Entrepreneur.com defines Competitive Analysis as “identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own products or services”.
This action will help your business determine potential advantages and obstacles within a target market, plus gain new ideas. It can also help brands monitor how direct competitors are implementing content marketing strategies, how they rank in search engines, and how they effectively (or ineffectively) reach consumers.
What you include in your analysis will vary depending on what you want to learn about your competitors' businesses. It could encompass high-level detail, such as the full scope of a market approach, or, in this case, illustrate what they are or are not doing well online.
You can measure the effectiveness of competitors' strategies and campaigns using social media and analytics tools, and then use those results to either enhance or modify your own.
When looking at competitor analytics, you will want to analyze several elements, such as:
1. Keyword positioning in the SERPs, and what pages those keywords are on
2. Their target audiences (chances are probable they look much like yours)
3. Features on their websites (product images, design, layout)
4. Their content marketing tactics (blog topics, content types)
5. Social media participation (engagement, platforms used, frequency of posts)
6. What kind of support do they offer: email, live chat?
You will also want to subscribe to their newsletters, using your personal email address, of course, to see how much they are producing and at what frequency.
To get effective results, you should sample 7 to 10 relevant competitors. They should have a similar business model, sell or promote related products or services, cater to the same demographic, and be seasoned marketers.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to go about this is to set up a spreadsheet. Google Sheets or Excel will work fine, and it's really not as intimidating as you might think! Keep it organized so you can use it as a living document on which you make periodic changes to maintain its relevance, as you would your website or blog.
Across the top of the spreadsheet, populate columns A-K, starting with your business name and your 10 competitors. Below, list elements you wish to compare, starting with keyword positioning. You will also want to note their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Over time, you'll be able to get a sense of how you measure up to your competitors at a glance. The more information you include, the more in-depth your competitor analysis can be, giving you the upper hand in your industry.
Source: SEMrush
Written by: Michael Agwulonu, Digital Marketing Strategist
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