Explosive growth with multi-channel marketing
January 2, 2023
The Key to Unlock Success
Are you looking for a way to unlock the success of your company? Analyzing what works and doesn’t work for your competitors is one key piece of the puzzle — this is called a “competitive analysis.”
A competitive analysis aims to gain insight into your competitors’ positioning and help identify where you land in comparison. After completing your assessment, you should be able to identify your weaknesses, uncover new opportunities and identify market trends to position yourself well in advance to catch the wave.
This blog post will discuss tips for conducting a comprehensive competitive analysis, setting the foundation for market share capture and differentiation.
All Roads Lead to Rome
All roads lead to Rome, but not all are suitable for travel.
It’s essential to be focused and specific in your research so that you may arrive at insight quickly.
Below are eight questions to help guide your journey.
- Determine who your competitors are.
- Assessing your competitors’ marketing mix.
- Research your competitors’ revenue-generating tactics and results.
- Assess competitors’ pricing and perks.
- Analyze how your competitors market their products.
- Deconstruct competitors’ content strategies.
- Map out competitors’ channels for marketing and promotion.
- Conduct a SWOT analysis of your competitors.
Determine Who Your Competition Is
First, you’ll need to identify who you compete with for revenue, market share, and customers. However, not every competitor is equal. You have direct competitors and indirect competitors.
Direct competitors are businesses offering a product or service identical or similar to yours. Indirect competitors are businesses offering different products or services but appealing to the same customer base.
Example: Energy drinks versus coffee products. Both drinks are caffeinated beverages solving the same problem for a buyer: waking up.
Understanding the competitive landscape around your business can be daunting, but here are some tips to point you in the right direction:
- Reading industry news and reports
- Researching industry trends
- Researching social media (profiles, hashtags, company descriptions, etc.)
- Business Directories
- Asking suppliers
- Asking customers
- Conducting a search traffic analysis
Assessing The Competition's Marketing Mix
The strategic framework known as the four Ps of marketing separates success from failure for many businesses. Product, price, place and promotion are all crucial elements in any effective marketing strategy; they provide key insights into how companies create a brand image and entice customers to their products or services. By thoroughly analyzing competitor activities within each P component – like pricing strategies, available product offerings, distribution channels and promotional tactics – it’s possible to gain an edge over your competition!
Consider these questions in your analysis:
Product
- What is it?
- Who is it for?
- What features does it have?
- What problem does it solve?
Price
- Cost-effective vs luxury
- Are they low-cost or high-cost providers?
- How do they present pricing?
- Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases vs brick-and-mortar?
Place
- Where do they conduct business?
- Where do they sell their product?
- What channels do they use for b2b/b2c?
Promotion
- How do they promote their product/service?
- Where do they promote it?
- What tactics do they use to promote?
The marketing mix lays the foundation with the core categories of business activity. The remaining explorations of competitive analysis are merely extensions of the 4Ps.
Research Your Competition's Sales Tactics
The difficulty of assessing competitors’ sales tactics depends on your industry and how customers buy.
Digital businesses leave footprints of their sales funnels all over the internet: their website, landing pages, advertisements, social media, email marketing, blogs, and video content.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and go through the buying journey.
Ask yourself how the experience felt each step of the way.
Analyze The Competition's Pricing and Promotion Strategies
Analyzing price when conducting a competitive analysis can be like finding the needle in a haystack — it’s tricky but worth it!
Price can tell you so much about your competitive landscape by giving insight into competitive positioning, market approval, relationship to target customer segments and more.
It’s important to remember that trends over time are just as important as one benchmark comparison. Track changes in price over time and look for correlations to external factors within the industry – you’ll get an idea of any strategies that might be utilized for optimizing profits.
Don’t let yourself get derailed by pricing confusion – keep analyzing, and you’ll soon find the hidden cost savings waiting to be discovered!
Price is only one piece of this puzzle. You must also consider where and how your competitors promote their services, product, or public offering.
Analyze the efficacy of their messaging and see if you can spot any weaknesses in their approach. Keep an eye on what kind of advertisements they release and which platforms they use them on.
Are they spending most of their budget on print media when your target audience is digital-focused? With competitive analysis, it’s crucial to stay one step ahead by discerning elements of your competitor’s promotional strategy that you can capitalize on for yourself!
Identify where your competitors promote and assess the quality and frequency of their activity in each of these channels:
- Paid ads
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Email Marketing
- Trade shows/Event Marketing
- Tours
- Collaborations and partnerships (product collab, event-based collab, content collab, etc.)
- TV ads
- Billboards
- Op-Eds
- Press Releases
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Analyzing price and promotion when conducting a competitive analysis is key to staying ahead of the curve. It can help you determine what’s working for your competition and what’s not so you can adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Study Your Competition's Content Strategy
Price and promotion are effective levers in a company’s marketing strategy, but without content, there is no competitor. Content is the fuel to a company’s marketing plans. So you must analyze and understand your competitors’ content strategies.
Find out where your competitors are investing time and effort.
- blogs
- videos
- social media posts
- podcasts
- email marketing
Assess the quantity of each type of content they publish.
- Are they publishing more podcasts than blogs?
- Are they publishing more blogs than social media posts?
- Is there a subject that they’re publishing a lot of content on?
- What’s required from your company to catch up, compete, and surpass your competitors in content breadth and depth?
Assess the publication frequency of each type of content
- How many social media posts do they make per week?
- How many blogs go up on their website per month?
- When do they send out emails? Note the time and day of the week.
What topics does the content cover?
- Your aim here is to determine which topics are covered to help identify areas they’re interested in competing in.
- After noting their content coverage by subject, identify areas they need to capitalize on.
Depth of Content
- How in-depth does their content coverage go? Is it introductory, generic, or high-level content? Or is it granular, specific, insightful, and helps position its brand as a thought leader in the space?
- Does their content employ stock images or custom designs with illustrations, graphic reports, text quotes, and video snippets to engage the reader?
Now that you’ve gathered all this data on your competition, it’s time you use it to conduct a SWOT analysis and arrive at insights to help develop competitive strategies for your company.
How to use SWOT analysis to out think the competition
Using your SWOT analysis is a great way to outthink your competition and employ effective strategies to advance your business.
Below are some questions to get you started in your SWOT analysis:
Strengths:
- What is your competitor doing well? (Products, content marketing, social, branding, promotion, etc.)
- Where does your competitor have the advantage? (Partnerships, funding, location, etc.)
Weaknesses:
- What is the weakest area for your competitor?
- What and where could they do better?
Opportunities:
- What opportunities does your competitor have, and how are they positioned for them?
- What’s a trend that your competitor can benefit from?
Threats:
- What threats is your competitor exposed to?
- What sudden changes can undermine your competitor’s business?
Once you know your competition’s SWOT, use it as a guide to research and analyze your company’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison.
With your analysis in hand, come up with rock-solid strategies and tactics to take advantage of your competition’s weaknesses, and seize on opportunities that arise from their missteps while shoring up your company’s vulnerabilities that they could take advantage of.
Strategizing with the insights from the SWOT analysis can uncover creative ways to reach new heights with your business and have a leg-up on everyone else.
Build Winning Strategies
It’s incredible how SWOT and the 4Ps of marketing can provide valuable insights into any competitive landscape. By conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you’ve identified opportunities to outmaneuver the competition and create an edge for your business. SWOT will help you understand where your internal weaknesses are located, while the 4Ps will give you an idea of what strategies each competitor is utilizing in their campaigns. Armed with invaluable data, you can create strategies that help propel your brand forward and increase your market share.
Once you have a good understanding of your competitors and your own business, the next step is to develop strategies to address weaknesses, capture opportunities, mitigate threats, and succeed in the marketplace. We will cover these strategies in a future blog.
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