No matter if you’re an established brand or a new start-up, knowing who you’re facing is crucial to your growth strategy. To be able to do this, you’ll require an analysis of your competition – an assessment of your rival’s strengths and weaknesses. This will help you determine your offensive and defensive strategies.
You can contract an external market intelligence firm to help you with this work but you can conduct a thorough and efficient competitive analysis on your own. BDC Senior Business Advisor Mallika Kasim shares a 5-step competitor analysis framework to aid you in understanding your competitors strengths and weaknesses and gain insights that will help you plan your growth strategies.
Competitor analysis is a key step in establishing your product, marketing and sales roadmaps, and also setting the benchmarks to measure your success. It’s the best way to zoom in on specific aspects of the market landscape to determine how your products and services compare against the competitors. In addition to the main products your competitors offer A thorough analysis of your competitors should include their pricing strategy and positioning. It should also provide an in-depth analysis of how they communicate what differentiates them from other brands.
To perform a competitor analysis, start with identifying competitors who are located closest to you in the market. Then, you’ll conduct a detailed research by combining primary and secondary sources–sources that contain data gathered by your team or user research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Once you’ve collected your research you can use a competitor grid (or matrix) to arrange it. This will make the results easier for you to digest. This will allow you to identify more significant trends sites that could impact your strategy.