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Competitive market analysis: step-by-step guide and template

WHY CONDUCT СOMPETITIVE MARKET ANALYSIS

Competition analysis is an integral part of any business. Although we are mostly not happy with our rivals, we have to admit that they can be very useful. From your main competitors, you can learn valuable information and receive insights to understand in which direction you need to move your business to grow rapidly.

WHAT IS СOMPETITIVE MARKET ANALYSIS

Competitive market analysis is research that provides information about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, competitive advantages market strategies, performance, and other information to supply you with valuable insights to create a winning business strategy.

WHEN TO CONDUCT СOMPETITIVE MARKET ANALYSIS

It’s recommended for each business to do competitor analysis regularly at least once in a half a year period. In a very dynamic industry like tech and IT – at least once in 2-3 months.

HOW TO DO СOMPETITIVE MARKET ANALYSIS

Business Intelligence (BI) has created for you a universal competitor research guide and template that you can apply to YOUR business. To conduct a competitive market analysis, you will need to follow 6 simple steps:

  1. Set goals for the analysis.
    To get the best results, you need to determine the main goal of this analysis as accurately as possible, it will draw the direction of the whole research. What decisions are you trying to make based on this research? What questions to answer for yourself? Where will you use gathered information later on?
  2. Identify your TOP direct competitors.
    You need to know who you are dealing with to conduct the competitive audit. Gather Top-5, Top-10, or Top-15 competitors in the market depending on your market fragmentation level, resources, and timeframe.
    Remember that competitors are those companies who target the same group of people and solve the same problem/need of your customer.
  3. Make a list of characteristics that need to be collected on your TOP competitors.
    Once you have determined “Who” you will analyze, you need to decide “What” you will analyze. BI has taken care of this for you. The universal template already has a pre-set list of information that most companies need to collect. You can access the template here.
    But every company is unique and based on your specific goals and decisions you want to make eventually you will have to add your own parameters to personalize the research.
  4. Collect the data.
    Fill out the template with competitor insights. Have no idea where to start? Start with the competitor’s website and media presence. Investigate how they position themselves, what’s their motto, and what numbers do they present on the website to create trust. Then move to google and check if there are any interviews with the company’s owners and management that can give you more insights into what direction the company is headed. To enforce your data collection with information that is not presented on the website, you can use various additional tools like the followings: ZoomInfo/CrunchBase are company databases. They are useful to get general information about companies like foundation year, annual turnover, number of employees, technical stack, media signal, and employees’ information.
    SemRush/SimilarWeb – suitable for general traffic analysis of your competitors. It helps you to understand the marketing and advertising strategy.
    Spyfu – the main assistant for the analysis of advertising campaigns.
    BuzzSumo – will help you understand the social networks of your competitors. Traffic, advertising, content strategies will help you research how your competitors gather their audience. *More information and links to these tools can be found in the “Top 5 best tools for competitive analysis” blog here
  5. Make a comparative analysis and prepare conclusions.
    DOWNLOAD THE TEMPLATE HERE Once you’ve filled in your competitive template, you can now take stock by looking at the information you’ve found and automatically generating graphs. The SWOT board is one of the most useful instruments in market analysis. It will show you where do you stand compared to your competitors. You can use this to remove your shortcomings and promote new ideas and opportunities for your company.
  6. Enforce your business strategy
    After you prepared the analysis don’t forget to include these insights into your business strategy creation or improvement. Remember if your competitors can do it then YOU CAN DO IT BETTER, NOTHING LESS. The best practice here is to make a focus on the resilience of your competitive advantages and only after you should move to improve your weaknesses

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