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Regardless of the industry, you are in, you will often hear the term competitor analysis on a regular basis. But what does competitor analysis actually mean? Competitor analysis is the art of researching and assessing your competitors with the intention of identifying their strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and how effective these strategies are. It is a three-step process that revolves around understanding which firms are your competitors, obtaining relevant information about them, and analyzing this information.
However, conducting a competitor analysis is not an easy task since you have to consider their activities and approaches from an entirely different point of view. Nevertheless, the insights you gain through this would be very valuable as you would be able to improve your own strategies based on what you learnt, realize market opportunities that you had not previously noticed, and establish a clear vision of the future. Furthermore, you would also be able to position yourself in a competitive edge and exploit the weaknesses of your competitors in order to outperform them.
So what competitor analysis can you perform for your organization? Well, this may depend on the tools and skills you own, and what you expect to learn through your analysis. Nevertheless, we have put together the following varying type of competitor analysis that you would find valuable.
Content-based analysis
If your organization is into creating quality content for your users through various means such as blogs, podcasts, videos, and webinars, analyzing your competitors could be quite helpful. You could assess their content strategies and learn which strategies work for your target audience, and which do not.
SEO Analysis
An SEO analysis would be quite useful if your current SEO strategy is not reaping the expected results, or you are looking forward to implementing a new SEO strategy. Through analysis, you could research different aspects like how their website is designed and structured, how often they post content, what keywords do they focus on, and which techniques do they practice when using keywords in their title tags, descriptions, topics, and so on. This analysis will also help you discover the trending keywords of your particular market and long-tail keywords that are yet to be competed for. But prior to assessing your competitors’ keywords, you need to have a general idea as to which keywords are ideal for your users and which would generate the most relevant user traffic.
Social Media Analysis
Social media is a trending marketing tool due to the multiple cost-effective services they offer. Not to forget, it is very useful for organizations that function beyond their geographical borders as well. Hence, if you are an organization using social media platforms as a marketing tool, a social media analysis would be extremely valuable. By conducting a social media analysis you will be able to obtain valuable insights about different factors such as:
- Which social media platforms does your target audience use the most
- The most effective schedule to publish content
- Which approaches do they take when engaging with their customers
- What types of content do they share
When replying to customer reviews it is not only about your business’s Google My Business Listing. Do remember to reply to customer reviews on every page that Google crawlers analyze, such as Yelp reviews and Facebook Business Page reviews as well. Moreover, when replying to customer reviews, do use the keywords you want your business to rank for.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is a powerful analysis tool that businesses have been using over a long time. A SWOT analysis will assess your competitors based on their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The in-depth knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses would tell you a lot about their internal environment, while the opportunities and threats would do the same about the external environment. However, when it comes to competitor analysis, it is the internal environment that would be the most resourceful. Perceiving the internal factors from a customer point of view will give you insights as to why your users would choose them over you. These reasons would be a huge treasure chest for you when improving your future business strategies.
PEST Analysis
A PEST analysis is a great tool to gain a bigger picture of your external environment
based on political, economic, social, and technological factors. It would tell you
how you and your competitors would affect each other with the changing environment.
In addition to the above, the following are several other analyses that would be useful
for your future strategies.
Share of Voice (SoV): The SoV tells you about how much your target customers speak about
your brand when compared with the other competitors in the market.
Sentiment Analysis: A sentiment analysis would tell how customers perceive your brands
on a more personal level. This is usually done by analyzing text data such as online comments.
Analyzing market-related phrases: Knowing the market-specific topics and keywords
would let you research what your customers have to say about your brand and those
of the competitors’.
Customer demography analysis: This analysis would tell you whether or not
you and your customers are focusing on the same customer demographics. It would bring
valuable insights about which demographics you are lacking in, and which demographics
your competitors are doing well in.
