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5 examples of competitor marketing analysis
Competitive analysis is an opportunity to study, understand and take into account both the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors. This analysis helps to identify gaps in the activities and strategies of competitors. As a result, you get:
Understand how to improve your business strategy.
Knowledge of possible areas that will allow you to outperform your competitors.
Identify the traffic channels used by your competitor.
Understand the marketing activities implemented by your competitor.
Identify what competitors' customers liked and what they didn't.
The advantage of competitive analysis is that it allows you to learn from other people's mistakes rather than making them yourself. This is worth using. To keep up with your competitors, it is important to conduct competitive analysis on a regular basis.
What is competitor analysis?
Competitive analysis is based on the process of collecting and analyzing information and is important for understanding your market position compared to your competitors. This analysis can be defensive or offensive. In the process, you identify possible threats and weaknesses of competitors. Based on the data, you can develop more effective marketing strategies. It is important to note that competitive analysis does not allow room for intuition and assumptions, as it is based on specific facts and details. Competitive analysis includes an in-depth study of the marketing strategies of competing companies and individual areas.
Aspects of competitor analysis
Competitor analysis includes several key aspects that can be divided into the following categories:
Website analysis: Website quality, determining the overall impression of the competitor's website, including design, navigation, and structure. Assessment of the quality and efficiency of graphics and images on the website. Analysis of the time required to load website pages. Assessment of the availability and effectiveness of search tools on the website.
UX (User Experience): assessment of the convenience and logic of website navigation. Analysis of the checkout process and possible improvements. Evaluation of the quality and accessibility of the support service for users. Mobile version: checks the availability and quality of responsive design for mobile devices.
Content strategy: analyzing the effectiveness of instructions and calls to action on the website, assessing the quality and targeted focus of product or service descriptions. Blog posts - studying blog content and its target audience.
Social media: assessment of user activity and engagement on various social platforms, analysis of competitors' platforms, and frequency of publications.
Marketing tactics: studying the promotions and discounts that competitors regularly offer.
Feedback: appreciative reviews and complaints on various platforms such as Yelp, G2, Capterra, Clutch.
SEO: this item includes researching the types of content that attract organic traffic and analyzing backlinks, traffic, and identifying the main sources of traffic to a competitor's website.
Ads Manager: analysis of active and launched targeted advertising campaigns of a competitor.
Onboarding: Processing of potential customers: Analyzing the process of attracting and onboarding potential customers.
PR: studying media publications that mention a competitor's brand or website.
Google Ads: analysis of active and launched search advertising campaigns of a competitor.
Brand popularity: Research the popularity of a competitor's brand name and search queries in different countries using Google Trends or Google Ads Keywords Tool.
This is just a general overview of possible sections for competitor analysis, and the details may vary depending on the specific business and industry. Undoubtedly, analysis is an integral part of business at all stages. Competitive analysis is a key component of strategic marketing, and it is a smart move to start it at the initial stages of your business. This analysis is crucial for building successful marketing strategies that will allow you to compete successfully in the market.
Why is competitor analysis important and what are its advantages?
Researching the product range, marketing strategies, and SEO of competitors provides invaluable insights into the preferences of the target audience and the characteristics of competing companies. Regular analysis is important as new competitors emerge, market trends change, and the Internet marketing and e-commerce industry is constantly evolving. For a successful online business, you need to be aware of these changes and adapt to them.
Let's take a closer look at why a high-quality and comprehensive analysis of competitors' work is of great value. Let's identify three key advantages of competitive analysis:
Understand the demand for the product: You can estimate how popular your product is. Not all products will always be important in the market, and not all can withstand competition. Ask your competitors to avoid a random approach. At the same time, you will also learn about current trends and novelties, which will help you develop new products.
Evaluate and improve marketing campaigns: You can evaluate the effectiveness of your own marketing strategy by comparing it to your competitors. Only by comparing yourself to others will you understand how well your strategy is working. In addition, competitors can provide useful input when developing a strategy.
Identify potential customers that others have missed: There's always a part of the audience that competitors don't pay attention to or don't take into account. By analyzing the customer journey, you can find these gaps and expand your influence. As a result, you will be able to attract a new audience.
As you can see, competitive analysis is an extremely important component of business development, and investing time, money, and effort in it is a top priority.
Several competitor analysis systems
The SWOT analysis system is often used for analysis.
The SWOT method, which is based on the analysis of four components - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats - provides important information for assessing the competitive environment and strategic planning. Here's what you can learn from this data:
Strengths: This aspect answers the question of what your competitor's advantages are. For example, it may be its brand reputation, availability of resources, or peculiarities of corporate culture.
Weaknesses: you will find out what does not function effectively in a competitor's company or what they lack. This may include deficiencies in their products, inefficient processes, or resource dependence.
Opportunities: A SWOT analysis identifies new avenues for growth and opportunities to develop new products or improve existing ones.
Threats: identifying circumstances or factors that could threaten the success of a product, such as changes in the marketplace, the emergence of new competitors, or political or social changes.
The SWOT method is a powerful tool for identifying potential strategic opportunities and risks. It is also used by marketing agencies for competitive landscape analysis (CLA).
The key to a successful competitive analysis lies in five key components, which we will discuss below.
Porter's five forces
Another method of analysis that looks at the competitive situation is divided into five key segments:
Buyers: the number of buyers, their impact on prices and solvency are studied. This helps you understand how much consumers influence the market and how it affects your business.
Suppliers: Supplier analysis covers the supplier market, their uniqueness, quantity, and impact on product cost. It is important to determine how much your suppliers can influence your wholesale prices and how this affects your operations.
Substitution: We study the possibilities for replacing your product or service with existing alternatives on the market. This helps prevent possible losses of market share.
Competitors: analyzes the number of competitors and compares their products with yours. It helps to identify your competitive position and opportunities for improvement.
New entrants: assesses the ease of entry for new players and their chances of success. This helps you understand how stable your market position is.
Based on the results of the analysis, you develop a strategy taking into account real market factors. For example, if you find that your industry is saturated with similar products, this may encourage you to make your product more unique.
Strategic group analysis
This method helps to analyze competitors in groups based on the similarity of their strategies. This makes it possible to understand the impact of different strategies and identify the closest competitors. Depending on the need, you can classify competitors by product/service type, market share, and other characteristics. This analysis is especially relevant if your goal is to assess your position in comparison with other companies.
Growth share matrix
This method allows you to thoroughly analyze the market and answer the question: "Is it worth investing in a particular product?" The growth matrix ranks products based on their market share, indicating the most successful solutions. You can also analyze the development of a competing company to find out what is attractive to consumers.
Position mapping
Position mapping is a visual demonstration of customer perception of a product compared to direct or alternative opponents. You can see maps of consumer actions on the way to the product - movements, touch points, and interactions.
Examples of how competitive analysis works
An example of geographic market analysis.
AirBnB is a website that offers rental services. First, we identified competitors and divided them into groups. After that, we moved on to a more detailed study of competitors in the following categories:
Business and company performance
Product.
Customers and awareness
Marketing
In the category "Customers and Awareness", a quantitative analysis was conducted using the Awario tool by country and language of customers. As a result, the following results were obtained regarding language:
English - 46.7
Spanish - 4.5
Russian - 2.4
German - 2.4
French - 1.5
Based on this data and information about how customer preferences have changed recently, you can make a decision about entering a particular country.
Basic analysis of competitors and their products.
On the blog Shopify blog provides a template for conducting a competitive analysis, where possible components and the number of competitors are selected according to your needs. This example analyzes a makeup brush seller.
Determining your market position relative to competitors
An example taken from the review Asanareview demonstrates how to determine your market position. For this purpose, a graph with levers of influence on competitiveness is created, where two main variables are important: customer satisfaction and market presence.
Analysis of competitors' SEO
A marketing agency that specializes in SEO website optimization for dentists has published a detailed analysisin which the following steps were taken to study the competitive environment:
A list of competitors was created using Google search.
We studied the marketing strategies and service offerings of competitors, using tools such as Ahrefs to conduct SEO analysis of their websites.
A SWOT analysis was conducted to assess the agency's strengths and weaknesses and identify opportunities and threats in the market.
A graph was created that showed the existing competitors. The analysis showed that there are two companies that outperform the agency in terms of market presence and positive feedback.
The results can be tabulated to see solutions for developing and creating an effective strategy.
Determining market share
An example that was published on the Bufferblog illustrates how to determine the market share held by different companies. For this analysis, we used data from fast food restaurants. With the help of the tool Brandwatch tool, the following results were obtained:
McDonald's - 23 %
Taco Bell - 18 %.
Pizza Hut - 14 %.
Burger King -9 %.
Subway - 9 %.
Dominos - 7 %.
Wendys - 6 %.
Dunking Donuts - 6 %.
KFC - 3 %.
Dairy Queen - 2 %.
Papa Johns - 2 %.
Five Guys - 1%
Share of voice illustrates the number of mentions of a company on social media, search engines, and websites in a well-understood way.
Who can help you analyze competitors?
This is exactly what our specialists do. Marketing agency "TOP-DIGITAL" is a dynamic team of professionals with experience, ready to quickly conduct a marketing analysis of competitors in the market niche you need. In addition, our professional analysts are ready to develop a strategy that will bring customers to your business.
