Competitive Analysis for Your Business
Competitive analysis helps a business determine potential advantages and barriers within a target market around a product or service, and generally helps brands monitor how direct and indirect competitors are executing tactics like marketing, pricing, and distribution.
What should you cover in a competitor analysis?
Your competitive analysis can vary widely depending on what you’re trying to learn about your competitors. You might do a competitive analysis around a specific aspect of your competitors’ business—like their website, for example—or you might do a high-level look at their marketing approach as a whole.
There are a lot of different ways you can structure a competitive analysis, so let’s look at the types of information that are frequently seen within this kind of research.
If you're doing a high-level competitor analysis, there are a few major elements you’ll want to be sure to include around competitors’ market positioning, such as:
Who their target customers are
What market share to they currently own
What their main differentiator or unique value-add is for their business and products
Key features/benefits they highlight in sales materials
Price points for products, even across different marketplaces
How they approach shipping
If they've received any funding or venture capital
These sections will help you get a zoomed out look at what separates these businesses from each other and how they’re working to differentiate themselves from the competition within the niche.
If you want to look at more specific elements of your competitors’ approaches, you might consider adding sections like these to your competitive analysis:
Features on competitors' websites (like search tools, product images, design/layout, etc.)
Customer experience elements (cart abandonment strategy, customer support, mobile UX, etc.)
Social media approach (channels used, frequency of posting, engagement, etc.)
Content marketing tactics (blog topics, content types, etc.)
Marketing tactics (types of promotions, frequency of discounts, etc.)
Email marketing approach (Newsletter, promo codes, etc.)
Customer reviews (language used around products, recurring complaints, etc.)
Generally, competitive analysis can take on many shapes and forms depending on what a company wants to evaluate about its competitors, but this should give you a rough idea of what could be included within the different sections.