When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand?
And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently?
If you’re not sure, or if the last “analysis” you ran was a quick perusal of a competitor’s website and social media presence, you’re likely missing out on important intelligence that could help your brand grow.
What is a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is a strategy where you identify major competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you can create solid business strategies that improve upon your competitor’s.
A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works, and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them.
It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards.
Let’s dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses:
- Helps you identify your product’s unique value proposition and what makes your product different from competitors’, which can inform future marketing efforts.
- Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your product and your marketing campaigns are outperforming industry standards.
- Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out new, unique marketing strategies they haven’t taken advantage of.
- Learn through customer reviews what’s missing in a competitor’s product, and consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs.
- Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your own growth.
Convinced, yet? Next, let’s dive into how you can conduct a competitive analysis for your own company.