February 15th 2023

Guide

How to Perform Competitor Analysis in Digital Marketing: A Complete Breakdown [2023]

Have you ever thought about how certain businesses maintain their position in the marketplace? It requires time, effort, and smart work to build your reputation in the market and earn the trust of your clients. You can do this in many ways but the most important one is “Competitor Analysis“.

Conducting a competitive analysis is the best way to assess what your competitors are doing. It assists you in discovering opportunities, staying up to date with trends, and improving your goods and services to exceed industry standards

Once you are aware of your position in the market, you can develop a marketing plan to assist you to expand your sales and connect with more people.

Don’t get worried because it is not a difficult task. You may find unlimited guides on the internet explaining how you can do competitor analysis. But trust me, they all are beating the bush.

Read out our brief guide on Competitor Analysis and learn the best practices to expand your business and stand apart from your competitors.

Let’s begin.

What is Competitor Analysis?

A competitive analysis is an approach in which the company analyzes the competitors in the same field to learn more about their goods, sales, and marketing strategies. Not only this but a competitive market analysis has many advantages, including the ability to implement stronger corporate strategies, stand apart from the competition, and gain maximum market share.

Furthermore, competitor research helps you to profile yourselves better by learning important facts about them.

It is very helpful because you do not have to start your research from scratch rather you can what your competitors are doing to rank on Google. However, it is important to note that an effective competitor analysis promotes innovation, growth, and development of your business.

Steps to do Competitive Analysis

Marketing professionals might view competitive analysis as a tiresome and never-ending process. To keep you focused, we will go over its main components and the procedure for doing critical analysis effectively.

Find out your competitors.

The first and foremost step is to figure out who your competitors are. You might know one or two of them but that will not work. You need to have a list of at least 4 to 5 companies.

We suggest you make an extensive list of all the businesses, competing for similar markets, or providing the same goods and services as that yours. If you’ve never conducted a competitor study before, reduce the list to the top four or five firms that pose the greatest threats to your company.

Look for their sales strategies and techniques.

We, as a professional digital marketing agency, understand that it can be challenging to do a sales study of your competitors. But you have to do it since it is very necessary.

To make it easy for you, we have compiled a list of questions that can help you work on the sales strategies.

How do they sell their products/services?
Which channels do they use to sell?
Do they have several locations, and if so, how does that help them?
Are they growing or not?
Do they have affiliate programs?
What prevents their clients from making a purchase?
What are their annual revenues?
What about the overall number of sales?
Do they typically offer discounts for their goods or services?

The answers to these questions will help you outline maximum information about your competitors, their sales, and their techniques.

Moreover, you can also access annual reports of publicly traded organizations online, but you’ll need to do some detective work to find similar information for privately held enterprises.

Some of this information could be discovered by looking through your CRM and contacting clients who prioritized your rivals over you. Try finding out the actual reason why they did not buy your products or services.

Asking why a customer is thinking about switching to your product when a competitor is mentioned will help your sales team go deeper into the situation. If you’ve already lost the sale, make sure to get in touch with the prospect to find out why you were defeated by your rival.

What products or services drew the prospect in? Was price a factor? What does the potential customer think about your sales procedure? Finding out the reasoning behind their choice will help you understand better.

Furthermore, you may also get direct feedback from clients about what they like and don’t like about your business. This can simply be done by posing open-ended questions.

Once you have the answers to these inquiries, you may begin investigating the marketing initiatives of your competitors.

Do a SWOT analysis.

We assume that you might have done a SWOT analysis for your business before but in case, it is not done, do it as your priority.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. List down all of them one by one and start working on filling in the gaps. Moreover, online research enables you to examine your company from the perspective of potential clients, highlighting its advantages and disadvantages as well as any opportunities or threats to its survival. You will require this information specifically to do your SWOT analysis.

Strengths: What are your company’s greatest strengths? What do you offer that your rivals don’t?

Weaknesses: Are there any areas in which other businesses outperform yours?

Opportunities: Are there any new trends or adjustments being made by your competitors that might be advantageous to your business as well in the long run?

Threats: Which developments or competitive measures could endanger your company’s presence in the market?

This study will show you potential improvement areas as well as places you can use to your advantage in upcoming branding and marketing initiatives.

Check out your competitors’ social media presence

To look for their social media strategies and approaches, you need to see the following:

Do your competitors interact with their fans on social media?
Consider the platform, the number of followers, the regularity and consistency of their posting, and the popularity of their content.
What type of content do they publish?

What’s Next?

In short, you cannot succeed in the market by following your strategy. To create an approach that sets you apart in the market, you must comprehend what your competitors are doing. Although the Internet has made it simpler to access this information, yet if you are unfamiliar with competitive analysis, it can still be challenging.

If this is the case, don’t get tensed because Softigh can assist you. Softigh is an award-winning digital marketing agency that believes in producing results for its clients. To learn more about us and our services, get in touch with us right away.