so that people are more gravitated towards your brand rather than your competitors’.
Besides identifying your competitors, here are some elements to include in your competitive analysis:
- Details of their target group
- Various strategies they follow for pricing, development, etc.
- Details of the products and services they offer
- Financing models that they use
- Sales and marketing tactics, including the tools they use
- Competitive advantage describing the unique features of the products and services
- Weaknesses and strengths of the services and products
Importance Of Competitor Analysis
You need competition to take your business to another level. When you crack your competitors’ strategies, you can understand how to outsmart them. Competitor analysis helps you:
- Analyze the market
- Create better strategies
- Create a Unique Value Proposition
- Study market trends
- Understand your firm’s demand and supply
- Improve your market share by gaining leverage over your competitors
- Design a unique product or service category
How To Conduct Competitor Analysis?
There are several ways to conduct competitor analysis, but it is best to pick one that best aligns with your business’ requirements.
#1 Basic Stats
It is best to begin with a general overview of your rival’s reach, size, personnel, and activities to form a basic comparison with your competitors. Here are a few things you should consider:
- How many clients they have
- How many employees do they have
- How many locations and offices do they own
- What is their revenue
- What products and services do they offer
- Important information about their noteworthy employees
- Their history and considerable milestones
- Social channels and websites they have
- Which areas do they operate in
#2 Pricing
This is a straightforward measure that you can use to find your competitor’s price list to compare with yours. For similar products, the comparison will be easy, but for others, it won’t be. With different products or services, you can find as much commonality as you can to compare properly. If this isn’t doable, you have to consider the context for prices to see if it is priced fairly as compared to yours.
#3 SEO Analysis
SEO lets you see how well your competitors rank on Google. Search engines can generate lots of website traffic and increase revenue, so this is an important part of the analysis.
Here are some key SEO areas that contribute to competitor analysis:
Keywords
Start by noting down what keywords are important and relevant, which will get the best conversions to compete with your competitors. Use SEO tools to find these keywords instead of a Google search which is not always accurate.
The result will show you how well your competitors perform with those keywords, the quality of SEO and content they use, and how you can do the same and even better. Using this information, you can plan your SEO to create a content plan.
Finally, use market intelligence tools to evaluate your main SEO competitors over a vast result of trends and keywords.
Domain And Links
The number of links a website gets pointed with and the number of websites that create these links contribute to SEO performance.
It is advantageous to know your competitors’ links for several reasons. For starters, it helps you determine what you need to do to get an edge over them. Secondly, it provides several sites you can use to get links from as well. Thirdly, it uncovers what type of content attracts links.
Similar to keyword analysis, these things help to create a content strategy. Of course, different sectors have different requirements, and some things work with one and not the other, but this is the best way to determine that.
#4 Social Media Analysis
Careful analysis of your competitor’s social media gives great insights into how they use it and how people talk about them.
Begin with determining the platforms your competitors use, the audience they interact with, and the posts or content they put up. Since this gives a surface-level view into who performs better and the reasons behind their success, you can use special tools to analyze the various aspects of these platforms, such as your competitors’ Twitter following.
Furthermore, it is essential to note which competitor has social media’s highest share of voice with relevant tools. Share of voice (SOV) is your brand’s share in the market compared to your competitors’. It includes digital advertising, digital PR, website traffic, social media mentions, and all forms of quantifiable brand awareness elements that your company can wield in your target market.
The higher your share of voice, the more people are aware of your brand. Thus, keep an eye on the results, monitoring them daily to see their growth and act accordingly.
Now we’ll see how social media monitoring can help in competitor analysis.
Using Media Monitoring Tools
Social media plays an essential role in conducting competitor analysis, especially in this digital age.
There are several competitor analysis tools, namely:
Here’s how you effectively use these tools:
#1 Group Competitors Together
When you identify your competitors, pick the ones who are your direct competition and begin tracking their mentions on social media platforms and analyzing their performance with the information you get.
Moreover, social media monitoring tools help you categorize competitors and the relevant, collected data together.
#2 Competitors’ Mentions Notifications
Using media monitoring tools, you can track your competitors without actively seeking their mentions. Instead, whenever some profile or media outlet mentions your competitors, your feed will display that. Setting alerts can instantly notify you whenever there is a new mention through an email.
This way, you can stay up-to-date with their product announcements, marketing campaigns, new content, pricing, product updates, etc.
#3 Find Influencers
Social media influencers are big now, and collaborations with them help increase brand awareness, build trust, and reach a larger audience. So while finding influencers for yourself, you can look at those working with your competitors to gauge what you’re up against!
Try to reach out to these influencers and pitch your product to convince them how good it is. This can work if an influencer is unhappy with your competitors’ products, giving you a perfect chance to swoop in and catch their attention and loyalty.
#4 Follow News
Follow any news related to your competitors through their publications, product announcements, marketing campaigns, open positions, new content, pricing, product updates, etc.
You can also track their profiles or website to check the latest developments in their business. Moreover, with the help of alerts and real-time notifications, you can be updated about mentions daily or weekly.
#5 Competitor’s Mentions Analysis
Reports are a huge advantage of social media monitoring for competitor analysis because they let you analyze all the data you have gathered.
These tools and other metrics like sentiment analysis and share of voice let you compare your brand’s online reputation with that of your competitors. How you fare against your competition becomes very convenient to figure out with these.
#6 Online Reviews
It is essential to determine what your competitors’ customers think about their products and services. Track their online reviews and see how you can improve your service and products to give customers what they are exactly looking for, which the competitors aren’t providing. So, as you track your online reviews, check those for your competitors and use the opportunity and get an advantage over them.
#7 Improve
When you perform competitive analysis, you get a better understanding and insight into what your competition offers. But, the best part is that you’ll get more insight into your business through this analysis.
You will find what areas of your business lack and where you can improve related to your competitors’ strategy, whether it is SEO, social media performance, content, or others. You can identify improvement opportunities and reduce possible threats through competitive analysis.
Conclusion
Competition is in every field, and it helps you get better when you use it properly. It is essential to know what you are up against, and competitor analysis provides you with the opportunity to grow your brand and understand what the rest are doing.
Strategies like social media monitoring are a good way to find out your competitors’ position and strengths or weaknesses, which you can use to create your own strategies.
Mentionlytics can help you improve your brand awareness and consequent revenue with different strategies and tools to stand out amongst your competitors.
Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/competitor-analysis/
