Does your business put a priority on its business intelligence process? Does it monitor your competitive analysis, 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? This will be a four-part series. This third part will discuss how a business should conduct a competitive intelligence. Whoever tries the most stuff usually wins.
The Business Intelligence Process Part 4 SWOT Analysis
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for competitive analysis in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by us and our readers.
The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.
Do you want to freshen up your business success abilities? Have you thought about looking at your competitors for inspiration as well as good ideas? Checking out what other companies are doing can often help you brainstorm your own business tactics.
In this article , you’ll discover how to analyze your competitors’ to inspire new ideas and improve your competitiveness.
Researching your competitors not only provides an overview of your industry, but it also gives insight into the current habits of the audiences you’re targeting.
By answering a few key questions, you’ll see what kinds of ideas are most effective for the customers you want to reach.
No business attribute is more important today as 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.
A vigorous competition watch kills two birds with a single stone – helps with 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.
Still looking for reasons to use competitive analysis in improving business success? Read through the following reasons and find out for 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 target market.
Update and add unique value propositions.
Conclude if your marketing strategies are effective.
Obtain an understanding of what your competitors have done that has been successful without re-inventing the wheel.
Isolate trends that make a positive difference.
Competitive intelligence … 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:
Whether you work internally or were hired as an outside resource to help with your client’s SEO campaign, you probably have some idea of who the competition is in your space. Some companies may have good offline marketing but poor online marketing.
If you’re looking to be the best, it’s a good idea to do your own research and see who you’re up against.
In my experience, it’s always good to find and verify 5-10 competitorsin your space from a variety of sources. You can use tools for this or take the manual approach.
Make sure to capture the basic information for each competitor including their company name, location, and website. These tools will be useful at a later time. Record these in the “competitor research” tab of a spreadsheet.
Standard Google searches for competitors
This is pointing out the obvious, but if you have a set of keywords you want to rank for, you can look for trends and see who is already ranking where you want to be. Don’t limit this to just one or two keywords, instead get a broader list of the competitors out there.
To do this, simply come up with a list of several keywords you want to rank for and search for them in your geographic area. Make sure your Geographic preference is set correctly so you get accurate data.
Collect a list of keywords
Search Google to see which companies are ranking in the local pack
Record a list of the companies’ names and website URLs in the spreadsheet under the competitor research tab.
Outside of the basics, I always find it’s good to see who else is out there. Since organic and local rankings are more closely tied together than ever, it’s a good idea to use 3rd party tools to get some insight as to what else your website could be considered related to.
This can help provide hidden opportunities outside of the normal competition you likely look at most frequently.
What should you 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.
Competitive intelligence – How to do it effectively
Taking a sneak peek at competitors requires a little undercover work from your office and occasionally doing walk around surveillance.
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.
What to review: The Business Intelligence Process Part 4 SWOT Analysis
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.
On-line strategy
How many followers do they have? 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 walk through
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.
Be on the lookout for trends and shifts.
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 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 setup 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. You can also see what changes RivalIQ does to titles, Meta descriptions and social bios and even track web site 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. We recommend short revisits on these topics every 3-4 months.
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, 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? Please join the competition below.
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Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
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.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on a business process from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
