Studying competitors is necessary for both existing companies and those who are just developing a business strategy and unique selling proposition (USP).
Objectives and tasks
Typically, competitive analysis results are used to make decisions on pricing and marketing issues. It is also used to forecast potential demand, sales volumes, and other business indicators.
Most often, competitor analysis is carried out:
When a company enters the market or launches a new product. In this case, research helps to determine the market niche, the possible target audience, the cost of the product or service, as well as channels for promotion and sales.
If an existing business needs to maintain its market share. Analysis allows you to understand what market share the company currently occupies. This will help assess the demand for the product, brand recognition, strengths and weaknesses against competitors - everything that can be dental email database lists influenced by marketing tools.
When scaling. Research can help you find out which niches are not yet occupied and identify growth points.
How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis
First, determine who your company's competitors are. They can be of two types:
Direct ones are those who produce a similar product and sell it in the same region.
Indirect - those who offer a different product, but with its help the target audience can satisfy the need for your product.
Typically, companies only compare with direct competitors.
Next, you need to determine what exactly your competitors are offering. At this stage, you analyze the entire range of their products and services, as well as their quality.
Then study how competitors operate in the market: their promotion tactics and sales levels. It is necessary to track the pricing policy of competitors: how they set prices, what and at what cost they offer, what promotions they hold, whether there are discounts. In parallel, find out the terms of delivery.
The next step is to study the marketing strategy of competitors. Find out what kind of advertising they use, whether they have podcasts, how actively they use infographics, thematic articles, whether they use expert and other types of content. Here it is also worth finding out how companies work with reviews and what information is published on their website.
When collecting information, do not neglect social networks and messengers. Check whether competitors have official communities, how many subscribers they have, what methods they use to promote the brand on VKontakte and other similar platforms.
Once all the information has been collected, put it together in a table or graph. The methods we will discuss below will help you analyze the data qualitatively and present it visually.
Methods of analysis
Each company decides individually how exactly to conduct the research. However, there are several classic methods of competitive analysis that many marketers use.
Comparative analysis
A method in which companies are compared using the same parameters. Experts select criteria for evaluating competitors depending on their current tasks. Metrics can be divided into two groups: quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative criteria include everything that can be counted or converted into points. For example, this is how they evaluate the convenience of ordering a call back on a website, the number of subscribers in VKontakte communities and other social networks, the number of brand queries in search engines.