It is always important to conduct a competitive analysis regularly in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
You will need a lot of market research and insights about the industry that you are in and brands that you are competing with. You can use different search engines to collect information about your competitors. A good starting point for competitive analysis would be to identify the competing companies and get to know their strengths and weaknesses. So, here are some of the things to consider tracking as part of your competitive research:
1. Alternatives
What alternative can you offer your clients? Everyone would change something about their current product or service of use. Your mission is to find out what that is and offer this alternative that would make customers be more eager to support you instead. You have to have the same purpose as your competitor, but with different functionality.
2. Company Size
While doing your analysis, you should be looking at large companies as well as smaller companies. Only analyzing competitors of the same size as your company is a mistake. Doing a competitive analysis of other companies of all sizes, big and small, will give you a somewhat more accurate depiction of where your company falls on the spectrum. Always consider your relative position against your competitors. When compared to smaller businesses, your business might look further ahead. And when compared to bigger companies, it may look unreasonably smaller. You can have a more balanced view if you look at companies of both sizes.
3. The Number of Employees
You’ll want to review a competitor’s employee count. This is a good indication of how much their company has grown in all the time that it has been an operating. Use this data to set yearly goals for yourself. Use sites such as LinkedIn, Owler, AngelList and Crunchbase to find the “biographical” information of a company.
4. Founding Year
You can use the founding year of your competitor to set your own goals. By knowing how much the competitor has achieved in a certain amount of time, from the founding of the company up until now. You can use the goals of the other company and what they have achieved, as a benchmark of your own goals and what you aim to achieve.
5. Investors
Finding a Venture Capitalist (VC) is helpful because a VC will provide you with capital if they think that your company exhibits high growth potential. If you see that a Venture Capitalist’s name is missing from the list of investors in your competing category, it would be wise to contact that VC because odds are that they might invest in your company.
6. Clientele
It will be difficult to find the exact number of customers that have supported your competitors. But, you can research the press releases of your competitors. Companies usually boast online about reaching milestones in revenue and number of customers. Use Datanyze to see how many customer tags have used the competitor’s product.
7. Mergers and Acquisitions
One of the easiest ways for a company to enter a new market, or to get rid of a competitor, would be through merging or an acquisition. Do some research on the mergers and acquisitions of your competitors to get an idea of what direction they are moving in.
8. Organizational Strength and Flaws
You can find a lot of interesting feedback from employees on Glassdoor. These employees anonymously submit their reviews. Naturally, there is no holding back on information, whether it is good or bad. You can uncover cultural aspects of the organization. Just read what the employees have to say about senior leaders of the company. Some strengths cannot be replicated. If the founder has a large following on social media and is some influencers, then you cannot easily replicate that as it has to happen organically.
If you’ve fallen behind your competitors, chances are it’s because they realized this before you did. But if the stats and the history show us anything, it’s that just because you lose some customers, doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. Be honest about your business. Think outside the box. Improve the customer’s experience and go win them back!
Tali is a results-driven digital marketer with a track record of growing her clients’ businesses and driving revenue.
As the business owner at WSI Digital Path, Vaughan, she takes great pride in delivering powerful but cost-effective solutions for her clients.
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