How can you differentiate yourself from the competition? How can you stay ahead of the game? What can you do differently? If you want to keep your brand at the forefront of your industry, these are just some of the questions that you need to know the answers to.
With a comprehensive competitive analysis, you can get ahead of the competition and increase your revenue and brand visibility. It’s okay, and it is even recommended that you be inspired by other brands, which can help you determine where they fall short and bridge the gap.
Let’s examine why competitor analysis is so critical for marketing, examine it step by step, and explore practical competitor analysis tools widely used today.
What is a competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis is how you evaluate where you position your brand in the industry, make detailed analyses regarding content, digital marketing, and brand identity, and figure out a roadmap that will help you pinpoint where you fall short and what you can do better.
The best place to start is a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for your business. This way, you can determine the developmental aspects, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of both your brands and competitors in your industry.
By analyzing your competitors, you can compare your position in the industry by collecting data such as their brand identity and positioning, community management, social media marketing, marketing projects, and more.
Competitor analysis for marketing
For a comprehensive competitor analysis, it is paramount to establish the four P’s of marketing for your brand and your competitors: Product, place, promotion, and price. This will allow you to see where you are in the market as opposed to your competitors. As you go deeper, evaluate the strategies used for digital marketing, such as:
- Email marketing: Campaigns, newsletters, special offers
- PR: Media coverage, reviews, press releases
- Website: Design, SEO, evergreen content
- Advertising: Paid ads, platforms used, ROI
- Social media marketing: Platforms used, frequency and content of posts, follower interactions
By doing this evaluation, you’ll be able to see which areas your competitors thrive in and where they fall short—a perfect starting point to catch up to their success and offer solutions where they fail to do so.
Now, you can start going deeper in your SWOT analysis. Here are three things you need to do to conduct a thorough competitive analysis audit:
Traffic Audit: This will provide essential data about the volume of visitors interacting with a website. You can analyze the traffic density of your website compared to that of your competitors. You can see which page of your competitors receives the most visitors and try to match them with different strategies.
Content Audit & SEO Audit: This is how you can measure what content your competitors use to communicate with customers, their tone of voice, and how their audience interacts with their content. By following recent trends in the industry, you can find keywords you can include in your content that can help your chances of ranking higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) and be among the first pages clicked when your target audience is looking for information.
Pricing Audit: This will be a great channel to reveal how your pricing point compares to your competitors. However, it’s important to consider your target audience–you don’t need to change your prices if you are targeting a different demographic than your competitors.
Why is it important to do a competitive analysis?
It is crucial to understand the new trends in the industry and analyze competitors to maintain competition or ensure superiority. The frequency of this situation may vary depending on the industry you work in. For example, if you work/manage a company that needs to be fast and agile, such as an FMCG company, it would be wiser to use competitive auditing practices more frequently.
Another thing is that it will help you make strategic decisions. Data-driven information will help you grow your business. If you decide on a strategy based on data, you’ll see that it produces better results. Observe and note the areas where your competitors are successful and stand out, then start by investing in strategies that can help you catch up as well as address their shortcomings.
How to conduct a competitor audit in 5 steps
1. Determine your competitors
Start by researching who the key players in your industry are and find out your primary and secondary competitors. Establish your brand identity and compare your products, services, and target audiences to determine your similarities and differences. You can start by typing keywords about your product/service into Google and see what comes up!
2. Evaluate your competitors with a SWOT analysis
Learning your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help you get to know them better and provide an environment where you can become aware of your weaknesses and turn threats into opportunities. At this point, it would be good to ask: What does my opponent do well? What do I do differently from my competitor, and am I good at it? What opportunities does my opponent create and win? Where do they fall short?
3. Gather information to create action items
Analyze how they do what they do; pay close attention to their strategies, content marketing, ads, and community management. For example, does your competitor have a blog, or does it publish an external newsletter? Do they produce podcasts or short-form video content? At what intervals do they publish their blogs or external newsletters? Find out how they engage with their audience and establish authority in the industry.
4. Keep monitoring and re-evaluating
Competition audits aren’t something that is one-and-done. Digital marketing is dynamic; new trends, approaches, and algorithms are coming out every other week. If you don’t want to fall behind your competitors, it’s of critical importance that you keep monitoring the impact of your strategies and watch out for new trends. Always be open to change and adjust your approach to keep growing.
5. Collaborate with a marketing agency
Achieving success through competitor analysis marketing doesn’t end with gathering data–you have to do something with it. You might not have time for social media management, developing content marketing strategies, monthly competitive audit reports, and paid marketing campaigns, especially if you’re a start-up. The most clever approach is collaborating with a digital marketing agency and leaving all these to professionals. This will also allow you to save time and resources to focus on improving your products and operations.
Tools for competitive research
In this digital information age we’re in, fastly developing technologies provide you with effective tools to conduct competitor research much more easily. Here are some tools that marketers use to analyze and monitor competitors:
Semrush
You can use Semrush to measure activities such as examining your competitor’s website traffic and finding high-ranking pages for competitive analysis.
Ahrefs
Considered one of the best tools for SEO audits, Ahrefs provides you with the means to do traffic audits, competitor website audits, and content audits, as well as find out which keywords you can target to improve your ranking in Google search engine result pages.
Similarweb
If you want to learn the market share of your website and its performance in the search engine, this tool may be useful to you. Similarweb will impress you with features such as daily visits and duration of stay on the website.
Wappalyzer
This tool, which is a free-to-use Firefox add-on, shows which technologies and features websites use. With just one click, you can use Wappalyzer to generate audits on your competitors’ websites.
First step towards improving brand visibility
Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. You cannot do competitor analysis once and put it aside after developing one or two marketing strategies. It’s something you need to stay on top of and use to inform your marketing operations. The tools you can use for competitor analysis also have considerable learning curves, which might slow you down when you need to do the opposite: stay agile.
No need to worry, though, because we are here to do what it takes to take your business to the next level and improve your brand visibility. All you need to do is contact us, tell us who you are, and leave it to us to do the rest!
