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How to create a competitive analysis (with examples)

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Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. In this guide, we’ll outline how to do a competitive analysis and explain how you can use this marketing strategy to improve your business.

Whether you’re running a business or playing in a football game, understanding your competition is crucial for success. While you may not be scoring touchdowns in the office, your goal is to score business deals with clients or win customers with your products. The method of preparation for athletes and business owners is similar—once you understand your strengths and weaknesses versus your competitors’, you can level up. 

What is a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. 

[inline illustration] What is a competitive analysis (infographic)

Direct competitors market the same product to the same audience as you, while indirect competitors market the same product to a different audience. After identifying your competitors, you can use the information you gather to see where you stand in the market landscape. 

What to include in a competitive analysis

The purpose of this type of analysis is to get a competitive advantage in the market and improve your business strategy. Without a competitive analysis, it’s difficult to know what others are doing to win clients or customers in your target market. A competitive analysis report may include:

A description of your company’s target market

Details about your product or service versus the competitors’

Current and projected market share, sales, and revenues

Pricing comparison

Marketing and social media strategy analysis

Differences in customer ratings

You’ll compare each detail of your product or service versus the competition to assess strategy efficacy. By comparing success metrics across companies, you can make data-driven decisions.

How to do a competitive analysis

Follow these five steps to create your competitive analysis report and get a broad view of where you fit in the market. This process can help you analyze a handful of competitors at one time and better approach your target customers.

1. Create a competitor overview

In step one, select between five and 10 competitors to compare against your company. The competitors you choose should have similar product or service offerings and a similar business model to you. You should also choose a mix of both direct and indirect competitors so you can see how new markets might affect your company. Choosing both startup and seasoned competitors will further diversify your analysis.

Tip: To find competitors in your industry, use Google or Amazon to search for your product or service. The top results that emerge are likely your competitors. If you’re a startup or you serve a niche market, you may need to dive deeper into the rankings to find your direct competitors.

2. Conduct market research

Once you know the competitors you want to analyze, you’ll begin in-depth market research. This will be a mixture of primary and secondary research. Primary research comes directly from customers or the product itself, while secondary research is information that’s already compiled. Then, keep track of the data you collect in a user research template .

Primary market research may include: 

Purchasing competitors’ products or services

Interviewing customers

Conducting online surveys of customers 

Holding in-person focus groups

Secondary market research may include:

Examining competitors’ websites

Assessing the current economic situation

Identifying technological developments 

Reading company records

Tip: Search engine analysis tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you examine competitors’ websites and obtain crucial SEO information such as the keywords they’re targeting, the number of backlinks they have, and the overall health of their website. 

3. Compare product features

The next step in your analysis involves a comparison of your product to your competitors’ products. This comparison should break down the products feature by feature. While every product has its own unique features, most products will likely include:

Service offered

Age of audience served

Number of features

Style and design

Ease of use

Type and number of warranties

Customer support offered

Product quality

Tip: If your features table gets too long, abbreviate this step by listing the features you believe are of most importance to your analysis. Important features may include cost, product benefits, and ease of use.

4. Compare product marketing

The next step in your analysis will look similar to the one before, except you’ll compare the marketing efforts of your competitors instead of the product features. Unlike the product features matrix you created, you’ll need to go deeper to unveil each company’s marketing plan . 

Areas you’ll want to analyze include:

Social media

Website copy

Press releases

Product copy

As you analyze the above, ask questions to dig deeper into each company’s marketing strategies. The questions you should ask will vary by industry, but may include:

What story are they trying to tell?

What value do they bring to their customers?

What’s their company mission?

What’s their brand voice?

Tip: You can identify your competitors’ target demographic in this step by referencing their customer base, either from their website or from testimonials. This information can help you build customer personas. When you can picture who your competitor actively targets, you can better understand their marketing tactics. 

5. Use a SWOT analysis

Competitive intelligence will make up a significant part of your competitor analysis framework, but once you’ve gathered your information, you can turn the focus back to your company. A SWOT analysis helps you identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. It also helps turn weaknesses into opportunities and assess threats you face based on your competition.

During a SWOT analysis, ask yourself:

What do we do well?

What could we improve?

Are there market gaps in our services?

What new market trends are on the horizon?

Tip: Your research from the previous steps in the competitive analysis will help you answer these questions and fill in your SWOT analysis. You can visually present your findings in a SWOT matrix, which is a four-box chart divided by category.

6. Identify your place in the market landscape

The last step in your competitive analysis is to understand where you stand in the market landscape. To do this, you’ll create a graph with an X and Y axis. The two axes should represent the most important factors for being competitive in your market. 

For example, the X-axis may represent customer satisfaction, while the Y-axis may represent presence in the market. You’ll then plot each competitor on the graph according to their (x,y) coordinates. You’ll also plot your company on this chart, which will give you an idea of where you stand in relation to your competitors. 

This graph is included for informational purposes and does not represent Asana’s market landscape or any specific industry’s market landscape. 

[inline illustration] Identify your place in the market landscape (infographic)

Tip: In this example, you’ll see three companies that have a greater market presence and greater customer satisfaction than yours, while two companies have a similar market presence but higher customer satisfaction. This data should jumpstart the problem-solving process because you now know which competitors are the biggest threats and you can see where you fall short. 

Competitive analysis example

Imagine you work at a marketing startup that provides SEO for dentists, which is a niche industry and only has a few competitors. You decide to conduct a market analysis for your business. To do so, you would:

Step 1: Use Google to compile a list of your competitors. 

Steps 2, 3, and 4: Use your competitors’ websites, as well as SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, to deep-dive into the service offerings and marketing strategies of each company. 

Step 5: Focusing back on your own company, you conduct a SWOT analysis to assess your own strategic goals and get a visual of your strengths and weaknesses. 

Step 6: Finally, you create a graph of the market landscape and conclude that there are two companies beating your company in customer satisfaction and market presence. 

After compiling this information into a table like the one below, you consider a unique strategy. To beat out your competitors, you can use localization. Instead of marketing to dentists nationwide like your competitors are doing, you decide to focus your marketing strategy on one region, state, or city. Once you’ve become the known SEO company for dentists in that city, you’ll branch out. 

[inline illustration] Competitive analysis framework (example)

You won’t know what conclusions you can draw from your competitive analysis until you do the work and see the results. Whether you decide on a new pricing strategy, a way to level up your marketing, or a revamp of your product, understanding your competition can provide significant insight.

Drawbacks of competitive analysis

There are some drawbacks to competitive analysis you should consider before moving forward with your report. While these drawbacks are minor, understanding them can make you an even better manager or business owner. 

Don’t forget to take action

You don’t just want to gather the information from your competitive analysis—you also want to take action on that information. The data itself will only show you where you fit into the market landscape. The key to competitive analysis is using it to problem solve and improve your company’s strategic plan .

Be wary of confirmation bias

Confirmation bias means interpreting information based on the beliefs you already hold. This is bad because it can cause you to hold on to false beliefs. To avoid bias, you should rely on all the data available to back up your decisions. In the example above, the business owner may believe they’re the best in the SEO dental market at social media. Because of this belief, when they do market research for social media, they may only collect enough information to confirm their own bias—even if their competitors are statistically better at social media. However, if they were to rely on all the data available, they could eliminate this bias.

Update your analysis regularly

A competitive analysis report represents a snapshot of the market landscape as it currently stands. This report can help you gain enough information to make changes to your company, but you shouldn’t refer to the document again unless you update the information regularly. Market trends are always changing, and although it’s tedious to update your report, doing so will ensure you get accurate insight into your competitors at all times. 

Boost your marketing strategy with competitive analysis

Learning your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses will make you a better marketer. If you don’t know the competition you’re up against, you can’t beat them. Using competitive analysis can boost your marketing strategy and allow you to capture your target audience faster.

Competitive analysis must lead to action, which means following up on your findings with clear business goals and a strong business plan. Once you do your competitive analysis, you can use the templates below to put your plan into action.

Business growth

Business tips

A step-by-step guide to competitive market analysis

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I remember Blockbuster going bankrupt in 2010. As a 12-year-old, this news meant the end of walking down aisles with my family, looking for the perfect weekend flick. But to Netflix, this meant their competitive market analysis had paid off.

As much as I miss my three-day VHS and DVD rentals, video entertainment has improved significantly, thanks to innovation and competitive pressure. Your industry isn't immune to change either, which is why it's so important to get ahead.

Table of contents:

What is a competitive analysis?

The importance of competitive analysis in marketing, how to conduct competitive market analysis in 6 steps, competitive analysis example, internal operations as a competitive advantage.

Competitive market analysis is the process of determining who your competitors are, researching their strategies, and unpacking what they do well (and not so well).

From this process, you can learn a lot about your company's own strengths and weaknesses, as well as how to remain a strong competitor in your industry.

A deep dive into your competitors' strategies will reveal their product offerings, mission statements , target markets, marketing strategies, and more. You may even identify new competitors you didn't know existed.

Identify and fill crucial gaps in your business  

The greats learn from the greats. Yes, you're trying to beat your competitors, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from them—especially if they've been around the block a few times. Seeing what works for your competitors will point toward gaps in your own strategies (as well as gaps in their strategies)—and ideally give you some inspiration on how to fill those gaps.

Spot trends and get ahead

Competitive market analysis isn't just about understanding specific competitors. It can also uncover the direction that an entire industry is moving. For example, Blockbuster didn't move with the industry, and we all know how that ended. Competitive analysis can help you avoid that same fate.

Recognize product value and pain point solutions

By analyzing competitors, you uncover customer pain points they might've missed, allowing you to refine your product's value and directly address those needs. It's not just about watching rivals, but seizing opportunities to stand out.

Set future objectives for growth

By examining market leaders, you define bold markers for your growth, and you can emulate their tactics. You can also employ AI-driven tools like Google Analytics' predictive metrics, HubSpot's forecasting tools, or IBM Watson's analytics. These tools can decipher market patterns, anticipate future prospects, and help you set precise KPIs. With AI's assistance, you can unearth data-driven insights and opportunities even top-tier competitors might miss.

Competitive market analysis isn't just a matter of making sure you have a unique selling point. Here's how to dig into the competition and figure out where you stand—and how to stand out.

1. List your competitors

Start by creating a comprehensive list of everyone operating in your industry. You can weed out the less relevant competitors later, but for now, jot down anyone that offers similar products or services.

If you're a small local business, your competitors are located nearby—you probably know a lot about them, but at the very least, you know they exist. But for something like an eCommerce store or online service, it's important to figure out who your competitors even are.

Start with basic keyword research. Google your product category a few different ways, maybe with words like "price," "cheap," or "sale" to reinforce the commercial nature of your query.

A Google search for "flower shop new york"

This will help you identify any competitors and can shed some light on how saturated your industry is.

Next, categorize the companies you identify into direct and indirect competitors.

Direct competitors provide similar products or services to a target market similar to yours. For example, Gucci and Prada both offer high-end clothing and accessories to fashion-conscious consumers with high disposable income.

Indirect competitors provide different products or services (though ones that land in the same category as yours) to a target market similar to yours. For example, gyms and companies producing at-home workout equipment can be considered indirect competitors.

As the name suggests, direct competitors tend to pose a more direct risk to your business. That said, indirect competitors can still attract customers and pull business away from you. You need to identify and analyze both to truly understand your competitive landscape.

2. Identify their target markets

Sometimes, a competitor's target market is clear—especially if it's a niche brand. Take Dick's Sporting Goods—it's pretty obvious that they're targeting people who are into sports (or who want to be).

For other companies, it isn't as obvious. To determine your competitors' target markets, try the following:

Study their mission statement: Sometimes, a company's mission statement will explicitly state who their products and/or services are designed for. And even when it isn't explicit, it will almost certainly provide a hint. Navigate to the "About" page on their website, and soak up whatever insight you can.

Analyze their voice and tone: Stoic or cheeky? Packed with jargon or written for the novice? Your competitors' tone and wording have a purpose—to get through to their target market. Read company blog posts, join their newsletters, and watch promotional video content, all the while paying close attention to who they seem to be speaking to.

Pay attention to their social media engagement: Observe who comments on their content and how they respond to those comments. The influencers they partner with can also shed light on the audience they want to reach.

3. Unpack their 4 P's

Table showing the four P's of Apple's marketing, product, price, place, and promotion

Competitive market analysis requires you to analyze your competitors' four P's of marketing : product, price, place, and promotion.

The best way to learn about your competitors' customer experiences is to become a customer yourself. You'll gain incredible insights into what's working for them—and more importantly, where there's room to offer something better.

Whenever possible, give your competitors' products a spin. Get a free trial or even buy or sign up for the real deal, if your budget allows. When using their products, try contacting their customer support for additional insight.

Pricing can be one of the most sensitive aspects of marketing. For this reason, you need to understand and track what your competition is doing with their pricing. Here are some questions to ask yourself about each competitor:

What's their pricing model? Subscription-style, one-time purchase, or a mix of both?

Do they seem to be using skim pricing or penetration pricing?

Does their pricing model seem to align with the rest of the industry?

There are many tools out there to help, as well as specialized tools for specific industries, like hotel room price monitoring.

Once you have a grip on your competitors' pricing strategies, here are your options:

Reduce your prices: If pricing is the only differentiator in your industry (meaning product, place, and promotion strategies are all pretty uniform), you may consider lowering your prices to snag a higher share of the market. But be wary about how this will impact customers' perceptions of your quality, as well as the risk of a price reduction competition, driving everyone's prices to unprofitable levels.

Raise your prices: If your business already leads the market by providing something unique or higher-quality products than the competition, you may consider raising your prices. Be mindful of the price elasticity of your product before pursuing this strategy, as a small price increase can lose customers in certain industries.

Match your competitors' pricing: It's much more challenging to sell products at the same price as competitors. This strategy works if your business has been in the market for a while and can make a unique or niche offer. In this case, the customer will decide to purchase based on personal preferences rather than the price.

If you feel like none of the above strategies will work for you, you might explore nontraditional pricing structures like bundling.

Where are your competitors selling? Is everything online, or do they have brick-and-mortar stores?

Every industry trends differently here—shoe brands, for example, tend to have some in-person outlets since most people want to try on a pair of shoes before buying them. Furniture stores, on the other hand, don't always rely on brick-and-mortar locations. They can provide pictures, videos, and product details (such as dimensions and materials) to provide customers with a "good enough" idea of what they're getting.

Promotion encompasses more than just advertising, but since advertising is so measurable and public, it's the easiest to spy on. To avoid wasting your advertising budget , analyze your competitors' strategies.

Here's what you're looking for:

Cost per click: If the CPC is too high, you may not want to use paid ads as a promotion channel at all. It's better to learn this from your competitors than from your own experience.

Keywords: Examine the competition level for each keyword in your competitors' ad campaigns. This will help you find the best-performing keywords with low competition (and that means lower cost per click). You'll also be able to see which keywords aren't doing well and avoid those.

Long-running ads: If your competitor keeps running the same campaign for a long time, it definitely works for them. You can try to create something similar to replicate their success.

If most competitors rely on social media advertisements as opposed to TV or print ads, you should probably follow suit. Likewise, if they're putting their entire budget into advertising how crispy their chicken sandwich is, it's probably because chicken sandwich consumers really like their chicken crispy. Watch how your competitors allocate their advertising budget and use that information to inform your own strategy.

4. Get to know their SEO strategy

SEO is a beast, and there's no surefire way to fully dissect your competitors' strategy. But there are a few ways to at least figure out what's working for them.

Use a keyword research tool to see what topics your competitors are ranking for. Do they rely entirely on industry-specific queries, or do they branch into other tangential topics? What pages are bringing in the most traffic?

By discovering which keywords your competitors target (and rank for), you get insight into what's working for them and uncover new keywords you might have neglected. Even better, you might also find keywords they aren't targeting and identify the underserved customers. You can also use it as a chance to differentiate your message so that you're ranking for more targeted keywords .

The Ahrefs screenshot below shows the highest-traffic-driving pages from Slack's blog. A competing communication platform could use this data to learn what's working for Slack and replicate their success. To really be successful, however, you need to one-up the competition, bringing something new to the table.

Ahrefs screenshot showing the highest-traffic-driving pages from Slack's blog

Ahrefs also lets you see your competitors' backlinks. Figure out which websites are already linking to your competitors, and then you can try to get yourself a backlink from those sites as well.

Pro tip: As you do this research, actually click into some of your competitors' high-ranking pages to see what exactly is attracting users (and Google). Data is crucial, but nothing can replace the human eye.

5. Make note of their most popular content

If you can figure out which types of content—blog posts, videos, podcasts, guides, etc.—are most popular with your competitors' audiences, that can help inform your own content strategy . And here's a tech twist: you can employ ChatGPT to run a content analysis. Simply plug in a piece of content, ask it to run the analysis, and it will quickly dissect the post, highlighting themes, patterns, and potential gaps your brand can capitalize on.

The goal is to identify which content types get the most traffic or engagement. You can use a marketing analytics tool to analyze both of those things:

Do the highest-performing pieces of content tend to all be one specific medium (video, infographic, written content, or something else)?

Do the titles of the most-shared articles all have numbers or other specific characters (like brackets or hyphens) in them?

Is the most-shared content all about a similar topic?

Let's say you run a travel blog and discover that your competitor's article called "How to save money for a trip" is super popular among their audience. You now have an opportunity to create content on a similar topic but make it even better. Maybe "The ultimate guide to traveling on a budget" or even a real story about "How 21-year-old Mike saved $10K for his epic adventure." 

You should also be following all your competitors to learn more about their social media strategy , including which platforms work best for them.

Social media presents an opportunity to let your brand's voice and personality shine. Take Wendy's, for example. The brand publicly roasts its competitors on X (Twitter), and the internet loves it.

Screenshot of a Wendy's tweet

Not every brand can (or should) be quite as blunt and sassy as Wendy's, but showing some personality can pay off.

6. Conduct a final SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis is a great way to spot opportunities to capitalize on and threats to prepare for before they strike. In short:

Strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) look internally at your company.

Opportunities (O) and threats (T) look externally to the industry and market.

While diving into your competitive market analysis, consider these factors:

Market share percentage: This metric reflects the proportion of sales a company has in the industry compared to its competitors. Tools like Statista or market research reports can offer insights into a brand's dominance or underperformance.

Competitive features: Understand the unique offerings that set a product or service apart from its rivals. Customer surveys and product comparison charts are useful methods to determine standout features.

Company culture: A company's values, work environment, and ethics can be a deciding factor for customers. Monitoring employer review sites like Glassdoor or observing a company's interactions on social media can provide insights.

Customer reviews: Customer reviews provide direct feedback on a product or service's quality and the company's reputation. Platforms like Yelp, Trustpilot, or Google Reviews offer a treasure trove of customer sentiments and concerns.

Geography (if applicable): Location can be pivotal in a company's success, especially for local businesses. Using tools like Google Trends can help identify where a product or brand is most popular geographically.

Let's be clear—this isn't going to shine a spotlight on the exact strategy you should pursue to beat your competitors. What it can do is provide a high-level look at your internal and external environment, making it easier to piece together your competitive strategy.

When promoting your brand, you're thinking about how to communicate your strengths. Conducting a SWOT analysis forces you to also view your brand with scrutiny. You may be working toward being "the best" at everything, but there will inevitably be things that other brands do better.

Download our SWOT analysis template and follow along with the example below to learn as much as possible about your brand and your competitive environment. You can also kick-start the process using ChatGPT.

Example template of a SWOT analysis

Let's say you're the CEO of an automotive company conducting a competitive analysis. After doing a deep dive into your competition and your industry as a whole, organizing your notes and SWOT analyses in folders labeled by competitor, you notice a huge push toward electric vehicles.

In fact, you estimate that your closest competitor (who targets the same market as you) now allocates over half of its advertising budget to its newest electric vehicle release. But you only have one electric vehicle option, and you only allocate 15% of your advertising budget toward it. You reasonably guess that you're in trouble.

Additional research confirms your market is very interested in making the switch to electric. You decide to reallocate your budget toward researching, producing, and promoting electric vehicles. Five years pass, and you realize you would have been left in the dust had you failed to analyze the competition or ignored the warning signs.

Competitive market analysis can prevent wasted resources, inspire new opportunities, and help you stay one step ahead of the competition. Take these six steps to better understand your company's strengths and weaknesses—then identify where you need to improve and how to invest your resources to remain a strong competitor in your industry. 

Sometimes, a company's competitive advantage comes from its seamless internal operations. It can be hard to find out what's going on internally at another company, but you can be sure you streamline your own processes. Here are some tips to get started:

5 things you should automate today

9 ways to leverage automation in the workplace

How to write internal documentation that works

Streamline work across departments with automation

How to build an analysis assistant with ChatGPT

This article was originally published by Diana Ford in May 2021. The most recent update was in September 2023.

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Luke Strauss

Luke is a writer and content marketer from sunny San Diego. Since receiving his degree in International Management from Pepperdine University, he's channeled his passion for digital marketing and creative writing to create engaging content for organizations across a wide variety of verticals. When he's not at his desk, you'll find him at a music festival, thrifting, or spending time with his friends and family.

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Competitive market analysis: what it is and how to do it right

Keeping your eye on the competition is vital. Find out how you can use competitive market analysis to stay one step ahead of your rivals.

What is competitor analysis?

How often should you carry out competitor analysis, how to do competitor analysis in 10 steps.

Competitive market analysis is one of the most overlooked aspects of marketing. All too often, brands are so focused on what they’re doing, they aren’t paying attention to what their competitors are up to.

Keeping your eye on the ball when it comes to your competition is incredibly important to make sure you don’t get blindsided. And it’s not just your closest rivals you need to monitor, it’s the wider marketplace and your consumers. Otherwise, you might be taken by surprise by a plucky newcomer! 

Thankfully, there is a reliable way to make sure this doesn’t happen, and that’s what we’re going to look at in this guide.

First things first…

Competitor analysis is a type of market research where you gather insights into how your competitors are performing, how they compare to your brand and what consumers think about you and your competitors.

And competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is a form of market intelligence . The process involves gathering a wide range of information on your competitors. You’ll look at their product range and value propositions, their business model and brand and marketing strategies , their sales performance, and the amount of brand equity they have. 

This will allow you to assess each competing brand and put them on a scale to understand how much of a threat they represent. You’ll examine what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to devise strategies that will help you get ahead of your closest competitors. It will also enable you to spot marketing opportunities to take market share from competitors who are underperforming. 

Competitive market analysis is a hugely valuable process for both business leaders and marketers alike. Finding the right tool is crucial, so we’ve narrowed them down to the top competitor analysis tools to help you.

Competitive research is usually carried out as part of a market analysis when companies are putting together a business plan for a new product or venture. But just because your business is up and running, it doesn’t mean you should take your eye off the ball when it comes to your competitors.

In fact, you should continuously monitor your competition—through things like competition mapping —and keep collaborative files on each one of your competitors that your team can feed into. Having this information to hand when you need it will give your brand a competitive advantage. There are a number of tools for market analysis you can use to stay up-to-date on your competitor’s movements without much effort:

  • Google Alerts – set up an alert for when your competitor’s name appears in articles, blogs and research.
  • Companies House alerts – get notified when your competitors file accounts or make changes to their board of directors.
  • STAT – get alerts every time your competitor moves up or down the SERPs (search engine results pages).
  • Attest – schedule a brand tracker survey every six months to see if your competitor’s NPS has changed.

The competitive intelligence you receive through these channels should flag up anything that needs to be investigated further. But don’t forget to periodically repeat step one to make sure you’re monitoring all the competitors you need to be, and that there aren’t any new competitors gaining ground. The competitive landscape can change at any time and an indirect competitor can easily become a direct competitor by adding a new product line. 

You can also carry out a competitor analysis any time you need to reassess your own position in the marketplace. The process gives you an unbeatable perspective on how you’re performing, what your unique value proposition is, and any areas for improvement within your business.

Doing a comprehensive competitive market trend analysis might seem a little overwhelming. It’s true that a lot goes into it but, thankfully, the process can be broken down into much more manageable chunks. Here are the 10 steps to effective competitor analysis and the analysis tools you can use to help you:

  • Identify your competitors
  • Analyse your competitors’ product offering
  • Investigate competitors’ market share
  • Calculate your competitors’ market reach
  • Find out how satisfied your competitors’ customers are
  • Study your competitors’ marketing strategy
  • Examine the strength of competitors’ content and social media
  • Investigate your competitors’ tech stack
  • Test the customer experience 
  • Carry out a SWOT analysis

How are your competitors doing??

Yes—you can totally run consumer research into how your competitors are performing and compare that with insights about your brand

1. Identify your competitors

You can’t research your competitors’ businesses if you don’t know who they are. While you’re bound to have an idea of the companies operating in your space – and which ones are the biggest – you might not know which ones are most likely to be considered by your target market.

For example, let’s say you’re a men’s shoe brand targeting affluent hipsters – that’s quite a niche audience . What you actually need to know is which shoe brands have the most share-of-mind amongst that specific demographic.

The most efficient way to find that out is by asking the consumers in question. Using a consumer research platform like Attest , you can get answers from people in your target market. You might ask them:

  • What brands come to mind when they think about your product or service (unprompted recall)
  • What brands they’re aware of from a list you provide (prompted recall)
  • The last time they purchased your product or service
  • Which brand they bought from
  • Brands they’ve bought from in the past
  • Brands they plan to buy from in the future (purchase intent)

By getting respondents to answer in their own words, you gain a true picture of the brands you’re competing against. This might surface brands you’d not considered as direct competitors, or it could show you that a brand you thought was dominant actually isn’t in the eyes of your market. 

2. Analyse your competitors’ product offering

Now you know which brands are on your target audience’s radar, you can start researching them . You’ll want to get familiar with their product range – what do they offer that you don’t (or vice versa)? What price range are they in and how does your pricing compare ? Now, look at the quality of the products – are they better/worse/the same? How slick is their website? Be objective about it; it’s important not to look at your own brand through rose-tinted glasses!

You should also try to ascertain each competitor’s value proposition. In other words, what the brand tells people it stands for and why they should shop with them. Look at the messaging on its website – what are the key themes? Maybe it trades on being environmentally friendly or having the best prices? It’s important to understand how your competitors are appealing to their customers. 

Try drawing up a market map. Market mapping involves arranging competing brands/products on an axis according to their positioning. For example, whether they are high or low cost or whether they are complex or basic. 

Finally, what is your competitor’s business model? And which distribution channels do they use? For example, do they sell through third-party retailers or only direct-to-consumer? Do they list on marketplaces? Do they franchise or licence their products, or sell by subscription? Do they have a freemium offering? This process can highlight the potential to innovate your own business model . 

3. Investigate competitors’ market share

Digging into your competitors’ finances can tell you a lot about how well they’re doing. For UK companies, you can find accounts filed at Companies House. Meanwhile, publicly held companies in the US will publish trading reports on their corporate websites. You can use this information to calculate a company’s market share.

You can determine a company’s market share by dividing its total sales or revenues by the industry’s total sales over a fiscal period (Most industries have formal associations which compile and track industry sales data and have information on overall market size ). Use this measure to get a general idea of the size of a company relative to the industry. 

You can also see if the company’s market share is growing. A company that is maintaining its market share is growing revenues at the same rate as the total market. But a company that is growing its market share will be growing its revenues faster than its competitors.

You’ll also be able to find out other valuable information about a competitor by searching trade publications and other online sources. Look for:

  • Funding the company has received
  • Investment the company has made 
  • Plans to expand or enter into new markets
  • Notable new hires, vacancies and current number of staff
  • Or anything that signals a downturn, like redundancies or store closures

4. Calculate your competitors’ market reach

As well as understanding competitors’ market share, it’s also worth understanding their market reach, meaning how many customers can they access (or access them)? For brands with physical stores, how many do they have and where are they located? 

For those selling online, what are their logistics like? Can they deliver to all parts of the country? Do they ship internationally? If they do, is shipping priced competitively? These factors will affect the number of people who are able to shop with the brand. 

You should also review the company’s delivery terms in general – do they offer free delivery? How long does delivery take? How do they handle returns? These are all areas where you might be able to offer your customers something better.

5. Find out how satisfied your competitors’ customers are

Hard financial figures don’t tell the full story. A major consideration when conducting competitive market analysis is how happy a brand’s customers are. Looking at feedback from real customers can tell you so much. It can help you understand why people shop with a competitor, what they like about them, what they don’t like about them.

There are a number of sources to obtain this information. Social media is a good place to start. You can use social listening tools to assess the levels of positive vs negative sentiment towards a brand. But it’s also worth spending some time actually reading comments and posts to get a feel for the things people love… or what they’re frustrated with.

You should also read reviews posted to Amazon or the brand’s own site because it will show up in detail any areas of weakness that your competitor’s product has. Maybe lots of people are complaining about faulty products, or slow delivery or poor customer service. Whatever it is, you will have identified a chink in their armour. 

Market research is another great resource for competitor intelligence. You can obtain a Net Promoter Score (NPS) for your competitors, by asking consumers how likely they are to recommend the brand to a friend or colleague. It gives you an instant snapshot of the general sentiment towards the brand and is a metric you can benchmark against. Meanwhile, combining NPS with purchase intent data allows you to measure overall brand equity as part of benchmarking research .

17 brand preference survey questions (including NPS)

Looking for examples of brand preference survey questions? Our in-house team of research experts have put together this essential list (including Net Promoter Score)

Other questions you can ask through consumer surveys to get a complete picture of how people feel about particular competitors are:

  • Which of the following qualities do you associate with brand x?
  • Why do/don’t you buy brand x?
  • How would you describe brand x to friends?
  • Why did you stop buying brand x?
  • What could brand x do better?

6. Study your competitors’ marketing strategy

You’ve looked at the messaging your competitors are putting out, now look at the methods they use to convey that messaging. Try to find out which marketing channels they’re leveraging. These might include:

  • Owned media – blog, newsletter, podcast, downloadable content or in-house magazine
  • Paid social – ads on Facebook and Instagram etc.
  • Organic social – which social media platforms do they use?
  • Paid search – what keywords are they targeting for PPC/AdWords?
  • Organic SEO – where do they appear in organic search results and what optimization techniques are they using? 
  • Display advertising – banner ads on third-party websites
  • Native advertising – promoted content like articles or videos on third-party websites
  • Affiliate advertising – do they have an affiliate marketing scheme?
  • Print media – adverts or advertorials in newspapers or magazines
  • Broadcast media  – radio or TV ads
  • Sponsorships and partnerships – are they linked to any other brands?
  • Out of home – billboards, ads in stations, on buses/taxis etc. 
  • Sales collateral – leaflets, brochures, direct mail 
  • Event marketing – hosting or participating in online or offline events
  • Influencer marketing – do they have brand ambassadors? 
  • PR – do they issue press releases or stage PR stunts?

This process will give you a good idea of where your competitors are spending their marketing budgets. You might find that they’re under-utilizing certain channels which could represent a potential opportunity for your brand.

Start compiling examples of each type of marketing your competitor uses. Study how each piece expresses their brand identity and compels consumers to take action. What could you imitate? What could you do better? 

7. Examine the strength of competitors’ content and social media   

Just because a brand is present on lots of platforms, it doesn’t mean they’re really using them to their best advantage. As part of your analysis, you should look at how many followers they have on each social media platform and what level of engagement they enjoy. Observe how often they post, and how many likes, comments and shares they typically get. 

Which platform are they strongest on? What type of content do their followers engage with most? Are they making use of all the features on a platform, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories or Instagram TV? Do they sell directly through social media via services like Instagram Shopping?

Now, look at the content your competitor publishes on their own website. How often do they post to their blog? Do they produce downloadable guides or whitepapers? You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to see how successful their content marketing is. Just enter your rival’s URL to see their top content and the number of shares and engagements achieved across Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. You can even see who is sharing their content, helping you identify their most important influencers and develop your own content strategy. 

8. Investigate your competitors’ tech stack

What technology and tools are your competitors using to give them an edge? You can often find market research case studies on provider’s websites detailing how they work with different brands and this can provide you with lots of insight. 

For example, you can find out exactly how brands like Gymshark , Bloom & Wild , Little Dish , World Remit and Bought By Many work with Attest to gather consumer insight and use it to grow their businesses. 

You can also take a peek at the mechanics behind a competitor’s website with a tool like Built With. Just type in the company’s URL and you’ll be able to see what technology your competitors’ site runs on, including any third-party plugins and widgets they’re using.

9. Test the customer experience 

There’s no better way to understand the customer experience your competitor offers than by experiencing it yourself. So, pose as a customer and buy something. If they have physical stores, go to one. Make detailed notes about your experience:

  • How appealing does the shop look from the outside? What’s the window display like? What offers are being promoted?
  • How are things displayed in the shop? How tidy is it? What sort of welcome did you get?
  • What’s the range like? Is everything in stock? Are the staff helpful? Is there any cool tech?
  • Is there a big queue for checkout? What payment methods are accepted? Are your purchases packaged up nicely?

If you’re buying online, use a screen recorder to make a recording of the experience and narrate as you go. How easy is it to navigate the site and find what you want? What’s the checkout process like? Pay attention to all the follow-up communications too and look at how they try to nurture you as a new customer. 

10. Carry out a SWOT analysis

The final step in carrying out a competitive market analysis is taking everything you’ve learned and using it to do a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Consider all aspects of your competitor’s business, from their proposition and marketing to their infrastructure and financial standing. Here’s how to break the analysis down:

Strengths – What does your competitor do really well? What sets them apart from others in the market? How robust is their business financially and operationally?

Weaknesses – Where is your competitor failing? What could have been better about the experience you had when you shopped with them? What resource limitations do they have?

Opportunities – What’s missing from their offering? What product features are lacking? Are there any markets they’re underserving? Are they failing to use some marketing channels? 

Threats – What are they doing that presents a threat to your business? Are their prices more competitive than yours? Are they planning new retail outlets near yours?

This process will help you understand your competitor’s strengths, who you’re able to compete against, and the best ways to do it. You should also carry out a SWOT analysis for your own brand.

Run competitive market research today with Attest

Many brands run research into what consumers think about their brand, but not many gather insights into what people think about their competitors.

This research is super important as it gives context to your position in the market and tells you how you can increase your market share.

Learn what people think about you and your competitors

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market research your competition

Nikos Nikolaidis

Senior Customer Research Manager 

Nikos joined Attest in 2019, with a strong background in psychology and market research. As part of Customer Research Team, Nikos focuses on helping brands uncover insights to achieve their objectives and open new opportunities for growth.

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Start » strategy, sizing up the competition: how to conduct competitive research.

Competitive research can reveal trends in the marketplace and gaps in your own business plan.

 Game plan drawing

Competitive research is a crucial part of any good marketing plan. This term may elicit some negative images but competitive research has nothing to do with spying. It has everything to do with paying attention to your competition and what they are doing.

Many people will lose out on business to competitors they have never even heard of simply because they’ve never taken the time to do competitive research. Understanding what your competition is doing will help you position yourself, and your product or service, within the market.

What is competitive research?

Competitive research involves identifying your competitors, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of their products and services. By looking at your biggest competitors, you can see how your own products and services stack up and what kind of threat they pose to your business. It also helps you identify industry trends you may have been missing.

Four benefits to doing competitive research are:

  • Understanding your market . Competitive research can reveal trends in the marketplace that might have otherwise been missed. The ability to identify and predict trends is a huge asset for any business, helping to improve value proposition for customers. This is an important component of competitive research that you should constantly be doing.
  • Improving your marketing . Your customers care about how your product or service is going to make their lives better. If they are leaving to go to one of your competitors, it’s probably because that company does a better job of explaining the benefits to the customer base, or does in fact provide a better product or service. Competitive research helps you understand why customers choose to buy from you or your competitors and how your competition is marketing their products. Over time, this can help you improve your own marketing programs.
  • Identifying market gaps . When you do competitive research, you’re analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. You’ll often find that, by looking at the data, there is a segment of the population that is being underserved. This could put your business in a unique position to reach those customers.
  • Planning for the future . The most important byproduct of competitive research is that it will help you create a strategic plan for your business. This includes things like improving your product or service, using more strategic pricing strategies, and improving the promotion of your products.

Good competitive research could put your business in a unique position to reach customers who are being underserved.

6 steps to competitive research

It may sound obvious, but the first step is to simply identify who your top competitors are . There are two different types of competitors to identify: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors are targeting the same customer base you’re targeting. They are solving the same problem that you are trying to solve and sell a similar product or service.

Indirect competitors may sell something similar to your product or service but target a different audience, or they may target your same customer base but have a slightly different product or service.

It’s important to understand this segment of your market for two reasons: (1) it could provide you with growth opportunities for your own business, and (2) it could also highlight a threat to your business of which you would otherwise be unaware.

Here are six steps to getting started on competitive research:

Identify main competitors.

The most obvious way to do this is simply by searching your product or service category on the web and seeing what comes up. You can also check websites like Crunchbase or Product Hunt . You may find competitors that you might not have noticed before.

The goal is to cast a wide net and get an idea of who your main competitors are. Another good way to identify direct and indirect competitors is to ask your potential customers what services they are already using.

Analyze competitors' online presence

Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you want to look at their website, the type of content they are publishing, and their social media presence. Then, look for any blogs, white papers, and social media content being provided about their products and how to use them. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is the user experience like on their website?
  • Is it easy to navigate?
  • Do you clearly understand the products or services they offer?
  • Is their website mobile-optimized?
  • How often do they blog and most importantly, is the quality of their content good?
  • What topics do they blog about most frequently?
  • What social platforms are they actively using to talk about their products and services?
  • Is this content engaging their target audience?

The answers to these questions show you opportunities where you can outperform your competitors. You will want to pay close attention to anything they are doing well that you aren’t doing. This will help give you a better understanding of where you should be focusing your attention and resources.

Gather information

The best way to gather information about your competitors is by acting like one of their customers. Sign up for their email list so you can get an idea of how they communicate.

Also, follow their blog and social media accounts and watch how they interact with their customers online. What kind of experience do customers have with your competitors?

You should consider shopping from them so you can see what their product looks like and what the experience is like from a customer perspective.

Track your findings

Make sure you track your competitors' findings on a spreadsheet; it will help with ongoing monitoring. This isn’t a complicated process, you just need to keep track of what they are doing over time so that you can see how they change everything from pricing to marketing and promotional activities.

You’ll start by dividing your competitors into direct and indirect customer columns. You’ll then track the following information:

  • Company name
  • Social media sites
  • Unique features
  • Pros and cons
  • Screenshots and additional links

Check online reviews

Try to find as many reviews of your competitors as possible. Read their social media reviews, comments on their blogs, and case studies on their website. If they offer and present Google reviews, read them as well. It’s a good idea to understand not only the good things that your competitors may be doing, but the bad things as well. Include mentions with the Better Business Bureau about them in your research.

How customer-focused are they? This could be an opportunity for you to stand out. And, if they sell a product similar to yours, this will be a good way to find out if a lot of people are interested in it.

Any negative feedback will help you identify areas where you can improve your own product or service.

Identify areas for improvement

Now that you’ve taken note of some of the biggest differences between you and your competitors, it’s time to think about how you can use this information to improve your own business results.

Your competitive research should reveal at least one area your business can stand to improve in. This will help you learn how to engage better with your customers and online followers.

Keep in mind that competitive research is never a "one-and-done" event. Ongoing monitoring, such as observing how competitors evolve, is necessary to ensure that you are staying competitive in the marketplace.

Tools for competitive research

Software and technology now make it easier than ever to conduct competitive research. However, there are hundreds of competitive research tools on the market and narrowing down the right software can feel overwhelming.

This is why we’ve done the legwork and narrowed it down for you. Here are four tools you should consider using to conduct your competitive research:

SEMrush : This is one of the best competitive research tools on the market. It contains over 30 tools that can track things like SEO, PPC, keyword research, competitive research, and more. SEMrush will help you discover new competitors, find their best-used keywords, and analyze their ad copy. They have flexible pricing plans depending on your business needs.

SpyFu : This search analytics tool reveals the keywords websites buy on Google. So, once you’ve identified your biggest competitors, you can track every keyword they’ve bought. Plus, you can track every keyword they are ranking for and find the content and backlinks that helped them rank in the first place.

BuzzSumo : BuzzSumo lets you see how your content is matching up to your competitors’ content. You can see which content is shared more frequently on social media compared to others, and you can even schedule alerts on your competitors’ content which will make it easier to continue tracking them.

Owletter : Owletter tracks and analyzes emails sent from a website. This allows you to track your competitors’ email marketing and see what is and isn’t working for them. To get started, you’ll need to sign up to join your competitors’ email list. Then, every time you receive an email, Owletter will take a screenshot, analyze it, and alert you to any useful information.

Competitive research can seem daunting at first but it’s an essential part of running a successful business. When you incorporate the right tools into your research, you may find that it’s not as difficult as you imagined.

On some level, understanding your competitors is just as important as understanding your customers. Your competitors have valuable lessons to teach you and it’s important to regularly monitor their online activity. Doing so will strengthen your business and improve your own value for your customers.

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Brand Experience

Competitor Analysis

What is competitor analysis?

What are the benefits of competitor analysis, who are your competitors, what are the different aspects of competitive analysis, steps to performing competitive analysis, using competitor research to understand the wider picture, how often should i do competitor analysis, what tools can i use to do competitor analysis, taking action on your competitor analysis, see how qualtrics strategic brand works, competitor analysis & competitive market research.

25 min read Part of crafting a robust brand strategy involves understanding the competitive landscape. Find out why learning this context through competitor analysis is a vital ingredient in building your competitive advantage.

A foundational part of crafting a brand strategy relies on market orientation, i.e. the process of identifying and meeting the stated or hidden needs or wants of customers .

However, a critical part of your strategy is also associated with choosing how you want to compete, which naturally requires an understanding of the competition as well as your overall market share.

Focusing attention on your current and potential competition will help zero in on specific claims that you believe distinguish your brand from its competitors. The more you can understand the brands that directly and indirectly compete in your area of business or industry, the better you’re equipped to capitalize on opportunities and mitigate the threats to your own business.

That way you can ensure you are one step ahead of the game and the competition.

Learn about our competitive benchmarking study

Category competitors vs. the wider market

While it is important to pay attention to your most relevant competitors, businesses can be at risk by only focusing on what they believe are their category competitors.

However, what can really impact your market share is not seeing a category disruptor or a business redefining the category itself. In recent years, we have seen numerous examples of this – from Facebook and Google becoming major advertising channels to Amazon and eBay disrupting retail.

The ability to redefine a category by shifting the offered benefits to differentiate in new and unexpected ways was the foundational idea developed in The Blue Ocean Strategy .

It’s critical for businesses and brands to attend to this challenge, periodically take a broader view of industry trends, and look beyond their own category. Talk to consumers who have left your category – that way, you can understand if the “category” is losing consumers and what categories, outside of your own, you might be competing with.

Competitor analysis is used by the most successful businesses to remain forward-looking – it helps you revise strategy based on the insights you uncover and amplify what works.

Competitive analysis also helps businesses understand how they can improve by better serving their customers, based on customer feedback around other competing businesses in their market.

Businesses are better off if they know how they are faring when competing for market share, and why.

Businesses not executing regular competitive analysis risk not understanding when and why consumers prefer their competitors, not identifying their competitive vulnerabilities, and not seeing new threats and opportunities.

When marketers have a strong knowledge of their brand, it can be tempting to think that competitor analysis is an unnecessary exercise, but this is a common misconception.

Customer decision-making isn’t always straightforward or rational, but by asking your customers about their beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and experiences toward you and your competitors, you can build an accurate picture of how to become a more significant part of their everyday lives.

Most importantly: you can find actionable insights that lead to practical, positive changes to your marketing strategies, product or service, or business as a whole. This, ultimately, means that competitor analysis is a vital tool in cultivating a competitive edge.

5 benefits of competitive analysis

Image credit: QuickBooks

Direct, indirect, aspirational – all your competitors matter, and it’s important you understand their significance to what you’re trying to achieve, and where and how you will decide to compete. First, let’s look at how to find yours :

Ask your customers

The reason for this is that what we assume isn’t always true. People don’t stick to categories the way we often think they do – sometimes they think of alternatives that we might miss.

Only by talking to existing or potential customers can you reflect their point of view and understand their behaviors, your business’ role within that, and the wider competitive landscape.

Desk research

Read feature articles and industry trend reports and get a gauge for what’s here and now, and also on the horizon. That way you can stay one step ahead of your competitors and lead the market.

Online tools

There are a host of digital tools to help you hone in on a list of your competitors. Google Trends, for example, lets you see search results for various terms. Maps is a simple way to find locally-based rivals, while, SocialMention scours social media channels for brand mentions based on any search query.

The next thing you need to do is classify the competitors you’ve found into one of four groups:

1. Direct competitors

The brands that first come to mind when you think about your competition. They’re in your sector or neighborhood, marketing products and services that do the same like-for-like job as yours.

2. Indirect competitors

They address the same customer needs as your business does, but they do it differently. Your target audience will overlap with theirs but won’t be an exact match.

3. Substitute competitors

These don’t sell the same products but compete for consumer spending, e.g. bars, cafés, restaurants, delis, and supermarkets all compete for lunchtime trade on a main street.

4. New entrants

Competitors who have recently entered a market offering the same products or services.

With all this in mind, keep the lens wide and try to maintain an open mind. Try to take as broad a view of the competitive landscape as you can. Not only will you understand the context in which you operate better, but you will learn more too. Some of the best businesses take ideas that are working well in other markets and replicate them in their sphere.

For example, rather than looking to understand a beer brand’s market share, think of the competition as ‘share of throat.’ Why? Because not everyone likes beer, but they might like wine or gin – and these are often in competition with beer as someone’s drink of choice.

Competitor types

Image credit: Buffer

Marketing research, as applied to competitive analysis, is key to helping us understand consumer sentiment toward brands and products, as well as those of our competitors and how they influence the market.

This is because you’re asking the people that actually use them, or those who choose not to, and gaining valuable insight into why.

But this can be broken down into specific topics:

  • Who is the target audience of your competitors?
  • What do people like/dislike about the product/service/brand sentiment?
  • Why do people like/dislike the product/service/brand? And why do they use/not use the brand?
  • When do people use them? Are there particular circumstances or occasions of use?
  • How much would a customer spend, and why?
  • Are they front of mind for the customer when it comes to buying or using a product/service?
  • But most importantly, how does this stand up against you?

An effective way of conducting a competitor analysis is to break it down into stages, using the questions above as your framework.

Firstly, ask yourself – What do I already know?

Begin by conducting stakeholder interviews and tap into their vision and experience of the brand. See the market landscape from their perspective – it might be different from yours or your colleagues’. Then undertake desk research to get more insight into any broader trends that may be emerging, as well as review recent marketing research that may contain information about your competitors. It is key to begin any new marketing research efforts with some clear ideas about what you might find.

Secondly, ask yourself – what don’t I know?

But how do I know what I don’t know? – you might ask. Begin by casting your net wide, and then bring it in as you hone in on the information important to your business.

Any thorough competitor analysis will want to absorb and compare as much information as possible – but it’s crucial that you look at the right information that’s relevant for your business.

In essence, though, competitor analysis is all about information gathering. Generally, there are four business areas to concentrate on, which we’ll cover below. Some of them will require specialized competitor analysis tools, while others rely more on desk research and a bit of digging.

These metrics are the core numbers and details associated with your competitor as a business. And within that sphere, you can group those into sections like revenue, customers, funding, and basic info.

Whereas the latter might be a simple case of filling out details on your competitors’ number of employees, the name of their C-suite executives, locations, etc. via sources like LinkedIn or CrunchBase , metrics like revenue are harder to figure out.

Start by googling their names alongside ‘revenue’ or ‘customers’ to see what you can uncover from their website, press releases, and investor keynotes. If that doesn’t work, you can also try a business directory like Dun & Bradstreet .

2. Products and services

Understanding the products or services that your competitors offer is the key to finding market differentiation for your brand. The first thing you’ll need to do is answer a few basic qualitative questions:

  • What are your competitors selling?
  • What is their USP
  • What key features are offered?
  • What technology are they using?

Most of this information can likely be found on their website, but you should also consult their LinkedIn posts, job ads, and tools like BuiltWith to fill in any gaps.

After that, you can move on to more quantitative details around price. Questions to answer here include:

  • How much does their product cost?
  • Is that more or less than your closest equivalent?
  • Is it a subscription or a one-off fee?
  • Do your competitors offer more packages than you?

3. Target market and customer awareness

Whom are your competitors trying to sell to? Is it the same kind of customer your own company wants to attract? And, importantly, is it working? You can get a decent handle on that last question by monitoring both share of voice and sentiment. Most social listening and competitor analysis tools (more on those in a bit) will be able to track this for you.

The crucial part with both is: how does your competitor’s share of voice or sentiment rankings stack up to yours? It’s only really by tracking a range of competitors that you can apply meaning and context to the results your brand sees.

Social listening can also help you learn what customers are saying about your competitors and whether they’re listening. It’s also useful to see what kind of things your competitors are saying on their social channels – and on which ones.

For instance, if your competitor is posting more on say, TikTok than LinkedIn, then you can make an educated assumption that they’re probably looking to attract a younger audience.

4. Marketing strategy

The meta-information around the above line of inquiry can help you fill in a few more blanks, too. For example, you’ll learn the geographical markets your competitor is focussed on alongside which ones they aren’t, and you’ll soon develop a full picture of their online presence as it relates to their target market.

But beyond that, a vital part of competitor analysis is in examining direct and indirect competitors’ marketing strategies as a whole. And there are many areas to dive into:

Advertising

Alongside TV and other traditional ATL advertising, it’s helpful to use competitor analysis tools to find out how (and how often) other brands are running ads online. You’ll want to see how your advertising output matches up against your rivals’ Google, YouTube, Display, Facebook, and Twitter ads.

Social media and influencer marketing

As mentioned in the section above, it’s important to know where your direct competitors are focussing their efforts when it comes to social posting. Moreover, if you monitor engagement levels per platform, you’ll learn which channels it’s best for you to prioritize.

Content marketing

Are your competitors blogging? Do they publish thought-leadership pieces on LinkedIn? Do they make regular videos on their YouTube channel? Do they own or sponsor a podcast? And is any of it working? Learning what others are publishing and tracking engagement can be a useful benchmarking exercise, or – again – it can highlight potential gaps in the market.

SEO performance

Tracking content marketing will likely lead to monitoring the SEO performance of your direct competitors. There are several online tools (like PowerSuite, Ahrefs, Rank Tracker, and SimilarWeb) that can help you find out what keywords other brands are ranking for, and how you stack up in comparison.

Understanding this is crucial for adjusting your marketing strategy, to win a greater share of common search results in your industry.

Lead handling

Familiarize yourself with your competitors’ lead and sales process by venturing down it yourself. Watch a tutorial, book a demo, or make contact with their sales teams to see how much of the process is gated, how seamless things are, and how long responses take.

Similarly, competitors’ customer service is also something to keep an eye on: how do your rivals handle it? Take a look at Twitter complaints and note down their response times, or you could even email them with a ‘query’ of your own.

At this point, it’s also useful to gather insight on your designated topics from the point of view of the consumer. Marketers have various tools available to them to do this – surveys , social media listening, and purchasing panel data (E.g. Nielsen Panel, IRI), each serving a particular purpose.

Brands can leverage surveys to assess attitudes ; passive data can be used to understand behavior; and panels for market penetration and share. All of these, when used together, help to understand the sentiment and opinion about particular topics and competitors and give a broader view of the market.

You may want to segment this research too, so you can see how different audiences behave differently from competitors in the market. This will help you to establish where you are performing strongly, and how you can improve in relation to your competitors. Whilst knowing this information is great, it’s just as important to listen and act on the insights that arise from it.

There are tools to help with this. For example, the Qualtrics BrandXM platform can help you focus on the important points of action recommended in the platform.

Qualitative collection methods also play an important role. For example, social media listening tools are great at helping understand the share of voice and can help you set key metric benchmarks.

These can be used in partnership with more traditional qualitative collection methods too, like focus groups and interviews. Use these methods to dig deeper and talk to people to understand what drives their attitudes and behaviors.

At Qualtrics, we work with partners to help you facilitate this qualitative research. By pulling this qualitative data into BrandXM , you can quantify it and pull out trends and valuable insights in your dashboard. This will help you with your strategy moving forward.

Research only reflects a certain point in time, so if you want to stay ahead of the competition then you need to make sure that this data is maintained for accuracy. Many businesses find themselves wrong-footed, not because they did something wrong, but because they failed to anticipate changes in the market.

This is why keeping a pulse on how the business competes is important. Maintain an awareness of who’s gaining attention and who’s losing traction, amongst who too.

Do so by updating this research periodically, be it once a year, bi-annually, or every quarter. That way, whenever a change in strategy is taking place you can draw on the most recent data to establish this foundation for the change.

Traditionally, competitor analysis and other similar studies have been outsourced to agencies. However, these studies were often expensive, were slow to complete, and only reflected one point in time and you didn’t have access to real-time data. With advancements in technology, brands have far greater accessibility to tools that mean they can take this discipline in-house.

Complex processes and data have now been greatly simplified , so now everyone can be an expert with access to vital insights in real-time.

Qualtrics (quantitative and qualitative)

From usage & attitude studies to segmentation, brand perception , or awareness and perception tracking, Qualtrics BrandXM can get you up and running in no time. With all data in one platform, you can spend less time collating and cleaning survey responses, and more time listening and acting on your insights.

Qualtrics can also pull in all of your qualitative data at scale, giving you a holistic view of your competitors so you know how you compare. We also work with partners to give you the most comprehensive tool for competitor research. The partners listed below can be used to collect customer feedback about the competitive landscape in qualitative and quantitative formats.

Using Qualtrics, you’ll be able to see a holistic, unified snapshot of your place in the market, alongside a host of suggested actions for how to improve.

Qualtrics Research Services

If you don’t have an in-house team available to manage your data, Qualtrics research services can help. Our expert team oversees everything for you, from designing your studies, finding the right respondents, launching your surveys, and reporting on the results – so you can focus on taking action to improve your business. We’re with you every step of the way.

External partners:

Livinglens (qualitative).

LivingLens captures & analyses video content via speech, actions & sentiment, translating human behavior into insights. This makes working with video efficient and scalable, turning it into a usable data asset that you can gather insights from quickly.

Voxpopme (qualitative)

Whilst focus groups are still valuable, new approaches are being developed at scale that are changing the way we do market research . One example is Voxpopme , which “helps connect brands with consumers through real-time video feedback.” If you want to do in-store/shelf testing vs. interviews, digital usability testing, or tracking studies , Voxpopme gives access to qualitative insight at speed and scale for various use cases. Make the most of

Voxpopme’s on-demand community, or access your audience and capture, analyze and share insights from your customers all over the world.

BrandWatch (qualitative – social listening)

Various tools can help with social listening, and Qualtrics has an integration with a few partners – such as Brandwatch . Brandwatch gives “structure and meaning to the voices of billions of people, so you can make decisions that truly fit with consumer and buyer needs.” If you are just beginning to analyze your competitors and the market, social listening is your ally.

The reason for this is because it may (helpfully) challenge your perceptions of what you think is true by learning what your customers are saying about you and your competitors in their context. Brandwatch can also do scene analysis from sources such as pictures to help businesses understand the context in which they, and their competitors, are being consumed.

If you’ve used the right tools and completed all the steps above, you should have a robust view of the competitor landscape. And that means it’s time to take your learnings and use them to form a competitive advantage.

Exactly how you do that will depend on what you learn about industry trends, your market share, what your target audience thinks, and how your major competitors behave, but you should be able to spot areas for improvement in your offering.

But here are a few ideas of how to turn competitor analysis into actionable points:

1. Market your brand where they don’t

If you know that your competitors have left a gap for you to fill, it’s time to adjust your online marketing strategy to do just that. That might mean executing a new content marketing push on platforms that are being underserved by the competition. It could mean responding to people on social media who are currently being ignored. Or it could be working to ensure that your SEO performance puts you at the top of SERPs for more keywords.

2. Adjust pricing or features

If your competitor analysis shows that a direct or indirect competitor offers better value than you, then it’s time to make some adjustments. See if you can identify superfluous parts of the supply chain or other processes that allow you to carve out a stronger value proposition. That could even mean a change in how your products or services are offered – for instance adding a monthly subscription tier instead of just an annual one.

3. Act on known pain points

As mentioned, a truly comprehensive competitive analysis should include collating feedback from new and potential customers. With their responses, you might find experience gaps that nobody in the industry is helping to close. That then provides an opportunity to evolve your offering in such a way as to give people what they currently can’t get – and in an easier way.

And remember: Qualtrics can help you take action on your findings, and stay in the loop with where your brand sits in relation to your competitors.

Find out more about our competitive benchmarking study

Related resources

Question to ask for competitor analysis 4 min read, how to find your competitors 7 min read.

Market Segmentation

Market Fragmentation 9 min read

Brand Perception

Brand Sentiment 18 min read

Brand intelligence 12 min read.

Brand Awareness

How to Increase Brand Awareness 17 min read

How to build a brand 14 min read, request demo.

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market research your competition

Home Market Research

Competitor Research: What it is + How to conduct one

competitor-research

Having the feeling that your company is falling behind the competition is frustrating, right? Competitor research is one efficient strategy for staying one step ahead of the game. You can learn about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, gain valuable insights into their strategies, and ultimately improve your own business through competitive analysis.

In this post, I’ll discuss competitor research in detail and give you actionable tips on how to conduct it effectively. So brace yourself to overcome the competition.

What is Competitor Research?

Competitor research is the process of identifying your competitors, finding out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and evaluating their products or services. It helps you understand the market and find ways to differentiate your business.

You may learn a lot about the target market and the competition by analyzing the products and services of your big competitors. It also assists in identifying previously unnoticed industry trends in the business world.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market Evaluation

Why is Competitor Research Important?

Competitor research is an important aspect of business strategy because it allows companies to learn about their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Businesses can identify opportunities for improvement and areas where they can gain a competitive advantage by conducting a competitive analysis of their product or service, pricing, and marketing strategies.

Businesses may adapt their strategy to better serve their potential customers and position themselves to succeed in their industries by keeping up to date with what their competitors are doing. Following are some reasons for the importance of competitor analysis:

market research your competition

  • To Understand the Market: Competitive market research helps to find market trends, consumer preferences, and other important elements that have an impact on their industry by researching their competitors.
  • To Identify Opportunities: Businesses can identify market gaps where they can gain a competitive advantage by researching their competitors. For instance, they might identify market opportunities or brand-new customer groups to focus on.
  • To Develop Better Strategies: By conducting a comprehensive competitive analysis, you can better understand why customers choose to buy from you vs. your competitors. Businesses may identify what works and what doesn’t by analyzing what their major competitors are doing and then modifying their marketing strategy accordingly.

LEARN ABOUT: market research trends

Is competitor research qualitative or quantitative?

Competitor research can use both qualitative and quantitative methods based on the particular research objective and the data that needs to be collected.

  • Qualitative research collects non-numerical data and is frequently employed to better understand customer behavior, attitudes, and opinions. Conducting customer interviews, evaluating interactions on social media, and reviewing online reviews are examples of qualitative research methods.
  • Quantitative research contains the collection of numerical data and is frequently used to measure market trends and the behavior of customers. Quantitative research approaches include conducting surveys or questionnaires, evaluating sales data, or making use of web analytics tools to measure website traffic

The appropriate strategy will depend on the goals of the research, the resources available, and the exact information you want to learn from the research.

Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. In many cases, a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods can offer a complete picture of the competitive market.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

What should be included in competitor research?

A comprehensive competitor analysis or research should include some key elements to provide a complete picture of the market environment. Here are a few important things to consider:

Identify competitors

Analyzing the online presence of competitors.

  • Website Design and Layout: It covers your competitor’s website’s layout, design, user-friendliness, and mobile responsiveness.
  • Content Quality: It involves the accuracy, relevancy, and audience-usefulness of the content on your competitor’s website.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It analyzes the on-page and off-page SEO tactics used by your competitors, including how they make use of keywords, meta descriptions, headings, URL structures, domain authority, and link-building strategies.
  • Traffic Analysis: Find out how much organic and sponsored traffic your competitor’s website gets, including their use of calls-to-action, landing pages, and forms.
  • Social Media Integration: Check out how your competitors use social networking symbols and widgets on their websites.
  • Lead Generation: Check your competitor’s website for pop-ups, lead magnets, and other lead collection methods.

Competitive analysis of Products or Services

  • Identify the gaps: Product or service that your competitors provide but you do not.
  • Differentiators: Product or service that you provide but not by your competitors.

Pricing research

Marketing audit.

  • Sponsored Ad Campaigns
  • Social media advertisements
  • Newsletters

SWOT analysis

Gathering information and tracking your findings.

  • Business name
  • Social media
  • Special features
  • Pros and cons
  • additional details

Improvements and conclusions

Competitive research is a continuous process. For you to remain competitive in the market, ongoing monitoring is required, such as watching how competitors change. Creating a competitor analysis template will make future market research easier for you.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

Dumpster Diving vs. Value Driving: Which would you pick?

Instead of spending all of our time and money figuring out what the competition is doing — shouldn’t we just give our customers what they want?

Yeah. It was getting ridiculous. That little sentence almost got me fired. But, I had honestly had enough.

I was the 1-woman competitive intelligence department for a large pharmaceutical packaging company who had suddenly had a reality check moment when they saw bits and pieces of their multi-million dollar business start vanishing before their eyes.

Suddenly, I realized that other companies were providing the same products, and they went from one extreme to the other.

Over the next year or so, I did phone interviews, customer interviews, and even some dumpster diving, all for competitor analysis and with the intent of trying to figure out what was going on.

This was all in the days before the internet, so there was a lot of hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, kind of competitor analysis that I did. And my conclusion-customer satisfaction was a way better investment of time and money. But that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the competition and not do competitor analysis; no way.

How to begin the competitor research process

Figure out what do you want to know and why.

When I first started doing competitive intelligence, it was a knee-jerk reaction to seeing sales and profits dwindle.

  • Where did the money go?
  • Why aren’t they ordering the same number of parts as last year?
  • Who took my business?

And ultimately, the most important questions underlying all of these were “WHY were our customers leaving us?” and “What are we going to do about it?”

This was a good place to start our competitive analysis and competitive intelligence journey. The first step is knowing that you have competitors (duh! EVERYONE has competitors) and then understanding exactly what was important to our customers that we weren’t fulfilling on and our competitors were.

What’s your competitive dilemma?

  • Do you see a competitor getting more of your ideal customer than you are?
  • Do you see customers spending more on your type of product or service with someone else?
  • Do you see customers “doing it themselves” when you can do it better?

Get as specific as you can about exactly what you want to know and why.

What decisions are you going to make, and what information do you need to make them?

This is a sister question to the first and will often come only after you understand exactly what’s going on in your competitive landscape. But it’s a critical piece of information to have in your competitor’s research because it will drive your time, money, and resources for a good amount of time.

So, the clearer you are on what decisions you’re going to make and what information you need to make them, the faster the process will go and the more effective you’re going to be.

What is it about this “competitive situation” that have you stumped?

  • Are you trying to launch a new product and not sure if customers would switch from a competitor to you?
  • Are you considering getting into a new market and wondering how to position yourself against an entrenched competitor?
  • How many customers would you need to be successful?

Imagine that competition was NOT an issue; what would you need to know to be successful? This will help you identify and focus on very specific questions that will move your story and strategy forward and keep you from getting mired in “nice to know” information.

Decide on who your actual competition is in your competitor research

You probably believe that your greatest competitor is the person who lives next door, lives across the country, or offers the same service as you do. Is that right? Your competitors are any other possibilities that your customer may have to get the result that you promise. That is how I would define it. Keep reading to find out.

Types of Competition

As you can see, there are three categories of competition:

Direct competitors

Indirect competitors, secondary competitors.

Take a moment to list some of your direct and indirect competitors, as well as secondary competitors, now. This will really help you get some context around your competitor research.

Here are some Cool Tools That Will Help You Track Your Competition . Meanwhile, you can use some of our product survey templates and find out where your competitive advantage lies.

What tools can I use to do competitor analysis?

Competitive analysis is now more accessible than ever because of developments in software and technology. With so many options available, choosing the best tool for conducting market research might be difficult.

Because of this, I’ve done the research and narrowed it down for you. Let’s take a look:

  • Google Alerts: Set up a Google Alert to be notified whenever your competitor’s name, product, or brand name, or maybe even their management team, is mentioned.
  • Social Media Tracking: Use HootSuite to keep an eye on your competitors. I like this platform because it’s free, and you can make separate tabs for whatever you’re doing. So, make a tab that searches for the most important hashtags in your industry. Then, make another tab that searches for your competitors’ names and brand names.
  • Email Promotions: If your competitors use email marketing, SIGN UP to get their emails. Sure, they can take you off the list, but you’ll still get information in your inbox.
  • BuzzSumo: I started using BuzzSumo to come up with ideas for blog posts, but I’ve since learned that it’s also a great tool for figuring out how your competitors are doing. Just look up the name or brand of a competitor and see how many social shares they have.
  • HubSpot’s Marketing Grader: This was originally made as a way to get people to sign up for your email list and show you how to make your website better. But why not use it to rate the website of your competitor instead? It’s a simple way to see where they can’t reach customers (oh, and you can use it for your own site for the same thing).
  • Market research, Academic research, capturing qualitative and quantitative insights, and social media sentiment analysis .
  • Analyze pricing research data to determine market factors, including competition intelligence, purchase behavior, and pricing sensitivity.
  • A/B testing across questions, segments, and ideas.

Competitor Analysis FAQ

Is competitor analysis the same as swot analysis, why do we do competitor analysis, what are the types of competitor analysis, what are the objectives of competitor research.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

Final Words

Competitor research can be difficult initially, but it’s crucial to successful business management. It might not be as difficult as you thought when using the appropriate research tools.

QuestionPro is a set of research tools that let researchers make surveys, polls, online focus groups, and even mobile surveys. The platform has an easy-to-use interface and advanced customization options that let researchers make their surveys fit their specific research needs while collecting accurate data.

QuestionPro also has powerful tools for analyzing data, such as data visualization and real-time reporting , which make it easy for researchers to understand and present their findings. The automation features of the platform also make it easy for researchers to collect and look at data.

FREE TRIAL         LEARN MORE

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market research your competition

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Subscribe for exclusive access, the complete guide to market research: what it is, why you need it, and how to do it.

market research your competition

Written by Mary Kate Miller | June 1, 2021

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Components of market research

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Market research is a cornerstone of all successful, strategic businesses. It can also be daunting for entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup or start a side hustle . What is market research, anyway? And how do you…do it?

We’ll walk you through absolutely everything you need to know about the market research process so that by the end of this guide, you’ll be an expert in market research too. And what’s more important: you’ll have actionable steps you can take to start collecting your own market research.

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the organized process of gathering information about your target customers and market. Market research can help you better understand customer behavior and competitor strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide insight for the best strategies in launching new businesses and products. There are different ways to approach market research, including primary and secondary research and qualitative and quantitative research. The strongest approaches will include a combination of all four.

“Virtually every business can benefit from conducting some market research,” says Niles Koenigsberg of Real FiG Advertising + Marketing . “Market research can help you piece together your [business’s] strengths and weaknesses, along with your prospective opportunities, so that you can understand where your unique differentiators may lie.” Well-honed market research will help your brand stand out from the competition and help you see what you need to do to lead the market. It can also do so much more.

The Purposes of Market Research

Why do market research? It can help you…

  • Pinpoint your target market, create buyer personas, and develop a more holistic understanding of your customer base and market.
  • Understand current market conditions to evaluate risks and anticipate how your product or service will perform.
  • Validate a concept prior to launch.
  • Identify gaps in the market that your competitors have created or overlooked.
  • Solve problems that have been left unresolved by the existing product/brand offerings.
  • Identify opportunities and solutions for new products or services.
  • Develop killer marketing strategies .

What Are the Benefits of Market Research?

Strong market research can help your business in many ways. It can…

  • Strengthen your market position.
  • Help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.
  • Help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
  • Minimize risk.
  • Center your customers’ experience from the get-go.
  • Help you create a dynamic strategy based on market conditions and customer needs/demands.

What Are the Basic Methods of Market Research?

The basic methods of market research include surveys, personal interviews, customer observation, and the review of secondary research. In addition to these basic methods, a forward-thinking market research approach incorporates data from the digital landscape like social media analysis, SEO research, gathering feedback via forums, and more. Throughout this guide, we will cover each of the methods commonly used in market research to give you a comprehensive overview.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Primary and secondary are the two main types of market research you can do. The latter relies on research conducted by others. Primary research, on the other hand, refers to the fact-finding efforts you conduct on your own.

This approach is limited, however. It’s likely that the research objectives of these secondary data points differ from your own, and it can be difficult to confirm the veracity of their findings.

Primary Market Research

Primary research is more labor intensive, but it generally yields data that is exponentially more actionable. It can be conducted through interviews, surveys, online research, and your own data collection. Every new business should engage in primary market research prior to launch. It will help you validate that your idea has traction, and it will give you the information you need to help minimize financial risk.

You can hire an agency to conduct this research on your behalf. This brings the benefit of expertise, as you’ll likely work with a market research analyst. The downside is that hiring an agency can be expensive—too expensive for many burgeoning entrepreneurs. That brings us to the second approach. You can also do the market research yourself, which substantially reduces the financial burden of starting a new business .

Secondary Market Research

Secondary research includes resources like government databases and industry-specific data and publications. It can be beneficial to start your market research with secondary sources because it’s widely available and often free-to-access. This information will help you gain a broad overview of the market conditions for your new business.

Identify Your Goals and Your Audience

Before you begin conducting interviews or sending out surveys, you need to set your market research goals. At the end of your market research process, you want to have a clear idea of who your target market is—including demographic information like age, gender, and where they live—but you also want to start with a rough idea of who your audience might be and what you’re trying to achieve with market research.

You can pinpoint your objectives by asking yourself a series of guiding questions:

  • What are you hoping to discover through your research?
  • Who are you hoping to serve better because of your findings?
  • What do you think your market is?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • Are you testing the reception of a new product category or do you want to see if your product or service solves the problem left by a current gap in the market?
  • Are you just…testing the waters to get a sense of how people would react to a new brand?

Once you’ve narrowed down the “what” of your market research goals, you’re ready to move onto how you can best achieve them. Think of it like algebra. Many math problems start with “solve for x.” Once you know what you’re looking for, you can get to work trying to find it. It’s a heck of a lot easier to solve a problem when you know you’re looking for “x” than if you were to say “I’m gonna throw some numbers out there and see if I find a variable.”

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How to Do Market Research

This guide outlines every component of a comprehensive market research effort. Take into consideration the goals you have established for your market research, as they will influence which of these elements you’ll want to include in your market research strategy.

Secondary Data

Secondary data allows you to utilize pre-existing data to garner a sense of market conditions and opportunities. You can rely on published market studies, white papers, and public competitive information to start your market research journey.

Secondary data, while useful, is limited and cannot substitute your own primary data. It’s best used for quantitative data that can provide background to your more specific inquiries.

Find Your Customers Online

Once you’ve identified your target market, you can use online gathering spaces and forums to gain insights and give yourself a competitive advantage. Rebecca McCusker of The Creative Content Shop recommends internet recon as a vital tool for gaining a sense of customer needs and sentiment. “Read their posts and comments on forums, YouTube video comments, Facebook group [comments], and even Amazon/Goodreads book comments to get in their heads and see what people are saying.”

If you’re interested in engaging with your target demographic online, there are some general rules you should follow. First, secure the consent of any group moderators to ensure that you are acting within the group guidelines. Failure to do so could result in your eviction from the group.

Not all comments have the same research value. “Focus on the comments and posts with the most comments and highest engagement,” says McCusker. These high-engagement posts can give you a sense of what is already connecting and gaining traction within the group.

Social media can also be a great avenue for finding interview subjects. “LinkedIn is very useful if your [target customer] has a very specific job or works in a very specific industry or sector. It’s amazing the amount of people that will be willing to help,” explains Miguel González, a marketing executive at Dealers League . “My advice here is BE BRAVE, go to LinkedIn, or even to people you know and ask them, do quick interviews and ask real people that belong to that market and segment and get your buyer persona information first hand.”

Market research interviews can provide direct feedback on your brand, product, or service and give you a better understanding of consumer pain points and interests.

When organizing your market research interviews, you want to pay special attention to the sample group you’re selecting, as it will directly impact the information you receive. According to Tanya Zhang, the co-founder of Nimble Made , you want to first determine whether you want to choose a representative sample—for example, interviewing people who match each of the buyer persona/customer profiles you’ve developed—or a random sample.

“A sampling of your usual persona styles, for example, can validate details that you’ve already established about your product, while a random sampling may [help you] discover a new way people may use your product,” Zhang says.

Market Surveys

Market surveys solicit customer inclinations regarding your potential product or service through a series of open-ended questions. This direct outreach to your target audience can provide information on your customers’ preferences, attitudes, buying potential, and more.

Every expert we asked voiced unanimous support for market surveys as a powerful tool for market research. With the advent of various survey tools with accessible pricing—or free use—it’s never been easier to assemble, disseminate, and gather market surveys. While it should also be noted that surveys shouldn’t replace customer interviews , they can be used to supplement customer interviews to give you feedback from a broader audience.

Who to Include in Market Surveys

  • Current customers
  • Past customers
  • Your existing audience (such as social media/newsletter audiences)

Example Questions to Include in Market Surveys

While the exact questions will vary for each business, here are some common, helpful questions that you may want to consider for your market survey. Demographic Questions: the questions that help you understand, demographically, who your target customers are:

  • “What is your age?”
  • “Where do you live?”
  • “What is your gender identity?”
  • “What is your household income?”
  • “What is your household size?”
  • “What do you do for a living?”
  • “What is your highest level of education?”

Product-Based Questions: Whether you’re seeking feedback for an existing brand or an entirely new one, these questions will help you get a sense of how people feel about your business, product, or service:

  • “How well does/would our product/service meet your needs?”
  • “How does our product/service compare to similar products/services that you use?”
  • “How long have you been a customer?” or “What is the likelihood that you would be a customer of our brand?

Personal/Informative Questions: the deeper questions that help you understand how your audience thinks and what they care about.

  • “What are your biggest challenges?”
  • “What’s most important to you?”
  • “What do you do for fun (hobbies, interests, activities)?”
  • “Where do you seek new information when researching a new product?”
  • “How do you like to make purchases?”
  • “What is your preferred method for interacting with a brand?”

Survey Tools

Online survey tools make it easy to distribute surveys and collect responses. The best part is that there are many free tools available. If you’re making your own online survey, you may want to consider SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, or Zoho Survey.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a breakdown of how your business stacks up against the competition. There are many different ways to conduct this analysis. One of the most popular methods is a SWOT analysis, which stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” This type of analysis is helpful because it gives you a more robust understanding of why a customer might choose a competitor over your business. Seeing how you stack up against the competition can give you the direction you need to carve out your place as a market leader.

Social Media Analysis

Social media has fundamentally changed the market research landscape, making it easier than ever to engage with a wide swath of consumers. Follow your current or potential competitors on social media to see what they’re posting and how their audience is engaging with it. Social media can also give you a lower cost opportunity for testing different messaging and brand positioning.

SEO Analysis and Opportunities

SEO analysis can help you identify the digital competition for getting the word out about your brand, product, or service. You won’t want to overlook this valuable information. Search listening tools offer a novel approach to understanding the market and generating the content strategy that will drive business. Tools like Google Trends and Awario can streamline this process.

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About Mary Kate Miller

Mary Kate Miller writes about small business, real estate, and finance. In addition to writing for Foundr, her work has been published by The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Bustle, and more. She lives in Chicago.

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Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

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MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

buyers-journey-guide_3

Updated: 02/21/24

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

→ Download Now: Market Research Templates [Free Kit]

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

  • Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
  • Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

market research your competition

Free Market Research Kit

  • SWOT Analysis Template
  • Survey Template
  • Focus Group Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

  • Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
  • Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
  • What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
  • Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
  • What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
  • Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
  • Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
  • Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
  • Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

  • Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
  • Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

  • Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
  • Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
  • Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
  • Focus Groups
  • Product/ Service Use Research
  • Observation-Based Research
  • Buyer Persona Research
  • Market Segmentation Research
  • Pricing Research
  • Competitive Analysis Research
  • Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
  • Brand Awareness Research
  • Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

  • Define your buyer persona.
  • Identify a persona group to engage.
  • Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
  • List your primary competitors.
  • Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

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Four Ways to Use Market Research to Size Up Your Competition

by Caitlin Stewart , on April 27, 2015

Starting Line_Featured on www.blog.marketresearch.com

A simple way to know what your competition is up to is by researching it. Different market research solutions can provide you with the information you need to know in order to stand out, be different, and be better. Understanding both your direct and indirect competition will determine whether your business model can remain, or claim, the top spot in your market or if it must be altered to do so.

Here are four ways that market research can help you size up your competition:

1. Assess the market to identify both key players and those on the rise.

When thinking about your current and potential competition, a quick way to answer the basic questions is refer back to Michael Porter’s 5 Forces, a concept that is discussed in almost all marketing business classes. Think about:

  • Threat of new entrants
  • Threat of substitute products or services
  • Bargaining power of customers
  • Bargaining power of suppliers
  • Competitive rivalry

These considerations take a look into the market and the entire competitive landscape that is out there. By considering both key players and other potential threats, you will be better prepared to compete long term.

2. Focus on your key competition’s strengths AND weaknesses.

Your competition isn’t just a problem, they are a resource, too. Understanding your competition’s ups and downs can help you better determine what your company can do to be successful. Different syndicated reports and analysis identify key leaders in industries and provide in-depth assessments on companies’ different business strategies. Custom research projects can also be an effective way to examine SWOT analyses for your competitors.

Create a grid with the key benefits customers receive from your product or service along the top, and then make a list of direct and indirect customers along the side. Fill in which competitors offer which benefits. This is a simple task that can tell you directly what your competitors are offering that you aren’t, and vise versa.

3. Analyze any failures by your competition.

There have been many companies who have either had to completely pivot their business strategies or have failed all together. It’s important to be able to study business failures so you are better equipped to avoid them. Determine what factors led to a problem arising for a company and their decisions that ultimately did not solve the issue. Ultimately, knowing what caused businesses to fall can help you avoid the same mistakes.

4. Use your target market to your advantage.

If you are at this point in your business, you should have a clear definition of who your target audience is. And, their opinions matter. You can begin by doing simple research such as checking social media to see what is being said about your competition. Next, you can reach out to employees that are in contact with your customers, such as sales representatives. Find out if they have discussed competitors with clients, for example, if a sales rep hears a customer talk about your competition offering different promotions. And lastly, you can even reach out to your customers through surveys. Getting feedback from them directly can help you determine whether or not your company is appearing better or worse than the competition.

No matter what information you are looking for, market research will ultimately guide you to the data you need to make your business successful. MarketResearch.com’s newly upgraded research solution, Profound, can help you find the information you need to better understand your competitors and your market's competitive landscape. This cost effective solution gives users access to individual sections, chapters, tables or charts from syndicated reports without having to purchase the entire report, making it easier to acquire the bits and pieces of data you need of a variety of competitors for an affordable cost.

To learn more about how Profound can help you, visit our website and sign up for a free trial .  

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  Thanks for reading!

Caitlin Stewart Marketing Associate MarketResearch.com

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How to gain a competitive advantage by analyzing marketing initiatives by competitors

Written by by Jasmine Williams

Published on  November 30, 2023

Reading time  7 minutes

It doesn’t matter how niche a product or service you offer. There are probably other companies that do the same thing. Competition is a normal part of business–and it’s what drives innovation.

Digging into your competitor’s approach through a marketing competitor analysis is critical to putting together or updating your brand’s marketing strategy. It is the key to your business’s future success because when you look more closely into your competitors’ marketing, you learn from their successes and mistakes. And this informs your marketing game plan.

In this article, you’ll see why a marketing competitive analysis is important and get expert tips on conducting one.

What is competitor analysis in marketing?

Marketing competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies and tactics to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Look at the four Ps of marketing —product, price, place and promotion—these are four essential factors in marketing a product or service. Analyzing this gives you a competitive edge. Once you know more about your competitors’ methods, you can avoid their pitfalls and take advantage of missed opportunities to optimize your marketing.

A callout card that says, "Marketing competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies and tactics to identify their strengths and weaknesses."

But who exactly are your competitors? A competitor is any business that could pull market share away from your organization now or in the future.

There are two main types of competitors: direct and indirect. Direct competitors actively compete with you for the same customers, such as a similar business in your local area. Indirect competitors are those in the same category as you but sell different products or services and target a different market.

For example, if you run a B2B CRM software company that sells to small and medium-sized businesses, a CRM for enterprise clients would be your indirect competitor.

For a marketing competitor analysis, you should focus on your direct competitors.

How to analyze marketing competitors

To analyze your competitor’s marketing strategy, you need to gather as much competitive intelligence as possible about their marketing, from web and social media to field marketing. Fortunately, there are competitive intelligence tools to make this process much easier. You’ll also need to establish criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of their efforts.

What are the steps for a marketing competitor analysis?

While you were likely already familiar with the concept of a marketing competitor analysis, you might not know exactly how to put one together from scratch. Plus, with so much data available, you might find it tough to know where to start or where to focus.

Here’s a step by step process to get you started.

1. Determine your competitors

To find your direct competitors, turn to search engines, social media and customer insights to learn who’s competing against you. Search for keywords related to your product or service and see what other businesses rank for them.

For example, a Google search for “makeup brands” highlights a few of the world’s leading makeup companies.

A screenshot of a Google search for makeup brands.

Also follow social media hashtags related to your product or service. For example, if you run a home office furniture company, you might follow hashtags like #ergonomicchair or #homeoffice.

A screenshot of an Instagram post featuring a picture of a green desk chair and a green standing desk.

You could also survey and ask your customers what other brands they considered when making a similar purchase.

2. Research their content strategy

Once you have a shortlist of competitors, look at their online content. Consider these five key factors when evaluating your competitor’s content strategy:

  • Content type: Do they have a blog? Are they running paid social ads or posting organic social content? Publishing whitepapers/ebooks? Creating engaging videos? Podcasts? Take stock of the different kinds of content they’re producing.

Use tools like Meta’s Ad Library to see your competitors’ ads. Continuing with the furniture brand example, we can see that one brand, Autonomous, is currently promoting its bulk order promotion and an ErgoChair deal.

Knowing what types of discounts and products your competitors heavily promote is extremely helpful for your sales, marketing or product development strategies.

A screenshot of Autonomous’ current active Meta ads, as shown in the Meta Ad Library.

  • Total amount of content: If they have a blog, see how many posts have they published. Checking out how much content they’ve developed in total could help you set expectations or benchmarks for your content.
  • Publishing frequency: Are they publishing new content weekly, monthly or less often? Posting more frequently than your competitors could help you engage your audience better.
  • Quality: Is their content accurate, well-researched and polished? If not, this is a clear area where your brand can pull ahead.
  • Calls-to-action (CTAs): What’s their sales pitch? What unique selling propositions (USPs) do they include in the content? Use their approach as a guide—or try something entirely different to differentiate your brand. For example, scheduling software Calendly has a section on its homepage highlighting a few USPs, like its granular availability tools and easily shareable and embeddable scheduling link.

When it comes to competitor analysis, these USPs serve as a benchmark and inspiration for product development as they highlight features users expect from a scheduling tool. This will enable you to optimize your offer to compete.

A screenshot of Calendly’s homepage featuring its unique selling propositions.

3. Monitor their social media reach

According to The Sprout Social Index ™ 2023 , 68% of consumers follow brands on social to stay informed about new products or services. Look closely at your biggest competitors’ social presence and see how you compare and where to improve.

When conducting a social media competitive analysis , consider the following factors:

  • Audience size: Your competitors’ follower count may indicate your biggest competition.
  • Engagement: How many likes and comments does your competitor’s content get. If they’re getting a lot of attention, try to understand why.
  • Hashtags: What hashtags are your competitors using? How many people are tagging your competitors in posts? These factors help you better understand your competitors’ overall discoverability and level of brand awareness.
  • Top posts: Track competitor posts performing the best. Make a note of any patterns or themes and use this information to improve your content.

FYI: Sprout Social’s Listening and Competitive Analysis features make tracking these data points a breeze.

An image of Sprout Social's stats by profile feature.

4. Keep an eye on their online presence

Conduct keyword research to see what keywords your competitors use and rank highly for, and find new opportunities for your content. News mentions tell you about how your competitors are doing in the media and provide data for sentiment analysis (i.e., how the public feels about their brand).

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool offers a side-by-side competitor comparison of metrics like average positive sentiment. Sprout’s Listening insights also show you trends, topics and posts in your industry, all filterable by sentiment.

A screenshot of Sprout Social’s competitive analysis features such as total engagements, total unique authors, total potential impressions, and average positive sentiment.

Online reviews also give you insight into brand sentiment. Google Alerts will keep you in the loop about your competitors’ new content, news mentions and website changes. And ofcourse, our Spike Alerts help you monitor and respond to significant increases in mentions or keywords related to your brand or industry.

5. Evaluate their website for affiliations and events

Looking into the events your competitors attend or sponsor offers insight into their target audience, brand values and personality. Sponsoring an important cause also helps a brand foster a more positive reputation, so researching competitor events and affiliations will tell you more about what your target audience cares about, which you can use to your benefit in your marketing strategy.

For example, consulting firm Accenture sponsoring AfroTech, an annual conference for Black tech professionals, highlights their commitment to inclusion and diversity.

A screenshot from Accenture’s “Accenture at AfroTech 2023” webpage.

6. Consider working with a market research firm

If all this research and analysis sounds daunting, outsource the work to a market research firm. They will gather and analyze competitor data about your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Plus, since they’re not a part of your company, they often gather more neutral, unbiased findings.

7. Summarize findings and determine next steps

You’ve collected all this data, but what does it all mean? Once you’ve completed your research, break down your marketing competitor analysis into actionable takeaways that your key stakeholders can easily understand. Summarize the key findings and most interesting points, and use charts, graphs and other visual aids to make the data more digestible. Form your next steps based on the insights you gather.

Benefits of a marketing competitor analysis

Even if your competitors don’t change, your general market will. From evolving consumer behavior to new technological developments, your business must be aware of, and ready to, adapt to these shifts.

Plus, with the right tools for competitor analysis , you can quickly collect, refine and incorporate this data into your marketing strategy. For example, adding Sprout’s marketing toolkit makes competitive analysis less daunting and more automated.

Here are a few more ways regular competitor analysis marketing helps you stay agile and ahead of the curve.

Optimize product placement

Look at how your competitors position their products compared to yours. Analyze their messaging, branding and packaging to see how your products or services compare and what you can do better. Also, look at the channels they use to distribute their products, such as retail stores, online marketplaces or direct-to-consumer sales. If there are any channels they don’t use effectively, this could be an opportunity for your brand to shine.

Determine product outlook

Monitoring your competitors’ product releases and updates may uncover areas where they are falling behind. Fill in these gaps to better position your brand. Analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies helps you anticipate upcoming product launches or promotions that could impact your sales.

Establish benchmarks

Comparing your competitors’ marketing metrics, such as website traffic, social media engagement and conversion rates, allows you to set competitive benchmarks for improvement. Competitor analysis also often reveals industry best practices to incorporate into your marketing strategy.

Gain a competitive edge with marketing competitor analysis

A marketing competitor analysis is valuable for any business that wants to stay competitive and grow its market share. Keep an eye on your competitors to identify new growth opportunities, benchmark your performance and adapt to changes in the market.

Try Sprout free for 30 days and use our competitive analysis reports to get a leg up on your competition.

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What Sets Successful Startup Accelerators Apart

  • Susan Cohen,
  • Benjamin Hallen,
  • Christopher Bingham

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Research reveals three ways they help early-stage companies achieve higher funding and survival rates.

What role do business accelerators play in boosting the growth of early-stage companies? Accelerators provide a structured environment of mentorship, education, and resources in exchange for equity. And they work. Research involving numerous accelerator programs and interviews with various stakeholders reveals that startups in these programs typically achieve higher funding and survival rates. Three key strategies identified for their effectiveness include compressed advice, which offers intensive mentorship and customer feedback to refine business strategies quickly; friendly sibling rivalry, encouraging open sharing and competition among startups for accelerated learning and execution; and schedule transitions, enforcing structured developmental activities to balance broad learning with focused execution. These strategies, effective in the high-paced startup environment, are also applicable to broader organizational contexts for driving innovation and growth.

Business accelerators, often termed “startup accelerators” or “startup factories,” are organizations dedicated to fostering the rapid growth of early-stage companies. Typically operated by investors, corporations, or independent entities, they offer structured programs that usually span three to four months, providing selected startups with a combination of mentorship, educational workshops, networking opportunities, and often a modest amount of capital and office space. In exchange for these resources, accelerators usually require a small percentage of equity in participating startups.

market research your competition

  • SC Susan Cohen is an associate professor at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia.
  • BH Benjamin Hallen is the Dempsey Endowed Professor in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington and an associate editor at the  Strategic Management Journal.  
  • CB Christopher Bingham is the Phillip Hettleman Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Three steps for researching a new business market.

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Rockville Centre, N.Y.: A man walks in front of an optometrist's store in Rockville Centre, New ... [+] York. (Photo by Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

SPOILER ALERT: The classic movie Field of Dreams tells the story of an Iowa farmer who hears a voice saying, "If you build it, he will come”, and sees a vision of a baseball diamond. He then mortgages everything to build a baseball field. While he does experience initial financial hardship, he ultimately meets “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and the rest of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, reunites with his late father, and sees his baseball field become a financial cash cow.

If only real life worked that way.

Unfortunately, aspiring small business owners cannot just build something and expect consumers to follow. The steps between having a business idea and deciding to launch a small business require an understanding of who will buy your product or service. Oftentimes, people only rely on family and friends to determine if their business is viable, but conducting market research might be the right way to go if you are just getting started. Here are three steps that you can take to maximize your business's chances of success.

1. Increase Your Industry Knowledge

Before you start your business, you should become a student of the industry. Be sure to conduct all the necessary research on your product and consumers so that you can remain on par with your competitors.

2. Understand Your Market

There are a few things you should know about who you’re selling to before you start a business. According to the Small Business Administration, areas that you should consider include demand, market size, market saturation, and pricing.

3. Know Your Competitors

Chances are that your business will be competing with at least a few other businesses in your area. Conduct research on your competitors to see how much room is there for your business and if it can set itself apart with others based on services and prices.

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While having a sense of urgency to move forward with your business idea is a perfectly natural feeling, doing the research on the front end is critical. These steps can help you put your best foot forward in entering a new market.

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How to Compete Effectively with Your Industry's Emerging Brands

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  • 29 Feb 2024

Brand competition has escalated across industries. According to a study by market intelligence platform Crayon, 90 percent of companies report that their industries have become more competitive over the past three years—with 48 percent saying they’ve become much more competitive.

If you face brand competition in your industry, building customer loyalty is essential to your organization’s long-term survival—especially because data shows that 40 percent of consumers buy from a brand five or more times before considering themselves loyal.

But how do you get consumers to buy products so you can compete effectively with emerging brands?

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What Are Emerging Brands?

Emerging brands are new companies or products trying to break into established markets. They differentiate themselves by:

  • Uniquely addressing customer needs
  • Offering innovative products or services
  • Using modern marketing tactics

Outside of established brands that have stood the test of time—like Nike, Walmart, and McDonald’s—most companies experience substantial influxes of industry competition, with an average of 30,000 new products launched annually .

Many brands take a direct-to-consumer (DTC) approach to make quick pricing, positioning, and brand communication changes.

“Successful DTC brands have emerged by exploiting the shifts in how consumers engage with brands through digital channels and online communities and how they shop through e-commerce,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the online course Digital Marketing Strategy .

While many don’t succeed long term, they pressure the market.

“As DTC companies engage through digital means, established companies are also considering how they should market in these digital channels to compete,” Gupta says in the course.

If you want to handle your industry’s brand competition more effectively, here are four ways to differentiate your company.

4 Ways to Differentiate Your Brand in Your Industry

1. reassess your value proposition.

Value is critical to your brand's appeal.

“If you want to convince consumers to buy your product, you need to give them a compelling reason to purchase your brand instead of a competing brand,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy .

You can communicate that reason in your value proposition —the unique value or benefits your product or service provides.

To compete with emerging brands, evaluate your value proposition using the three C's of brand positioning:

  • Consumer analysis: Consumer behaviors, needs, preferences, and motivations
  • Competitor analysis: Competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and market position
  • Company analysis: Value proposition, capabilities, resources, and performance

By considering each, you can understand how factors like consumer behaviors and preferences impact your digital marketing plan .

“A brand co-creates its position with its consumers as they interact with each other and react to emerging cultural trends,” Gupta says in the course.

For example, despite Starbucks' dominance in the coffee industry, emerging brands like Flash Coffee —a Singapore-based, tech-savvy chain launched in 2020—competed with it by offering an innovative app and distribution structure aligned with consumers’ technology preferences.

Despite closing in 2023, Flash Coffee influenced Starbucks to harness technology through initiatives like its Odyssey loyalty program , which incorporates blockchain, NFTs, and the Metaverse.

Related: 3 Effective Methods for Assessing Customer Needs

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Your digital marketing strategy is only effective if you know who you’re trying to connect with.

“While you can try and market a product to everyone, consumers have different needs and preferences,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy . “What appeals to one group of consumers may not appeal to another .”

As a result, understanding your target audience —the group of consumers most likely interested in your products or services—is another way to compete against emerging brands.

To determine your target audience, collect data related to customers’:

  • Demographics: General information like age, gender, and occupation that helps you make implicit assumptions
  • Behavior: Behavior patterns related to your products or services, such as purchasing history and website interactions
  • Motivations: Primary motivations when making purchases, such as convenience, value, or status

For example, the music streaming service Spotify constantly analyzes data to understand users’ preferences and behaviors. That enables it to offer personalized features, such as Spotify Wrapped , to enhance consumers’ connection with the brand. It also aids in audience segmentation, or grouping users with similar tastes to offer tailored music recommendations.

A targeted approach is essential to maintaining a competitive edge in your industry and keeping consumers engaged.

Digital Marketing Strategy | Develop digital marketing strategies that reach and retain customers | Learn More

3. Build a Strong Social Media Presence

Your brand needs a strong social media presence to remain relevant in a digital world. According to a Sprout Social survey , 89 percent of consumers will buy from a brand they follow on social media, and 84 percent will choose that brand over a competitor.

Social media enables direct interaction between your brand and target audience. That two-way communication fosters a deep connection and encourages consumer engagement through:

  • Contests and giveaways
  • User-generated content
  • Live Q&A sessions

In Digital Marketing Strategy , Julie Bornstein, founder and CEO at fashion company THE YES, discusses how brands should think about social media and customer engagement.

“If you think about the places that consumers are spending the most time engaging, it's where they can respond,” Bornstein says in the course. “They can find things that are more relevant to them. And the more they do, the better the results get, and then they want to see it more.”

This is particularly true in industries like Bornstein’s, where social media and personal endorsements can significantly influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. Research by Nielsen shows that 77 percent of consumers are likelier to buy products recommended by a friend. In addition, 49 percent of TikTok users say they’ve purchased a product or service after seeing it advertised, reviewed, or promoted on the platform.

Creating a strong social media presence is crucial for enhancing your market position and defending against emerging brands that can quickly build trust and credibility .

4. Engage in Story-Making

Your brand’s story communicates its mission, builds trust with consumers, and motivates them to make purchases. According to research by content marketing agency Headstream, 55 percent of consumers are more likely to buy your product if they love your brand's story.

Your brand's success depends on how well it resonates with consumers, but keeping them engaged can be challenging.

For example, Digital Marketing Strategy highlights how global payment technology company Mastercard differentiated itself by moving away from traditional storytelling advertising.

“Advertising has been the main mode of communicating to the consumers and with the consumers,” says Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing officer, in the course. “Unfortunately, when every brand thinks up the same methodology to reach consumers, there’s an information overload.”

To better connect with audiences and communicate its message, the company implemented story-making with its Priceless Surprises campaign, inviting customers to become part of its story by sharing their experiences on social media in exchange for prizes.

“We said, ‘People remember things that they experience, as opposed to things that they listen to or watch,’” Rajamannar says. “If you experience something, it lasts with you for a long, long, long time. And that's very self-evident. So we said, therefore, ‘From storytelling, can we go to story-making? Meaning it's simply celebrating people, observing and celebrating priceless moments in people's lives. Can we curate priceless moments for people?’”

Mastercard created an emotional spark through the campaign that drove customer engagement and improved business performance.

By taking a similar approach and shifting from storytelling to story-making, you can turn passive audiences into active brand participants, adapt to digital marketing trends, and solidify your position in a crowded marketplace.

Your Guide to Online Learning Success | Download Your Free E-Book

How a Digital Marketing Strategy Can Help You Compete in Your Industry

A well-crafted strategy can help you outshine and compete with emerging brands by employing digital marketing skills like search engine optimization, social media, and content marketing.

One of the most effective ways to learn how to navigate brand competition is by enrolling in an online marketing course , such as Digital Marketing Strategy . Through real-world case studies and interactive exercises, you can better understand how you can excel in your industry.

Do you struggle to compete in your industry? Explore Digital Marketing Strategy to discover how to use the latest tactics and tools to position your brand for success. If you’re interested in online education but aren’t sure where to start, download our free guide to online learning success .

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COMMENTS

  1. Market research and competitive analysis

    Use competitive analysis to find a market advantage. Competitive analysis helps you learn from businesses competing for your potential customers. This is key to defining a competitive edge that creates sustainable revenue. Your competitive analysis should identify your competition by product line or service and market segment.

  2. Conduct a Competitive Analysis (With Examples) [2024] • Asana

    You decide to conduct a market analysis for your business. To do so, you would: Step 1: Use Google to compile a list of your competitors. Steps 2, 3, and 4: Use your competitors' websites, as well as SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, to deep-dive into the service offerings and marketing strategies of each company.

  3. What is a Competitive Analysis

    Research your competitors' sales tactics and results. Take a look at your competitors' pricing, as well as any perks they offer. Ensure you're meeting competitive shipping costs. Analyze how your competitors market their products. Take note of your competition's content strategy. Learn what technology stack your competitors use.

  4. How to Perform a Best-in-Class Competitor Analysis (w/ Template)

    Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your direct competitors' companies, products, and marketing strategies. To make your analysis truly useful, it's important to: Pick the right competitors to analyze. Know which aspects of your competitors' business are worth analyzing. Know where to look for the data.

  5. A step-by-step guide to competitive market analysis

    Additional research confirms your market is very interested in making the switch to electric. You decide to reallocate your budget toward researching, producing, and promoting electric vehicles. Five years pass, and you realize you would have been left in the dust had you failed to analyze the competition or ignored the warning signs.

  6. How to do market research: The complete guide for your brand

    Not everyone conducts market research for the same reason. While some may want to understand their audience better, others may want to see how their competitors are doing. As such, there are different types of market research you can conduct depending on your goal. Interviews. Interview-based market research allows for one-on-one interactions.

  7. Market Research: What It Is and How to Do It

    Market research allows you to discover the rules of the marketing game by understanding your target audience. Moreover, it allows you to understand who your opponent is by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. Research is what marketing pros do to plan their moves, and outperform their competition.

  8. What Is a Competitive Analysis & How to Do It (With Template)

    A competitive analysis is the process of gathering data about the products, sales, and marketing strategies of your competitors (i.e., other businesses in the same industry). Businesses use that data to identify their strengths and weaknesses and discover potential opportunities. A competitor analysis can help you understand the market ...

  9. What Is Competitor Analysis? Definition + Step-by-Step Guide

    A competitor analysis, also called competitive analysis and competition analysis, is the process of examining similar brands in your industry to gain insight into their offerings, branding, sales, and marketing approaches. Knowing your competitors in business analysis is important if you're a business owner, marketer, start-up founder, or ...

  10. How to conduct a competitive analysis with the help of surveys

    Step 2: Select top competitors. The next stage of the process is to select the competitors you'll be focusing your research on. We recommend distinguishing between the following different types of competitors: Known, direct competitors: These are mostly competitors that are most similar to you.

  11. Competitive market analysis: what it is and how to do it right

    Here are the 10 steps to effective competitor analysis and the analysis tools you can use to help you: Identify your competitors. Analyse your competitors' product offering. Investigate competitors' market share. Calculate your competitors' market reach. Find out how satisfied your competitors' customers are.

  12. How to Conduct Competitive Research for Your Business

    Competitive research helps you understand why customers choose to buy from you or your competitors and how your competition is marketing their products. Over time, this can help you improve your own marketing programs. Identifying market gaps. When you do competitive research, you're analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

  13. Competitor Analysis & Competitive Market Research

    The next thing you need to do is classify the competitors you've found into one of four groups: 1. Direct competitors. The brands that first come to mind when you think about your competition. They're in your sector or neighborhood, marketing products and services that do the same like-for-like job as yours. 2.

  14. Competitor Research: What it is + How to conduct one

    Competitor research is the process of identifying your competitors, finding out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and evaluating their products or services. It helps you understand the market and find ways to differentiate your business. You may learn a lot about the target market and the competition by analyzing the products and ...

  15. What Is a Competitive Analysis? (How-To Guide) (2023)

    Competitive analysis is a type of market research. It's the process of evaluating and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors in your market. It involves gathering and analyzing data on competitors' products, pricing, marketing strategies, distribution channels, and customer base. Doing a competitive analysis helps you ...

  16. The Complete Guide to Market Research: What It Is, Why You ...

    Market research is the organized process of gathering information about your target customers and market. Market research can help you better understand customer behavior and competitor strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide insight for the best strategies in launching new businesses and products. There are different ways to approach ...

  17. Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

    Download HubSpot's free, editable market research report template here. 1. Five Forces Analysis Template. Use Porter's Five Forces Model to understand an industry by analyzing five different criteria and how high the power, threat, or rivalry in each area is — here are the five criteria: Competitive rivalry.

  18. 10 Tips on How to Research Your Competition

    Here are 10 tips from entrepreneurs and small business owners on how you can start gathering information on your competitors. 1. Go beyond a google search. There's no doubt that any research ...

  19. Six Steps to Research Your Market and Competition

    4 Analyze your competition. Conducting a competitive analysis is an essential part of market research. To do this, you need to identify who your competitors are, what they offer, how they operate ...

  20. Four Ways to Use Market Research to Size Up Your Competition

    Here are four ways that market research can help you size up your competition: 1. Assess the market to identify both key players and those on the rise. When thinking about your current and potential competition, a quick way to answer the basic questions is refer back to Michael Porter's 5 Forces, a concept that is discussed in almost all ...

  21. Market Research and Competitive Analysis

    Examining your market and your competition reduces your risk and makes it more likely that your business will prosper. Define your target market. Your potential customers have a geographic location and certain characteristics. They could be local, regional, national, or international. ... Your market research for small businesses allowed you to ...

  22. How to Build a Competitive Analysis Report

    The next step is market research to gather and organize information about your competitors, customers and industry. Deep dive into particular customer segments with detailed customer profiles that will guide your marketing decisions later on. A social analytics tool like Sprout Social helps you conduct market research on social channels using ...

  23. Marketing Competitor Analysis: A Complete Guide

    Marketing competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors' marketing strategies and tactics to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Look at the four Ps of marketing —product, price, place and promotion—these are four essential factors in marketing a product or service.

  24. How to Research Competitors in Six Steps

    2 Identify your competitors. The next step is to find out who your competitors are. You can start by searching online for keywords related to your industry, niche, or target audience. You can also ...

  25. Put Marketing at the Core of Your Growth Strategy

    Companies that make the decision to put marketing at the core of their growth strategy outperform the competition, according to McKinsey research. Specifically, both B2C and B2B companies who view ...

  26. Dynamic competition and market structure for platform‐based products

    We consider dynamic competition between two platform-based products that exhibit two-sided network effects, such as game consoles and intelligent hardware. Firms compete in terms of pricing and Research & Development investment, which are driven by consumers' marginal utility of quality, indirect network effects, and the differentiation ...

  27. What Sets Successful Startup Accelerators Apart

    Research involving numerous accelerator programs and interviews with various stakeholders reveals that startups in these programs typically achieve higher funding and survival rates ...

  28. Three Steps For Researching A New Business Market

    According to the Small Business Administration, areas that you should consider include demand, market size, market saturation, and pricing. 3. Know Your Competitors

  29. A Beginner's Guide to Business Marketing

    Popular marketing acquisition channels; Your market's geographic distribution; These insights help you strategically focus your business marketing approach to reach the most relevant potential customers. And stand out from the competition across channels. Use Market Explorer to quickly research key market data points. There are three options ...

  30. How to Compete Effectively with Your Industry's Emerging Brands

    How a Digital Marketing Strategy Can Help You Compete in Your Industry. A well-crafted strategy can help you outshine and compete with emerging brands by employing digital marketing skills like search engine optimization, social media, and content marketing.. One of the most effective ways to learn how to navigate brand competition is by enrolling in an online marketing course, such as Digital ...