Unless you can say confidently that you know your competitor’s next move, and how they may react to your strategic decisions, you should be conducting competitor analysis.
Competitor analysis is when an organization identifies their key competitors and assesses their strengths and weaknesses around topics such as products, marketing methods, sales strategies, and target markets in order to compete better.
What are the benefits of conducting competitor analysis?
The main benefits of competitor analysis can be summed up in a few key points:
- Competitor analysis will help your organization identify how you can enhance your business strategy.
- It will provide you with a benchmark against which you can measure your growth.
- It will highlight areas where you can out-perform your competitors to remain top of mind for customers.
- Most importantly, it will uncover the opportunities your organization has to gain a competitive edge over others in your industry.
What strategies can competitive analysis inform?
The comparison process allows you to gain insight into how the businesses you are analyzing succeed or fail in their goals. These findings can help your organization hone in on your strategy to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Competitive analysis can be used to inform the following example strategies:
- Marketing and branding: Analyzing how your competitors brand and market their products and how successful they are in reaching their target market can provide insight on successful and unsuccessful tactics that can be applied to your own product or service.
- Discovering new markets: Competitor companies may be finding success in markets you have not yet considered.
- Finding gaps in the market: There may be similar complaints across a competitor segment’s product that you could capitalize on, or a white space in the market that your competitors have not yet addressed.
- Setting benchmarks and other goals: Whether you are a new company or you have decades of experience, seeing where other companies hit certain benchmarks and the strategies they deploy can help you develop your company roadmap and plan more effectively.
How often should you conduct competitor analysis?
All the time! To stay ahead of your competition you need to continuously understand your customer requirements and competitor strategies while keeping a pulse on the latest industry trends.
You should set a regular cadence for your organization’s competitive analysis efforts. This could be weekly with a roll up of your competitors’ developments over the last 7 days or it could be monthly through a longer report style piece of analysis that includes both primary and secondary research.
How can HelloInfo help me with competitor analysis?
HelloInfo team members are experts in competitive analysis. The first step we will take is collaborating with you to decide what competitors should be analyzed. For example, if your organization is looking to expand into a new market, you will need to conduct competitor analysis on the players that are already operating in that market.
Our competitive analysis methodology will be flexible based on your company’s needs; however, the following steps ware typically taken when conducting competitor analysis:
- Identify top competitors: It is always a good idea to start with the competitors that are most similar to you and provide the most direct competition. If you are not sure who these competitors are, HelloInfo can conduct preliminary research on your industry to identify potential targets for you.
- Choose which aspects of the competitor’s business will be analyzed: Decide which competitor metrics will be analyzed. Metrics can include everything from product features to financials to marketing strategy.
- Decide which research methods will yield the best results: Depending on the level of detail your company is looking for, HelloInfo will suggest a combination of primary and secondary research methods. For companies that are looking for behind-the-scenes competitor insights, in-depth interviews with competitors can provide a level of detail that is not publicly available.
- Analyze the data: Once all the research has been conducted, we will analyze the data sources and build a report type of your choice. Reports can be completely customized or follow a standard template decided on by your organization.
- Report delivery and next steps: HelloInfo can present the data to your organization and provide recommendations on how the analysis can best be utilized. If your organization is planning to conduct competitor analysis on a regular basis, HelloInfo is happy to help you strategize how you can develop your competitive analysis program.
Schedule a meeting to learn more about how we can help you understand your competitors and ensure you stay relevant to your customers.
