By evaluating the market, monitoring target competitors, and developing a competitive strategy, you can differentiate yourself from your competitors and set yourself on a path to long-term growth.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to:

• Evaluate market and key metrics
• Identify your direct competitors
• Analyze the competitive landscape and develop an effective competitive strategy.
• Explore the benefits of competitive analysis and how it can help your business succeed.

Perform a competitive analysis

What are you doing now to compete with other companies in your space? If you’re a small business you’re likely aware of other small businesses or consultants and at least vaguely aware of what they’re doing.

Competitive analysis means you’re getting serious about comparing their services to yours. You want to be examining their strategies, strengths, limitations, and market positioning to yours. You’re probably curious about their pricing strategies—value, hourly or package pricing. Their product or service offerings, marketing approaches, customer base, and distribution channels. This analysis enables you to identify the areas where you can surpass your competitors and gain a competitive advantage.

Gap Analysis 101

Line up your services against those of your competitors and identify services that you provide that they don’t, and you’ve just identified a competitive strength.

• Continue to compare your service offerings against those of your competitors.
• Where are you stronger than your competitors?
• Where are you weak?
• Where could you most easily augment your current deliverables to provide new services?
• What’s a longer-term strategy to provide more and better services?

Experts tell us to look at all segments of the industry—big corporation as well as the startups that have fresh ideas and approaches that can steal market share from established companies. These startups can be young and hungry, eager to enter the market for lower prices, so the competition is key.

More than 73% of enterprises dedicate 20% of their technology budgets to research and data analytics. (Source: Forbes)

Key benefits of competitive analysis

To better understand how competitive analysis provides value, let’s take a look at the key benefits of competitive analysis:

Understanding your competitive landscape: By analyzing your competitor’s overall strategies and shortcomings, you can identify opportunities and challenges that may impact your business.

• Identifying target competitors: Competitive analysis helps you understand marketing pricing, and relative customer base. This is an important one. This information can help you differentiate yourself and gain a competitive advantage. It can also help you understand pricing. We all want to be working with better clients, and in many cases, we find out that we’re not charging enough and we may not have raised our rates since or before Covid.
• Monitoring competitors: Competitive analysis helps you keep track of your competitors’ activities, such as new product launches, marketing campaigns, and other vital events. It can help you adjust your strategy in real-time and stay ahead of the competition. Learning what services your competitors aren’t providing may be an opportunity for you. It may include working with a white label marketing provider, adding a service with a trusted outside provider.
• Staying up to date on industry trends and developments: Competitive landscape analysis helps you stay informed about your industry’s latest trends and developments and identify new opportunities.

Now that you know how practical competitive landscape analysis is for you and your business, let’s look at the six crucial steps included in this analysis.

Step 1: Identify your target competitors’ overall online presence

The first step in conducting a competitive analysis is to evaluate the market and your direct competition. It involves researching and collecting information on companies that offer similar products or services to your target audience. After you have compiled a list of competitors, it is time to identify your competitors’ overall online presence.

• Research their online presence: Look at their websites, social media profiles, and other online platforms to assess how they present themselves to the public.
• What are your target competitors doing in the community? What about networking organizations to which they belong and causes they support? Think cause marketing?
• Do sign up for their newsletters. Read their blogs. These will provide key insights into what the company stands for and how they present information.

Step 2: Monitor and analyze your target competitors’ products/services

The second step is to carefully analyze the products/services your competitors provide–monitor the competitor’s website. Identify what your competitors offer that you don’t. Analyzing your competitors’ websites will also help you gain insights into their pricing strategies and any promotions or discounts they may be offering to attract new customers. Find out how they package their services.

Identify any unique selling points your competitors are highlighting, which can help you differentiate your products or services. Regularly check for updates or changes in their offerings to help you stay informed about the ongoing market trends and changes in branding or product launches.

Step 3: Use Online SEO tools; understand the keywords your target competitors are using

Use online SEO tools because it always seems to come down to keywords! After you have identified your competitors and analyzed their websites, it’s time to identify the keywords or phrases that your competitors are using on their websites or in their online content to attract and engage their audiences. You especially want to be looking for those keywords that you’ve identified as your own primary and secondary keywords.

• Pay attention to headings, titles, meta tags, and URLs—this is where we usually place our important keywords.
• You don’t have to be a techie to love this one. View the HTML source code of your competitor’s website by right-clicking on the page and selecting “View Page Source” or a similar option. Do a “Find” and look for metatags, title tags, and header tags that contain keywords. You can also search for the “keyword” metatag, although it may not always be present.
• Use online SEO tools specifically designed for competitor keyword analysis. Online SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can provide insights into the keywords your competitor is targeting. Enter your competitor’s website URL into these tools to get a list of the keywords they are ranking for.
• Google Keyword Planner: Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to research keywords. Enter your competitor’s website URL or specific pages into the tool, and it will suggest relevant keywords based on the site’s content.
• SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords. Look at the titles, metadescriptions, and content of the top-ranking pages to identify common keywords used by your competitors. Online SEO tools will help with this as well.

By understanding the keywords that your competitors are targeting, you can gain insights into what their audience is searching for and what type of content resonates with them. This information will help you improve your own website’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and create content that meets the needs and interests of your target audience.

By identifying the keywords your competitors are ranking for, you can determine which keywords are most valuable to your business and focus your SEO efforts accordingly.

Using competitive intelligence, 56% of executives keep an eye on their potential competitors and make plans to conquer new markets in the following three years. (Source: PwC)

Step 4: Marketing competitive analysis and customer retention strategies

The fourth step of competitive landscape analysis is marketing competitive analysis and evaluating your target competitors’ client retention strategies. It involves researching their advertising, promotion, competitive branding efforts, and how your competitors win long-term customers.

AI can analyze pricing data from competitors to help businesses optimize their pricing strategies. By monitoring competitors’ pricing trends and analyzing customer responses, AI can provide insights on how to adjust pricing to remain competitive and retain customers.

• Analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies can help you enhance your own marketing efforts and stand out in the market. Don’t be afraid to steal ideas.
• By identifying marketing gaps or opportunities, businesses can find ways to improve their campaigns. It can also help prepare for potential threats or challenges, such as a competitor launching a new marketing campaign.
• By combining the findings from your competitor’s marketing and customer retaining strategies, you can devise a foolproof technique of your own without repeating the same mistakes as your competitors.

Step 5: Analyze your competitors’ pricing strategies

Step five of the competitive analysis is to analyze your competitors’ pricing strategies. It’s vital to assess your competitors’ strategies to understand their pricing models, such as cost-plus, project-based, hourly or value-based pricing–each impacts your target audience’s purchase decision.

You can adjust your own pricing by analyzing your competitors’ pricing strategies to remain competitive. For instance, if a competitor lowers their prices, you may need to adjust your pricing to retain your customers and avoid losing market share. It may also show that it’s time to raise your prices!

Step 6: Review their social profiles

Step six of competitive analysis involves reviewing your competitor’s social media profiles to understand their social media marketing strategies. This step includes identifying the social media platforms your competitors are using and analyzing their content to see which posts get the most engagement.

• Are your competitors using video content and how is their audience responding to it? The response can help guide your own video strategy. Not using video yet? Maybe it’s time to step up!
• Are your competitors working with influencers and other brands to increase their reach and engagement?
• Are your competitors partnering with other organizations to create synergies. What about white label marketing?

By understanding your competitor’s social media strategies, you can gain insights on how to improve your own social media presence and increase engagement with your target audience.

Why benchmarking is important

Benchmarking is important because it compares a company’s performance or practices against the best-performing competitors or industry standards to identify areas for improvement and growth.

This is an example of how benchmarking can help achieve long-term success:

A fast food company benchmarked itself against its competitors to improve customer service

A company in the fast-food industry decided to benchmark itself against its competitors to improve its customer-service experience.

• They analyzed the wait times, accuracy of orders, friendliness of staff, and overall cleanliness of their restaurants and compared them to their top competitors.
• Results found that their competitors outperformed them in several areas, such as the friendliness of staff and speed of service.
• Using this benchmarking data, the company implemented changes in their employee training programs, improved their ordering and delivery processes, and invested in new technology to speed up service. The results? They increased their customer satisfaction ratings and attracted new customers, leading to growth in their business.

This example helps us see why benchmarking is important in helping businesses identify areas for improvement and achieve long-term success. Whether in customer service, product quality, or operational efficiency, benchmarking helps enterprises stay competitive and adapt to changing market conditions.

Additional tips for conducting effective competitive analysis

We have already discussed the most important aspects of competitive analysis. However, if you want to stay one step ahead of your competitors, you can follow these additional tips, focusing on key metrics.

• Stay updated: Watch the latest industry trends and changes in your competitors’ strategies. It will help you stay ahead of the curve and adjust your strategy accordingly.
• Use multiple sources: Don’t rely on a single source of information for your competitive analysis. Use primary and secondary research methods, such as surveys, customer feedback, industry reports, and competitor websites to get a complete picture of your competitors’ strategies.
• Focus on key metrics: Instead of trying to analyze every aspect of your competitors’ business, focus on the key metrics most relevant to your business goals. It can include metrics such as market share, customer satisfaction, and customer retention rates.
• Never ignore smaller competitors: While focusing on the major players in your industry is essential, don’t overlook smaller competitors who may be using innovative strategies to gain market share.
• Keep it ethical: While it’s necessary to gather information about your competitors, make sure you do so in an ethical and legal manner. Avoid using unethical tactics like hacking or stealing confidential information to gain an advantage over your competitors.

Conclusion

• Evaluate market with regular competitive analysis is a vital component of any successful business strategy.
• Use online SEO tools to monitor and evaluate your competitors’ online presence, products, pricing and competitive branding strategies, marketing tactics, and customer retention strategies, you can identify areas of improvement and opportunities for growth.
• Stay ahead of the competitors by evaluating market changes, customer preferences and adjusting your strategies accordingly. Pay attention to key metrics throughout.
• By implementing the insights gained from competitive analysis, you can make informed decisions and develop strategies that drive long-term success for your business.

Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and digital media specialists, 510-292-1843, jpeischel@top-mindmarketing.com