You can’t beat what you don’t understand and as a business owner, you must understand that competitors are a thorn in your flesh and a constant threat to your earning potential.
However, carrying out a competitive analysis enables you to understand your competition, learn from their successes, failures and compare your performance with theirs.
Read on to find out the best practices for conducting a competitive analysis. Or, let iTonic do a professional job on that for you.
What is your goal for conducting a competitive analysis
It would be a total waste of time if you are engaging in this process just because your employee or business partner thinks it is a cool thing to do. You must have a clear goal in mind, this will enable you to be effective in your research. fro my findings, you should be able to
answer the following:
- Which decisions are you looking to make from your findings through this competitive analysis?
- Are you looking to improve your customer support?
- Do you desire to improve your marketing funnel?
- Get inspiration for A/B or multivariate testing?
Identify your competitors
You will only be wasting your time and effort if you understudy every competition in your industry. Choose a few worthy ones by asking your customers who they consider as the next best alternative to your business. Running a google search on businesses in your industry, checking 3rd party reports on how businesses are faring in your industry.
- Carry out a SWOT analysis of your competitors’ strength, weakness, the opportunities available to them and what can potentially threaten them.
What products are they offering and what is their pricing strategy
as you know the product is the connection between the business and their customer. So take your time and find out the offering quality, the pricing policies, the promotional offers and every other thing your competitor does to drive sales.
- Now that you understand their offers, what strategies are they using to market these products? Do they make use of podcasts? Do they run a blog? How often do they publish content? Do they make use of tripwires? Do they publish free sample reports or guides?
- What automation tools does your competitor use: We live in the world of automation and companies are now using these tools to make their processes seamless and to improve their user experience. Some of these tools include accounting softwares, URL shorteners and so on.
- Analyze the engagement your competitors get whenever they publish a content. How many likes, social media shares, and comments does their content receive?
- What’s your competitors’ social media strategy: there are many social media platforms, some of the notable ones are Tiktok, instagram, YouTube and so on. Find out where they are active, how often they publish content, what their engagement is like, the quality and quantity of their followers.
These are some of the best practises you should follow when conducting a competitive analysis, and lastly the point of conducting this exercise is to improve your performance and it’d be a great shame and waste of effort if you do not implement your results.