How to Do a Competitor Analysis in 5 Simple Steps?

Being involved in a business means being a competitor among several others. Value and appeal are always at the top of people's minds. Whether you’re the biggest fish in the ocean or not, you must know how your competitors work. Want to know their secrets? Marketing analysis is where you study and identify information about a business or product while assessing its individual qualities and drawbacks.

Analysis and studying your competitors can reveal a lot of information that you may have overlooked. This information can help your business grow tremendously and bring in new customers. Getting to know your competitors not only helps you be prepared but also helps you learn from their mistakes. That being said, let's look into how to analyze your competitor.

Prerequisites to Analyse Your Competitors
How to Analyse Your Competitor?
1. Identify and Evaluate
2. Tracking and Spying
3. Find Out What Makes Them Unique
4. Analyze Customer Ratings
5. Evaluate Strengths and Weaknesses

Prerequisites to Analyse Your Competitors

Before you head on to analyze your competitors and take in information, there are a few questions you have to ask yourself. These may be according to your preferences depending on the business. These questions when answered should help you gain an advantage over your competitors. You will be more focused and organized once you have an overview. Some of these questions can be:

• What about my competitor’s business do I want to know the most?
• How long has my competitor been in the industry?
• What is their strongest selling point?
• What technologies are they using?
• How big of a threat are they?

These questions will help enhance the speed of your analysis process. Having a vision is crucial as it can be overwhelming to process all the information together. Once that’s done you can begin analyzing your competitor.

How to Analyse Your Competitor?

You might be surprised how a simple and easy-to-do analysis can reveal a lot about your competitors. This information can help you gain an advantage over them and improve your own business. Here we’ll look at 5 simple steps to analyze your competitor. The tools and methodology will also be explained for each of the steps below:

1. Identify and Evaluate

The first step is to identify your competitor. This means that you need to collect more statistical information rather than the company name and description. Finding out exactly where they rank up and how dominating they are will help you to evaluate their threat to your business. There are several free tools available to help you assess your rival.

SimilarWeb is a web traffic and analysis tool used by several businesses. It allows you to get the SEO rank of a website and details such as engagements, traffic by countries, the sources of traffic, etc. It even shows you a list of similar websites and competitors. This data can reveal their source of customers and a general idea of how good their website is. You must evaluate your results and understand your competitor before moving on to the next step.

2. Tracking and Spying

Observation is key when performing an analysis. To know exactly what your competitor does to maintain their position you must observe and track their actions. This is rather an easy thing to do in this digital era where nothing goes unnoticed. Observe them for a specific period. This could be anything from a week to an entire month depending on the kind of results you get. Try to visit their website often. What changes are they making concerning the industry? This could be the information that your business is lacking or something you could improve at.

Tracking Your Competitors

Some tools make this process much easier. Google Alerts and Brandwatch can track your competitor and give you alerts when certain events are triggered. These events can be when their traffic goes up a certain number, a certain page gets more visits or a social media post on trending. Tools like BuiltWith help you track the technologies used. Once you get these alerts, you can personally read the posts and know exactly what they did to get the extra attention. Progressive tracking can give you valuable insight into an organization.

Spying on Your Competitors

While on the other hand, one of the tricks that can be used in getting hold of trending advertisements of your competitors and their their ad strategies is Ad Spying. Ad spying tools like AdSpyder help in spying on the competitors' ads on all the major social media platforms like Facebook, Google, Youtube, and Instagram, and also on search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

3. Find Out What Makes Them Unique

Every business has something about them that makes them different. When it comes to marketing it's not just the product that makes a difference. Look into their socials, try to find out exactly how they advertise besides their website. How are the targeted customers drawn to them? Why would someone pick them over your business? Find out these factors and use them to boost your business. Although this doesn’t mean you should steal ideas from your rivals. It means that you can gain insight and use it as inspiration when you do your marketing.

4. Analyze Customer Ratings

Look at the business from a customer’s point of view. What seems appealing to the customers may be what drives their business. Check the rating and reviews of the product or business using platforms like Trustpilot and Sitejabber. Knowing what the customers think about a service can help you get a direct overview of the company. You can also use surveys and analytical tools for this purpose. Customers fuel the business. Knowing the customer mindset can help you understand the business marketing efficiently. This also helps you test the positive and negative aspects of the business.

5. Evaluate Strengths and Weaknesses

No business is perfect at what they do. Yet they are successful because they’re good at certain things. These are defined as the strengths of any business. While analyzing your competitor it's important that you know and accepts their strengths. Learning from your competitor and getting better is a huge benefit for any business. There are also weaknesses. These could be anything from a flawed marketing strategy to bad customer service. Knowing the weaknesses of your competitor allows you to exploit them by doing the deed better yourself. You not only have a chance of converting customers to your side but also improve in the long run.

FAQs

What is Marketing analysis?

Marketing analysis is where you study and identify information about a business or product while assessing its individual qualities and drawbacks.

What are the 5 steps to analyse your competitor?

Identify and evaluate, Tracking and spying, What makes them unique, Analyse customer ratings, and Evaluate strengths and weaknesses.

Why must one track the actions of competitors?

To know exactly what your competitor does to maintain their position you must observe and track their actions.