Question

What is a competitive analysis? How do you make one?

Answer 1

A competitive analysis allows you to assess your competitor's strengths and weaknesses in your marketplace and implement effective strategies to improve your competitive advantage. It helps to identify your competition, determine and weigh their attributes, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and understand their objectives and strategies.

The main objective of competition analysis is to obtain a very thorough information about current as well as potential rivals. That knowledge should be as comprehensive as possible. It should possibly cover all important aspects of business activity.

How to Conduct Your Competitive Analysis :

1) Identifying top ten competitors - Every organization will have few dreaded competitors they cannot stand, no matter what you do they are always using your ideas and taking your potential customers. Whether you are a local company, or a national company, or an international company, there is always a probability that probably someone in your company, specifically the sales and marketing teams can quickly rattle off your top competitors.

2) Analyze and Compare Competitor Content - Once the competitors are identified, one can kick start their competitive analysis and dig a little deeper to gain a better understanding of what type of content competitor is publishing. Analyzing the content of competitors can help you determine what opportunities you actually have which will help you in outperforming your competitors.

It is also very important to understand what type of content creation does your competitors focus on, a blog? Case studies? Premium content? Once you've located their content, you can determine the quality, and most importantly you can see how it compares to yours. Be sure that you look for how frequently they are blogging, adding, and updating new content, as well as what topics are they frequently discussing. Are they doing anything that you aren't?

3) Look at their Social Media Integration - The next step of your competitive analysis should be to determine how your competitors are using social media and integrating it into their marketing.

A company's presence on social media is becoming increasingly important everyday and every company is utilizing each platform differently. Social media networks are a great way for companies to interact with users and fans.

Not only is it important to see if your competitors can be found on social media platforms, but you also want to see how effectively they're using their profiles.

5) Identify Areas for Improvement - After performing a competitive analysis, you now have a better idea and understanding of what your competitors are doing. Take all the information you gathered about each competitor and identify particular areas that need improvement.