Understanding competition and keeping track of your competitors are essential for business survival. You’ve probably heard a lot about stepping ahead of the competition. Accomplishing one has become crucial for newcomers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners in the 21st century. Learning about your rivals and their public perception can help you distinguish your business and fare against your competitors. Hence, competitive analysis is a profitable investment to gain meaningful insight into the highly-competitive market around you. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can foster your website’s popularity through competitive analysis.
How Competitive Analysis Benefits You?
- The competitive analysis permits you to beat your rivals in business without outspending them.
- By going after competitive keywords, you can find ones with the highest ROI to beat your rivals.
- Targeting keywords that haven’t been discovered by your competitors allows you to target the previously-untouched audience.
- With a better understanding of the market, you can effectively target your potential customers and track the economic environment.
- By identifying the latest industry trends, you can effortlessly forecast market potential and trace your competitors’ products and prices.
How to conduct a competitive analysis?
- Preliminary preparations:-
The way you think about your assignment affects the way you perform it. Therefore, you need to clarify your aims and objectives before you begin a competitive analysis. It will help if you have a clear idea of which sectors you need to improve after researching your rival’s business acumen. Setting goals guide your investigation through the analytical process. Consequently, you’ll be able to conduct a SWOT analysis of your potential competitors. Where do your rivals have a business advantage over your brand? Where do all of you have tough competition, and where do you find them economically weak? You will compare their strengths against your failings and vice versa.
- Determine your major competitors:-
After preliminary preparations, the first step toward competitive analysis is to discover your rivals in the market. You must determine your top ten competitors. Then you can utilize a competitive research toolkit to explore their content creation, SEO-based marketing, and social media strategies. Marketers know the industry like the back of their hands, so finding competitors won’t be a problem. You can further conduct a Google search, check Google trends, and inquire about rivals from your customers. Finding your contenders in the market helps you realize what makes their services more attractive to customers than yours. There are two categories of your opponents:
- Direct competitors: The products they offer can be a valid substitute for your services. It will help if you focused primarily on these rivals.
- Indirect competitors: Their products aren’t similar to yours but perform the same services your products provide to the people.
- Sneak a peek at your rival websites:-
The second step after discovering your potential flaws is to review their websites. It’ll give you an idea of how well-structured their site is and what sort of customer experience they provide. You can check for multiple questions to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their digital presence. Is their site optimized for smartphone users? How long do they take to respond to customer queries and live chat? Where do they have positioned their social media icons? Do they own a blog? How clear are the product pictures? What kind of CTAs are they using, and what language is there on their banner ads? These questions will give you an idea of their website’s popularity.
- Check their marketing tactics and SEO strategies:-
The world of marketing has evolved. Merely stuffing your website with short keywords and poor-quality backlinks won’t make your brand popular. It will help you analyze your rival companies’ SEO techniques to gain insight into how your marketing skills need to get reshaped. Check for your FAQ sections, webinars, and podcasts on your competitor’s website. Moreover, try to find any press release, featured article, case study, or eBook if you can.
- Find out how your rivals manage their shipping costs:-
Expensive shipping was the primary reason why digital customers abandoned carts in 2018. It will be best if you learn how your rivals communicate expectations and manage product deliveries. Collect intel about both the pricing and shipping strategies of your competitors. Does your opponent offer any perk to please customers? Free shipping has become one of the major perks. If your rival is offering no delivery charges, you need to consider this option for your consumers too.
- Take a look at the competitor’s content marketing
If you wish to outperform your competitors, you need to analyze the content they’ve put on their websites. Compare that content with yours and check how it has a better level of engagement. What sort of content do they use preferentially? Assess the quality and interactivity of their content in comparison to the quality of your blogs/articles. How frequently do they upload new posts? How many likes, shares, and comments are there on each post? Then read these comments to find out what these people think about your rivals. Finding customer reviews on your competitors is another technique in competitor research and analysis.
- Manipulate your competitor’s customers:-
Manipulate them for the sake of acquiring information. By interviewing your rival’s customers, you’ll learn if they’re satisfied with the services they’re receiving. What prompted them to choose your rival brand? What were their primary purchasing criteria? Use the NPS (Net Promoter Score) Survey to ascertain the level of customer satisfaction among your rivals. The question can be framed as: “How likely are you to recommend this product to your friend?” You can expand your network of rival customers by referral sampling to get candidates for subsequent interviews. This investigation allows you to find ways to generate more traffic to your website.
- Analyze your competitor’s social media engagement:-
Another method of enhancing your web traffic is to compare your social media engagement with your rival’s. Do your opponents put social media buttons with each post? Do suitable CTAs accompany these buttons? Assess your competitor’s social media presence by analyzing:
- Number of followers online
- Average post shares on social media
- Frequency and consistency of content creation
Having an active social media following and enhanced virality means that you have a sustained market. Use a workable marketing strategy to beat your rivals. Accordingly, engage people on multiple platforms such as Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Conclusion
Competitive research and analysis allow you to imitate some promising business practices and avoid harmful ones. You essentially learn from the experience of your rival businesses. By monitoring your competitors’ online behavior, you become capable of anticipating their future actions. Being different from your rivals gives consumers a reason to purchase from you instead of other well-established brands. Hence, competitive analysis involves finding competition, interviewing their customers, and using research tools to conduct a proper investigation. Such an analysis enables you to identify market trends and retain a foothold against rival campaigns.
