Hello, Nick Ponte here. I own a digital marketing company here on Maui, and I specialize in helping small businesses create winning strategies to increase their revenue.
Lately, we’ve been discussing website strategies like how to increase traffic and improve SEO stats. This week, I want to shift gears a little.
In a competitive market, how do you know if you’ve got the edge, compared to other businesses? Do you know how to run an effective competitor analysis?
If your competitor analysis means you took a brief look at other businesses’ websites and social media, you haven’t gone deep enough. You need to know their products, offers, unique value propositions, and even their results, if you can find them.
Also Read: How Hawaii Businesses Boost Revenue Through Content Marketing
Keep Up!
A thorough analysis will help you stay ahead of the industry. You’ll gain knowledge to develop the best marketing plan to beat the competition. You’ll see what makes your product stand out (or whether it doesn’t), so you can plan for the future of your company.
If your competitors leave a gap in the market, you have the opportunity to fill it. However, you have to know about it in order to seize the chance.
You’ll be able to market more effectively because you’ll understand thoroughly about other available offers and business strategies. You’ll gain ideas for new products and services to offer your customer base and expand to new audiences.
If you want to make the most of your marketing strategy, you need to perform a competitor analysis. I’ve got some tips for you to get started, if you want to conduct your own.
Also Read: Designing a Website that Produces Results
How to Conduct a Strong Competitor Analysis
Here are three steps to set up a competitive marketing analysis to see how your business compares in the industry:
- Find Your Competitors
Whether they provide direct or indirect competition, know who they are. Know what they offer.
Compare your products. Check out their pricing. Learn about their perks. Watch their patterns of sales tactics and the resulting effectiveness. How does their quality measure? What about their product quantity? How much do they charge for shipping?
Pricing, quality, deliverables, and sales all matter. You need to know about the competitiveness of their strategies because you want to be better. Be brutally honest with yourself and evaluate how your product measures up.
- Look at Their Content & Marketing Strategies
Check out your competition’s content marketing strategy, too. If it’s good, it will speak to their ideal buyer. You want to reach that buyer, or learn how to reach a slightly different avatar.
Find them on social media platforms and examine their strategies and posting cadence. Which platforms do they use most often? How do they utilize it? What’s the tone of their content?
Analyze the level of engagement they get from their content, whether on social media or other online platforms, if you can see it. Do they have a blog where they regularly publish content? Do they create video or audio content? What kind of visuals do they include? How many comments do they receive and what does the feedback tell you?
Ideally, you want to understand the thought behind their strategy, and the kind of results it produces. This will help you learn how to to reach your market and show you the areas where you can compete – or the areas you need to improve.
- Learn about Competitors’ Technology
We know that technology helps us to streamline everyday processes and free up time to work on other important business plans. What do your competitors use to make the most of their time?
You can find out what kind of technology a competitor uses to run their business by checking their job listings. These often list requirements or preferences that candidates ought to have about tools, programs, or software. You can also use an online tool called Built With to look up the technology behind companies’ websites and plugins. Decide which parts of their technology stack you need to add and which might not serve them as well as they think.
These tips should give you a great starting point for running a competitor analysis.
If all of this sounds a little overwhelming, my company can do an analysis for you… for FREE. We know the ins-and-outs of conducting a competitor analysis because we do it all the time, and we can help you to better understand your industry’s market so you can have the edge.
That’s why our onboarding process is longer than other agencies. We include a detailed discovery call and discovery form. We don’t play around when it comes to knowing the competition. We learn how to win, and we help you execute the strategy.
If you want to see how your internet presence stands up to competition, simply reach out. We’ll help you to analyze the market and build a winning business strategy to build your customer base and industry presence, leading to increased revenue and profits! Get the best possible competitive edge by working with us.
If you want to learn more or want help, reach out to us today!
Further Reading: How Hawaii Business Owners Can Use Automation to Streamline Operations
Photos Courtesy of Johannes Andersson and Giorgio Trovato