Does your business put a priority on its competitive market analysis and competitive analysis ideas? Does it monitor marketplace trends and its understanding of market change? And most importantly, does it put a priority on making changes as a result of insights from this analysis?
Related: The Small Business Crash Course on Creative Business Ideas
No business attribute is more important today than that of adaptability, as many, many businesses are on the brink of irrelevance unless they change as fast as change itself. Your strategies do run out of steam, get old, and become ineffective … you need to keep refreshing them based on your anticipation of the next change. A competitive analysis is critical in helping with your anticipation of market and customer change. Read on to understand why.
Why do a competitive analysis?
A vigorous competition watch kills two birds with a single stone – helps with a better understanding of rival tactics and opens a window through which you can see your own problem areas. Further, I’m sure you’d agree that knowing where you stand is highly important.
Aquisition
Still, looking for reasons to use competitive analysis in improving business success? Read through the following reasons and find out yourself.
Identify opportunities to serve newly acquired and prospective customers.
Determine the size of the market – identify service gaps and areas for self-improvement where competition is exploiting at the moment.
Find the tested ways to cater to the target market.
Update and add unique value propositions.
Conclude if your marketing strategies are effective.
Benefits of competitive research
There are many benefits of effective competitive analysis. Here are the ones we feel are most significant:
You can really dive into your market to understand it better.
Define who your real customers are and better target them.
You can get an understanding of what your competitors have done that has been successful without re-inventing the wheel.
Isolate trends that make a positive difference.
Who are your competitors?
Most companies believe they know who their competitors are. But when we do a little research on identifying them, they are usually surprised by the results. Here are the questions and facts you need to know and be asking yourselves:
What to find about your competitor and where?
A local store is not your competitor online if they don’t offer their service via the internet. Your competitors based online could be entirely different. Examine new and emerging players in the market.
Evaluate the premise of your rivals – if you share similarities, look for areas where a certain edge can be established and nurtured.
Competition analysis – How to do it effectively
Taking a sneak peek at competitors requires a little undercover work from your office and occasionally doing a walk around surveillance. Here are some things you should consider:
Acquisition approach
Look for rivals’ social media engagement – how frequently they respond to their clients, are their social media reps doing a decent job or not, and subtle indicators of customer acquisition via self-promotion.
Unique value propositions
Learn how your rivals are playing the game, so you can beat them to the punch. The unique value proposition sheds light on the fraction of clients that your rival is fixated on.
Are their posts mostly internal, external, or a mix of both?
How on-brand are their photos? Do they show the product or service in each shot, or do they follow a more lifestyle-oriented content strategy?
What hashtags do they use?
Competition store walkthrough
Occasionally put your customer hat on and do a simple walk-through of your key competitors’ store. From a customer’s point of view, what are the strengths and weaknesses? Which ones could you employ to make your business better?
Tap local business leaders for local intelligence/advice
Never hesitate to reach out and ask local business leaders their opinions on trends they are seeing and how they see your business in relation to its competitors.
Compare your website value versus your competition
Our research has shown customers will visit at least three websites before making a purchase. The larger the purchase, the more sites they’ll visit. Therefore, you need to look at your website in the context of your competition.
Seek to understand the customer journey as they move from one website to the next. Pay attention to the promotion incentives your competitors offer and how they compare to yours. If the competition’s website is easier to use, offers more enticing incentives, and contains more compelling messaging, you will have a hard time generating online leads.
Trends and shifts
Watch for marketplace trends and shifts. Look at the fringe of the environment, for that is where trends first appear.
Anticipation
Work at developing your anticipation of changes in your market.
Study how trends start to interact with each other as well as customers and businesses.
Useful tools
Rival IQ
Rival IQ is perfect for getting full intelligence coverage on what your market is about. You can set up landscapes (up to 30 sites in the pro version) in your category or content publishing niche, find the hottest and most engaged (hello conversion possibility) topics and channels.
You can spot gaps where your competition is not present and mine the top 100 SEO keywords for search volume, traffic share, and search rank positions.
You can go deeper and map up the entire editorial flow for each channel and get topic ideas for your marketing. You can also see what changes RivalIQ does to titles, Meta descriptions, and social bios and even track website changes (design and mostly home page).
Site Alerts
Site Alerts is another great tool for looking under the hood to see what your competitors are using technology-wise (which eCommerce platform, mail provider, plugins, tech enhancements). It’s great for seeing what social referrals work best for them and what percentage of traffic they represent.
Additionally, you can see what other traffic sources they get (and the share for each) and a list of referral sites, related sites, and organic keywords.
Google Alerts are great little inventions because they allow you to track virtually anything and have it delivered either to your email or RSS. What kinds of stuff should you be tracking? The name of our competitor’s company, their employee names, their CEO, product names, locations, mentions of new features, etc.
What kinds of media are you looking for? Their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos, Flickr accounts, Facebook pages, etc. Why? The more you know, the better off you are to make smart decisions.
Follow your competitors on Twitter. Follow their employees. Follow the people that engage most often with your competitors. Follow the people your competitors are following. Private Lists are a goldmine for researching.
The bottom line
Continually rework all of your techniques, particularly your discrimination and value proposition.
The key to success here is realizing that this is a marathon and not a sprint. If you examine the competition in the top areas mentioned above and create a plan to overcome it, you will win long term.
Monitoring your competition is a small, but important component of a successful digital marketing plan. No business exists in a vacuum, so you must be aware of your environment.
Will you be the one to stand out?
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your creativity, innovation, and ideas?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
How You Can Improve Creative Thinking Skills by Adding Constraints
The Small Business Crash Course on Creative Business Ideas
Does a Paradox on Innovation Design and Creativity Exist in Business?
