How to Perform an Effective Competitor Analysis Intro_
When was the last time you performed a competitor analysis for your company? Also, do you know how to do one efficiently and effectively?
If you’re unsure, or if your previous “analysis” was a quick scroll through of their social media accounts, you’re likely missing out on important data that could help your brand effectively position its product or service, create compelling persona content, and outperform competitors.
What exactly is a competitive analysis or audit?
A competitive analysis is a strategy where you analyze your industry, identify your direct competitors, and deep dive into their product or service, online, and marketing strategies. Through this audit, you can develop solid goals and company strategies that will help you rise above your competitors.
Yes, we understand conducting a competitive analysis takes a good amount of time, but doing so will help you set a realistic business strategy that will allow you to compete, and eventually outperform your competitors online.
Also, if you’re setting up or revamping your online content strategy, implementing in-depth research like this will help you orient yourself within the market, identify opportunities to overtake competitors, and determine where you should put your effort and resources.
In this guide, you will learn how to identify your major competitors, analyze their online content strategy, equip your marketing team with a strategy to compete during the buyer’s decision stage, and discover how to run an effective, on-going analysis that sets your company apart.
So, channel your inner Sherlock Holmes, put your spy hat and goggles on, and get started with your competitor analysis! (Because considering today’s digital market, they’ve probably already run an audit on you.)
2 Table of Contents_
3 1. Define Your Buyer Personas_
While it’s important to know who your competitors are and where you stand in your industry for a competitive analysis report, the first step your brand should take is to understand where you stand in the eyes of your current customers and potential customers.
Do you know who your business’s buyer personas are?
And if so, how much do you know about them?
According to Hubspot, “Buyer personas are semi- fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization (from marketing to sales to service.)”
As a result, your brand will be able to better attract high-quality visitors and leads to your online channels who you’ll be more likely to convert and retain.
More specifically, having a good understanding of your personas is critical to driving your marketing strategy, content creation, product or service development, and basically anything that relates to your customer acquisition and retention.
“Okay, so personas are an important step to take when I’m developing my competitor analysis report. But...how do I actually make one?”
4 Well, you’re in luck they actually aren’t that difficult to create. The most stable ones are based on a combination of market research, as well as insights you retrieve from your actual customers (like surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.)
Market research, surveys, and focus groups help companies identify many important pieces of information, including:
• Facts about your target market
• What matters to someone who would purchase from you
• The demand for your product
• The potential price points
• Perception competition
• Impressions of your branding
• And more...
Once you’ve gone through the research process, you’ll want to take that raw, meaty data about your potential and current customers and identify patterns or commonalities to develop the persona, which you would then share with the rest of your company.
Your business will be able to develop an in-depth understanding of the people they’re targeting every day and develop strategies accordingly on how best to target, support, and work with them.
5 Free Buyer Persona Tips, Templates, & Worksheets
Whether you’re a newbie or experienced within building buyer persona’s the below tips, templates, and worksheets will give you a blueprint for conducting a thorough study of your product or service, target audience, and how you fare in your industry.
• Market Survey Template »
• Focus Group Template »
• Questions You’ll Want To Ask In Interviews »
• Tip: Look through your contacts database to uncover trends on how they find and consume your content
• Tip: Get your sales team feedback on the prospects they’re conducting communications with the most
• HubSpot Free, Downloadable Persona Template »
• Free DigitalMarketer Customer Avatar Worksheet »
When you’re clear on the characteristics of the person who is going to buy your products or services, it’s a lot easier to find and present them with a message that moves them to action (over your competition.)
Recommendation: If you’re new to developing personas, start off with 2-4, as any more than 4 tends to stretch budgets and narrow the focus too much.
6 2. Understanding Your Industry & Identify Competitors_
2.1 Understand Your Industry
During this age and time, it’s worthwhile to analyze the state of your industry - whether as a potential new entrant or as an existing company in the industry. One way to go about this analysis is to use Porter’s Five Forces Template.
This process considers five different criteria and how the power, threat, or rivalry in each is.
Below is a brief overview of the five forces analysis:
Competitive Rivalry
This section asks how high the level of direct competition is in your industry. You will want to ask yourself what other rivals offer the same product or service you do in the same location that you provide business in.
The Threat of New Entrants
This topic reviews how difficult it is to start a business or develop a product that could compete with yours. Take a look at the barriers to entry like resources, financial, restrictions, etc.
7 The Threat of Substitution
For this criteria, think of the alternatives to your product or service. Keep in mind, these are not direct substitutes.
Buyer Power
Is your market a buyer’s market or a seller’s market? If your product or service is dependable on the latest trend or discount, buyer power is high. If they do not have any other legitimate alternative, then buyer power is low.
Supplier Power
Finally, consider how much suppliers influence your business. For example, when gas prices go up, if your company gets materials by plane or car, then you will see a supplier power increase.
After you’re finished with your exercise, take a look at how often your categories are marked as “high” or “low.” If there are more lows than highs, great! You definitely have an opportunity to make an impact in the market. If your highs outweigh your lows, you will need to decide the actions you’ll have to take to overcome these threats or obstacles.
8 2.2 Identify Your Direct Competitors
Once you understand your industry as a whole, dive into who you’re really competing with so you can compare data accurately. When comparing your brand, you should only focus on your direct competitors.
Who are direct competitors?
Direct competitors are businesses that offer a product or service that could be utilized as a similar substitute for yours, and that produce in the same geographical location/area.
Once you determine who your direct competitors are, you’ll then want to analyze their complete product or service line and the quality that they’re offering. Also, take a look at their pricing to determine any specials or discounts they may be offering.
Here are some helpful questions to consider when identifying:
• Are they a low-cost or high-cost provider?
• Are they doing mainly volume sales or one-time purchases?
• What is their market share?
• What are the characteristics and needs of their ideal customers?
• Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick and mortar?
• How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?
• How do they distribute their products/services?
9 3. Analyze Your Competitor’s Online Content Strategy_
The best place to start looking for your competitor’s content strategy is to audit their website. This step does require a lot of “poking around” to find what you’re looking for, but it helps set you up to perform the next steps more easily.
Below is the most structured way we’ve found to approach this poking around exercise and used on multiple client competitor analysis reports.
1. View their web site’s navigation bar to find out where the content is housed 2. Click through each menu in the navigation to see if there is a sub-nav that leads to content assets you would want to note in your analysis 3. Scroll through the site’s homepage and see if there are other places content could be housed that weren’t in the navigation 4. Visit the footer of the website for good measure - many times there are links to pages that aren’t easily accessible, even several clicks into a site
10 Below is a list of some content assets you may encounter and will want to note within your analysis.
• Blog Posts
• Whitepapers
• Case Studies
• Videos
• Ebooks
• Webinars
• FAQs
• Infographics
• Press Releases
• Templates
• Checklists
• Buyer Guides
• Data Sheets
Recommendation: Your competitor may have more than one blog, so make sure to research and note for what those blogs are. With larger companies, they will develop a blog with its own objective.
Once you have an idea of where the content lives on your competitor’s website, the next step is to begin the audit. This is definitely the most time-consuming part of your competitive content analysis, but it will help you understand how you stack up to their creative efforts.
11 Below is a list of things you’ll want to review and report on:
1. Quantity of each content asset - this will help you determine whether your competitor is a content making machine that will require you to implement a content creation team to equal or surpass them.
– For Example: Do they have several hundred blog posts or a handful? – For Example: Are there five eBooks or one?
2. The frequency of each content type is published - this will help you understand how active their content creation efforts are.
– For Example: Do they publish blog posts twice a week or once a month? – For Example: How frequently do they generate a new eBook or download?
3. Distribution of topics discussed within the assets - will help you find opportunities they aren’t writing about and which topics they are trying to position themselves as a thought leader and within search for.
– Determine which topic categories are highlighted the most in their content
4. Evaluate the content quality - determine the pieces of content their audience finds most valuable and replicate similar pieces.
– For Example: How accurate is their content? – For Example: How in-depth does the content go? – For Example: Is their content structured and easy to read? – For Example: Is their content gated, form-free, or a mix? Which content pieces do they put behind a form? – For Example: Do they implement custom, quality photos, or videos? 12 4. Grade Your Competitor’s SEO Strategy_
There can be 200+ reasons why your competitors are outranking your website in organic search, getting more clicks to their website, generating more leads, and gaining more revenue.
To uncomplicate the process of determining where your website stands in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) compared to your competitors, several free and paid tools have been developed to help you more comprehensively evaluate your competitor’s SEO.
13 With these tools, you’ll have a much better indication of your competitor’s SEO metrics. At a glance, you’ll discover:
• Their organic rank
• Expected monthly traffic to their website
• Volumes of branded and non-branded traffic
• Who their organic competitors are
• If they implement Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Image Alt Text, Use Internal Linking, etc.
• How many indexed pages are on their site
• How many domains link to their website (a great indicator of not only their SEO, but the quality of their content)
• The target website’s total number of keywords with organic positions
• Discover their most successful keywords
• Get an idea of consumer behavior, based on search frequency
• View the most popular pages that users found with organic search
• Outline initial ideas on how you can optimize your website to increase your rankings and conversions
• And much more...
14 SEO Free & Paid Tools:
Here is a list of free and paid tools that can help you learn more about your competitors SEO efforts and how your company compares.
• (Free) Envision Creative Website Grader »
• (Free) Hubspot Website Grader »
• (Free & Paid Programs) SpyFu »
• (Paid) SEMRush »
• (Paid) Hubspot Competitor Tracking Tool »
With these tools, analyze what’s working for your competition and leverage this data to improve your own SEO efforts. Instead of guessing which keywords to target on the back-end and front-end of your website, content to create, links to build, etc., you can instead see what’s already working for your competitors, and build upon that success.
15 5. Look at Your Rivals Online Paid Ad Strategy & Go-To Platforms_
Trying to figure out your paid advertising strategy? Utilize the tools in Section #4 to gain insight into what ad strategies are working within your market.
The tools will help you analyze your competitor’s activity on Google Ads and the Google Display Network. The tools will reveal the following on your competitors:
• If they’re currently active on Google Advertising platforms, as well as when they launched
• The number of keywords the competitor is bidding on and their ranking for those keywords
• The estimated traffic coming from these keywords
• The paid traffic cost estimation
• Other websites/competitors your target rival competes with in advertising
• Historical data to uncover your competitors’ seasonal preferences in advertising
• The actual ads run by your competitor - view their headlines, descriptions, images, etc for insight into their positioning
• Identify the landing pages on their site that they’re driving ad traffic to and get a sense of the goals of the campaigns based on the CTA’s on their landing page
• And More...
16 There is a limited space on the desired first page of Google and the paid Google market is now fiercely competitive, making it hard to differentiate yourself. By conducting a thorough analysis on your competitors PPC strategy, you’ll be able to have the upper hand in the battle and turn your strategy into actionable PPC gains.
These golden nuggets of information will help you forecast your competitors future strategy, adjust your campaign accordingly, and pave the way for PPC success.
17 6. Check-Up on Your Competitor’s Moves on Social Media_
The final area you’ll want to analyze when it comes to your competitor analysis is your competitor’s social media presence and engagement. Social media is the prime location to view your competitor’s content strategy, how they’re responding to current events, and how they’re driving engagement with their brand. If your competitors are using social networks that you’re not on, you may want to consider learning more about how the platform can help your business, too.
Visit the following sites to see if your competition has an account on these platforms:
• YouTube
• Snapchat
18 Then, take note of the following items for each one:
• Amount of fans/followers
• Number of page likes
• Posting frequency and consistency
• Post engagement (how many likes, comments, or shares are they getting on posts?)
• What kind of content are they posting? Is it mainly original or curated from other sources?
• Are they focused on driving people to their website or landing pages to generate more leads or are they posting more visual content to promote brand awareness and engagement?
• What is their overall tone of the content?
• How does your competition interact with their followers?
If a competitor is using a social network effectively that you may be thought was not right for your brand, you would certainly want to look into getting in on the game. On the flip side, if your competitors are ignoring social media, this is a great opportunity for your brand to quickly outpace your competitors in your marketing strategy.
19 7. Perform a SWOT Analysis_
As you evaluate each section in your competitor analysis, make it a habit to perform a SWOT analysis at the same time. This means that every analysis section we just went over, you will take note of the competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within that area.
By performing a SWOT analysis your brand will be able to highlight the direct areas of opportunity you can start building on or work to overcome. Use this analysis as a snapshot for your company’s performance or potential performance. Compare the amount of each and weigh their importance to determine if you’re in a good place or if you could be doing better.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths Weaknesses
Your Areas for advantages improvement
Opportunities Threats
Situations to apply Where you your advantages are at risk
20 8. Review & Present Your Findings_
Now that you’ve collected all this competitive intelligence, what exactly do you do with it?
Your diligent detective work will help you understand where you stand alongside your competitors’ digital efforts, decide what you need to do just to keep pace, and then to surpass them. It’s crucial to look at your findings as a whole, not just one aspect/section - because each analysis impacts the other.
When you know not only who is beating you, but why they are beating you, you can take steps to address the specific issue instead of wasting precious resources trying to fix something in your strategy that may not be broken.
When presenting your findings, consider your audience. For example, if you’re presenting to your team or employees in your company, it should have a different setup and tone than if it were being used to present to investors or clients.
A great competitor analysis will have the following sections.
21 Background
Why did you choose to do this analysis? Are you a new business simply proving out your concept? Were you doing a routine check-in and using the findings to help develop a new initiative within the company? Were you trying to discover a new marketing strategy?
Whatever the reasoning, help your audience step into your shoes at the point when you decided to do this project. This is a great place to highlight the Five Forces Analysis, Buyer Personas, and the Industry/ Competitor Analysis.
Key Findings
Within each analysis section, highlight the outstanding and noteworthy intelligence you discovered right off the bat. In presentations, many of the facts can be forgotten, so speak to the big findings that must be known by anyone who attends the presentation.
After highlighting the main items, go in-depth on each analysis, which should contain overviews of both qualitative and quantitative data. Consider using screenshots, graphs, charts and Google Sheets or Powerpoint to showcase your findings.
Next Steps & Recommendations
Now that the research has been conducted and the findings summarized, highlight your plan of action! Maybe it’s a new marketing campaign, a best practices guide, an upgraded website, or something else entirely. Illustrate those recommendations and go out with a bang!
22 9. Recommended Online Competitor Analysis Schedule_
We recommend coming back and monitoring/ benchmarking all of these metrics on a quarterly basis, or if your competitors are very active, even more frequently (potentially monthly). Keep tabs on big trends and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
The good news is you won’t have to dedicate too much time on constant data gathering and analysis. By utilizing the highlighted tools and best practices within this guide you can set up an automated competitor analysis report and receive all the needed data carefully gathered for you by email.
Also, it’s important to note to orient yourself with your competitors to develop an appropriate digital marketing strategy, but not to harp on every action they take. You’re in the market because you have a competitive advantage -- don’t let what others do dictate your entire business marketing strategy.
23 10. Conclusion_
Success! You’re now equipped to perform and present an effective competitor analysis. As you can see, learning and implementing this type of insightful competitor research will lead your brand down the path of achievement.
We hope you enjoyed reading and this information benefits your business! If you need any help with your competitor analysis or digital marketing strategy, you know we have your back!
Contact us today to get started.
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