What is Competitor Analysis and How Can It Be Useful to You?

It’s natural for any business to want to have the edge on its competitors, whether you’re already established in your field or a digital start-up looking to stand out from the crowd. Planning future strategies is essential to ensure your business continues to grow and evolve, and competitor analysis is an important part of this process.

You might not be familiar with using competitor analysis, but it’s well worth getting on board with and can bring many benefits for your business. If you’d like to learn more about competitor analysis and why it should be a crucial part of your strategic planning process, read on for our handy guide.

What is competitor analysis? 

Competitor analysis involves identifying any competitors in your field and evaluating their strategies in order to compare any strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own business. It’s a vital step in any company’s marketing plan and helps to build brand awareness so you know what sort of position your business is at within its field.

Competitive strategies tend to fall into five areas; product, distribution, pricing, promotion, and advertising. A competitor analysis can help you identify any weak spots in these areas or, alternatively, things your business is doing particularly well.

Competitor analysis can be grouped into three categories:

• Recorded data such as annual reports or product brochures
• Observable data such as price lists, promotions or advertising campaigns
• Opportunistic data, like discussions with customers, meetings or seminars.

How can it benefit your business?

Competitor analysis is a type of strategic research that can have many important benefits for your business, such as:

You keep in touch with your market

It’s vital to keep on top of trends and changes in your chosen market if you want to stay ahead, and conducting regular analysis of your competitors can help you do this. It gives you a specific insights into the landscape of your chosen market so that you can plan strategies more accurately in the future.

You understand your market from your customers’ perspective

Analysing competitors from the outside gives a good idea of how third party customers might view your business. This perspective also allows businesses to identify priority improvement areas by focusing on the customer’s needs.

You identify opportunities

Don’t wait for your competitors to develop the best new ideas; use competitor analysis to spot any gaps in the market and act accordingly. Regular analysis allows you to stay one step ahead and constantly evolve your business to keep up with market demands.

You identify threats so that you can work on mitigating them earlier

As well as opportunities, you’ll also be able to identify any threats or weak spots and come up with strategies to mitigate them before they develop further.

Here at Samepage, we bring together digital technology and business to help you achieve your goals using strategies focused on getting the most out of technology, and ensuring that your business is offering the best value for your customers.