Competitive Analysis in marketing
Studying, understanding, and analyzing competitors is an important step in marketing. Additionally, it is also crucial in all successful marketing strategies. Therefore, if you conduct a competitive analysis and examine their strengths and weaknesses, you may lose your competitive advantage to be better presented by your competitor, for instance: offering the same product at a lower price or at an additional advantage.
Through competitive analysis, you can determine what makes your product or service unique, and therefore what features it needs to attract targeted customers.
What does competitive analysis mean?
Competitive analysis is an important tool to capture golden opportunities because it is a great and invaluable strategic research tool. By analyzing the performance of competitors and capturing golden opportunities in the market.
In other words, competitive analysis is the research and analysis process to identify your current and prospective competitors and assess their strategies for knowing their strengths and weaknesses compared to your product or service.
Competitive analysis often includes a SWOT analysis to help you identify a competitive marketing plan and enable you to recognize your competitive advantage, in addition to and avoiding and transforming vulnerabilities and threats into opportunities.
Competitive Analysis – importance:
Many entrepreneurs think less competition is better, as a result, there is a search for new products and ideas, but more and more competition reflects demand. This doesn’t mean that new ideas don’t work, but we need to know how much they are in demand and how thirsty people are to acquire them.
Market success intensifies competition and makes it difficult for new products competing to enter this market.
As a result, here lies the importance of conducting a competitive analysis:
-Making a competitive analysis is your first step in determining how you strategically get into the market.
– A competitive analysis helps you discover what distinguishes you from your competitors. In other words, identifying the competitive advantage that defines your products and your brand from your competitors.
Competitive Analysis marketing
-Constantly and periodically analyze conduct a competitive analysis to learn about market developments. Subsequently, work against competitors, and lastly, ensure the superiority of your campaigns and products.
-Another point is that a competitive analysis t gives you a perspective on the right time to enter the market.
-Doing a competitive analysis assists in taking advantage of competitors’ clients. In particular, their complaints and observations and take them as an opportunity to outperform competitors.
-A competitive analysis helps in identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – SWOT analysis – to see how a competitor can cope with crises along with other details.
SWOT analysis:
Also known as the “SWOT Matrix,” or “quadruple analysis tool”:
To clarify, it is an analysis framework used to analyze competing firms and to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to competitors.
The SWOT analysis is a model for measuring the strengths and weaknesses of organizations. As well as their potential opportunities and threats.
Internal and external SWOT analysis elements
SWOT is an abbreviation of four words representing the four elements underlying an analysis:
-Internal Strengths
-Internal Weaknesses
-External Opportunities
-External Threats
Competitive Analysis – How to identify competitors?
You first need to know who your competitors are, you probably already have a list, More importantly, have you thought about all the details that belong to them?
Let’s start with the following steps:
Types of competitors
Direct competitors:
The companies that provide the same service or products as you in the same geographical area. Additionally, they target the same audience and fill the same needs.
Indirect competitors
These companies provide the same services or products as you in the same geographical area, but serve different needs or purposes or target a different audience.
There’s also a third type, a third-class competitor.
To clarify, it’s a type of competition that sells a product that may be connected in some way to your product, but it doesn’t really compete with it. Furthermore, they can also be called secondary competitors.
This is to say, they can be defined as competitors that work in the same area as you but without competing directly with your business or brand.
Without a doubt, there is a possibility that they can become your competitors, either because of the launching of a new product line among other reasons.
Identifying these types of competitors is still important because they can become direct or indirect at any time. Therefore, you don’t need to conduct a thorough search for them, but monitoring any major changes or developments around them might be useful.
How do you get to your market rivals/ competitors?
1- Use google ads – semrush.
2- Write the keywords that you target.
3- You’ll have a list of similar words. Copy it.
4- Start searching for those words in search engines like Google.
5-Prepare a list of the top 10 competition results that will appear to you. Mostly these are your immediate competitors.
Tools that can help you know your competitors:
Many tools can ease the process of conducting a competitive analysis easily, for example:
The “kwfinder” tool gives you direct links to competitors’ websites.
“Facebook audience insights” help you identify your main competitors on social media platforms.
A magical way: Sign into “Njlatics” to determine how many posts are published by your competitors, along with acknowledging how they interact with their clients, and try to be more present for your clients.
Competitive Analysis – Steps:
– In competitive analysis, you must evaluate your competitors by placing them in strategic groups according to how directly they compete for market share.
For each competitor or strategic group you must include their product or service, profitability, growth pattern, marketing goals and assumptions, current and past strategies, organizational structure and cost, strengths and weaknesses, and sales volume of the competitor’s business.
Competitive Analysis marketing
In short, for your competitive analysis, find the answers to the following questions for each competitor:
- What products or services do they offer?
- What is the market share of each competitor?
- How much is their advertising budget?
- What are their current and previous strategies?
- Measure the interaction rate on their social media pages?
- What kind of media is used to promote their products or services?
- Every competitor’s strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the potential threats your competitors pose to your brand?
- What potential opportunities do they offer you?
Competitive Analysis – Identifying their media strategies:
Firstly, in competitive analysis, you must identify the communication channels they use. Secondly, analyze the channels and see how your competitors appear regularly. Finally, learn how they continue to deal with all the obstacles and barriers they face in the different media platforms.
Competition Analysis – Analyzing the content analysis of competitors:
When doing a competitive analysis, you must focus on the content provided by your competitors. Due to it being an important factor to be analyzed. Because one of the reasons for your competitors’ success, especially in the digital marketing world, is the quality of the content they provide.
In the competitive analysis, you must take into consideration all the details of their content, for example: how they present the content. Subsequently, what they rely on in their blogs in terms of language style. Along with the length of content, whether it’s long, detailed, and full of information and detailed. Or in the contrast, their content is short with useful information only. And certainly, learning the extent of the interaction on this content and its impact on consumers/readers.
Competitive Analysis marketing
Additionally, the competitive analysis focus on all the content of competitors in Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and all the channels they use.
Once you get all this information in your research to create a competitive analysis, it can be a little confusing. Therefore, you have to sort it out and make it valuable to your business.
To start, try to sort out the information in a way that helps you improve your strategies.
Focus your efforts on making use of every piece of information for your competitive analysis you get in a smart way that helps you improve your business and enhance your brand.
Do you need to do market research and conduct a competitive analysis of your own to identify your business?
In Lhamim, we can help you. Feel free to contact us.
