Competitor Analysis
When it comes to running a successful business, understanding what other companies in the market are doing is a great way to check that your marketing strategy is up to scratch.
Benefits of Competitor Analysis in Marketing
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Improved Decision-Making: Data from marketing competitor analysis ensures that your strategies are based on proven tactics.
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Enhanced Differentiation: By identifying gaps in your competitors’ strategies, you can position your brand uniquely.
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Increased Efficiency: Learn from your competitors’ mistakes to save time and resources.
What’s involved in competitor analysis?
While we tailor the details of every analysis to the client we are working with, our competitor analysis projects involve the same important steps.
1. Identify Competitors
We ask you to list all your competitors in the market, and the marketing channels you are most interested in. Then we check on your suggested competitors to see if we can find any better ones, especially for your channels of interest. You make the final choice on the competitors you wish to compare your business against.
2. Gather Data
We then use a variety of tools to collect data on the marketing strategies your competitors are using.
3. Analyse and Benchmark
We run an analysis against your business and dig into the data. Next we compare our findings and your performance against your competitors.
4. Implement and Optimise
We provide you with a report detailing our findings. This includes what we’ve discovered about your business and your competitors and how you compare. Most importantly, we include suggestions for optimising and elevating your marketing efforts.
5. Monitor
Once you have incoporated changes into your marketing, it is important to monitor any changes and adjust actions as necessary.
What do we look into?
Digital Marketing
Most of our clients, and their competitors do the bulk of their marketing online, so that is where we tend to focus our competitor analysis.
Online marketing channels that we commonly include in analysis are websites, social media, search engine results, online advertising and reviews. Each of these can provide useful information on where and how your competitors are marketing themselves online and how they are performing.
Non-Digital Marketing
With the heavy focus on digital marketing these days, it’s easy to forget that most of the traditional, non-digital marketing channels still exist.
Doing competitor analysis on the traditional marketing channels your competitors are using is a quick way to see if you are missing anything. It can identify non-digital marketing options that might work well for your business.
Marketing Strategy
While it’s quite high level, once you understand what your competitors are doing across all the different marketing channels, you have a good idea of the overall marketing strategy they are using.
Most people have a good idea of who their direct competitors are, but are they the best businesses to use for competitor analysis? We can guide you in this area.
Local, National and International
While your direct competition in your local area is the obvious place to look for businesses to run competitor analysis on, sometimes it can pay to look further afield.
Depending on the type, scale and reach of your business, we might suggest looking for competitors in a different area of New Zealand, or even overseas in some cases.
High Performing Competitors
If there are specific marketing channels you want to explore, then we can choose competitors based on how well they are doing in that channel. A good example is websites and SEO. Sometimes the companies you think are doing best, or are your direct competitors, don’t have a great website, so to do competitor analysis on their website in that case wouldn’t give you the best results to work with.
We can do a search to choose the competitors that are performing best in the channels you are most interested in.
Aspirational Targets
Often, in each market, there are a small number of top tier, often national competitors, and a larger number of smaller more local businesses. Undertaking marketing analysis on an aspirational competitor can be a valuable tool, either as part of a long term strategy to become a top tier player, or to find the best ways to become a top player in your local market.
Is Competitor Analysis right for your business?
For many businesses, competitor analysis is a critical component of their wider marketing strategy.
While many companies can benefit from some version of marketing competitor analysis, we certainly don’t recommend it for all business we work with. Talk to us about the benefits of comparing your business to competitors in your market and whether this is right for your. To find out more about competitor analysis, get in contact with us.
