Competitor Research...
Competitor Research and Analysis-Guideline
Competitor Research and Analysis-Guideline
What are competitor research and analysis in business?
Competitor research and analysis mean identifying your competitors in the market and analyzing their brand strength. A competitive analysis will help you see your unique advantages as well as potential barriers to growth so you can strengthen your marketing and business strategies. Competitive research help in several ways
- Understanding company status and standard
- Discover your niche
- Differentiate and explain your product and services
- Build a place in the market
- Measuring your growth
- Identify market gaps
- Planning for the future
5 steps to conducting Competitor Research
Set your objectives for competitive research
Before starting competitive research the first thing is to set objectives for competition. Objectives smartly affect your business outcomes and help to differentiate our company from other competitors. Objectives are important before starting competitive research because they give direction and help in decision-making. So it helps to analyze our competitors briefly and we will focus on each and every point of competitors’ marketing strategy. If you already know your goals, this knowledge will help you structure your research to meet those goals.
Identify your main competitors in the market
Identify the first top ten competitors in the market and make a list of each competitor according to your niche. In this step, Google will help to find our competitors at the national and international levels.
Analyze your competitors
It’s important that you can easily compare your competitors’ performance to yours with your team. Start by ranking your competitors on a scale of 1 to 10 /table like the one below:
Example Competitor’s performance analysis
| Product | You | Competitor 1 | Competitor 2 | Competitor 3 | Competitor 4 |
| Price | 3 | 7 | 3 | 6 | 5 |
| Quality | 6 | 9 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| Place | 2 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 |
| Marketing | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Positioning | 8 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 1 |
After making the table the next step is to evaluate your performance step by step with your competitors. After making a table you can easily evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
Identify your competitor’s advantages
Identifying the advantages of competitors is a totally different thing from the whole process of competitor research. The first thing starts with why? Why do they stand in this position in the marketplace? Focus on the benefits of their product and services. Are they focused on the problem of the customers and do they solve the problems or not? As it may be the possible reason behind their position they satisfied their all customers.
Adjust your marketing strategy
After completing the whole process it is time to set your marketing strategy smartly. Once you have collected detailed information about your competition, their strategies and policies, practices they use to attract new customers and their weaknesses, you can adjust your strategy. You will see where the market is short and where it is oversupplied.
The information you gather should be able to fall into three categories:
- What they are doing better than you?
- What they are doing worse than you?
- What are they doing that is doing the same as you?
- What they are providing better than you?
The competitive analysis gives your company valuable insight into your competition. Being clear about who your competition is, what product or service they provide, and where they fall short will enable you to improve your business performance and grow in the long run.