The process of identifying and researching your competitors to obtain key information and position yourself above them is known as competitive analysis and is an element that should not be missing when developing your strategy.
If you still have in mind the premise that analyzing your competition will make you the same as them, let me tell you that you are very far from the truth.
Because the reality is that if you take the time to verify step by step what your competitors do and how they do it, you will be able to detect each one’s faults and turn them into your strengths, which will automatically differentiate you from them and make you gain ground.
Only then can you develop an effective marketing plan to steer the ship in the right direction.
Here’s how to do a good competitive analysis in 8 easy steps:
1. Identify your competitors
A competitor is any company that solves the same problem as you in your target market.
For example, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are competitors because they sell the same thing to the same market. However, not all similar businesses are direct competitors, which is a common mistake people make.
Take restaurants and cafes and notice that bulgaria bulk telegram marketing both are places to eat, but they do not compete with each other.
Restaurants are for full meals, while cafes are for light meals or refreshments. It’s a similar story for standalone versus enterprise solutions. The products may be similar, but the same solutions don’t appeal to both demographics.
Now that you understand that, your first step is to find 3-5 relevant competitors (more than this would be overkill).
Here I share with you three ways to do it:
a) Look at the keyword overlap
Everyone should know at least one competitor, and you can use that information to find others. Simply plug your competitor’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and check out the Competitor Domains report.
This will show you other websites that rank for many of the same keywords as your known competitor.
For example, if you work for ConvertKit, you can look for sites that compete with MailChimp.
Just keep in mind that not all of those domains will be your business competitors. Some websites can monetize the same traffic with advertising or affiliate marketing.
If you don’t use Ahrefs, try sweden mobile phone numbers list Googling a platform like yourcompetitors.com.
This search operator finds sites related to a given domain. It works well, but the downside is that it usually only finds a handful of related sites. In this case, MailChimp, Aweber, Campaign Monitor, and three others.
For the rest of this article, I’ll use MailChimp as a competitor example because it’s likely a brand you already know.
b) Look who’s advertising
Searching for businesses bidding on industry keywords can be a little more reliable than searching for organic traffic overlap. This is because it tends to show direct competitors rather than blogs or other sites with different business models.
Look at the ads for “email marketing software.”
Both advertisers are direct competitors of ConvertKit or MailChimp because they sell email marketing software.
If you want to expand on this approach, use the Ad History report in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to view historical search ad data for relevant keywords. We see that 307 domains have historically paid for ads on keywords like “email marketing app” and “email marketing software.”
c) View category listings
No matter what you sell or do, you can bet there’s a website that curates companies that do the same thing.
Do you have a software product? Check bank email list out the companies listed in categories on G2 or alternatives.
Do you have a local business? Check out Yelp and its alternatives.
Do you sell tomato sauce? There’s a listing for that too.
This method is quick and straightforward. However, companies listed in a relevant category will not always be your competitors.
2. Competitive Analysis: Get Background Information
Knowing how a competitor was established and the story behind its growth puts things into context. It’s good to know what you’re up against in terms of size, backing, and funding.
Please check the following data:
- Year of foundation
- Are there venture capital investors?
- Which companies did they acquire?
- Number of employees
- Number of customers
- Income
You’ll find answers to the first three data points on company overview websites like Crunchbase or Yahoo Finance . The latter also provides income statements from publicly traded companies where you can find last year’s revenue.
If the competitor is a private company, you can still find the information. Just Google it.
C-level interviews often contain information about revenue, along with information about your strategy, challenges, most valuable segments , and much more.
Finally, you can find the number of people they employ on LinkedIn .
All of this tells you what you’re up against in terms of resources and how much of your target market the competitor owns.
MailChimp is clearly a long-established industry giant, but that doesn’t mean you can’t compete with them.
3. Analyze your products and services
Understanding what your competitors offer and how the market reacts to it is essential to creating a competitive advantage. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should copy something from them. Your product development should be guided by what the market demands.
Here’s what you need to know here:
Features and solutions
Try out your competitors’ products for yourself and take note of their features. There’s no right or wrong way to approach this. Listing all of MailChimp ’s features and solutions would require an entire spreadsheet on its own, so you’re better off writing a high-level overview.
Prices
In most cases, this will be easy to complete. Look at what price the products are selling for and see if there are any discounts.
For some B2B niches , you won’t find a public pricing page as they are often based on custom quotes. You’ll have to do some ghost shopping for multiple use cases and ask your current or past customers.
Customer rating
Being a marketer makes you skeptical about the reviews you read online. Review generating activities are highly biased, but hey, this is marketing too.
For that reason, you’ll want to check out the reviews that are in the middle.
The company may often encourage five-star reviews, and angry customers mostly write one-star reviews in the heat of the moment. For that reason, it’s worth looking primarily at 2-4 star reviews to get a clearer idea of what people think about your competitors’ products or services.
Review platforms offer all kinds of useful filters in addition to the review score.
Strengths and weaknesses
Now that you’ve completed your product overview, it’s time to summarize it. Write down some strengths and weaknesses based on the product information you’ve gathered so far.
This is what I have for MailChimp:
Strengths: You will likely be able to do anything you want with this product.
Weaknesses: More expensive than alternatives, probably too overwhelming for a beginner.
