Thorough competitor analysis is a crucial aspect of any marketing plan.
It helps you understand how challenging it could be to crack a market, what strategies could work, and how you can best position your brand.
It can also tell you what strategies won’t work, what the customer’s expectations are and how much they’re willing to pay.
Without it, you likely won’t survive a day in a new market.
You need to study your competition not only when you’re starting out but also periodically after cementing your feet in the market. This way, you can stay on top of your game, consistently growing your market share.
Not sure where to start?
We’ve got an easy, 6-step competitor analysis template for you in this guide. We’ll also share templates to help you document your findings.
Competitor analysis is the strategic research of your competitors to study their strengths and weaknesses.
By taking the time to analyze your current and potential competitors, you can identify areas for improvement. You want to look out for things like their value proposition, product, marketing and sales tactics.
Besides helping you find gaps in the market, studying your competition helps in the following ways:
A competitor analysis seeks to study all available information on your competitors, including their pricing, differentiators, positioning, product portfolio, strengths and weaknesses.
The steps below will help you uncover all this and more.
Chances are you can recall who your competitors are in a breath.
But if you’re new, identifying who your direct and indirect competitors are will take some time.
Keep in mind that direct competitors offer products and services similar to yours, positioning them as a substitute for your business. They also mostly target the same audience.
On the flip side, indirect competitors are businesses that don’t necessarily offer the same product or service. However, their offering can solve the same customer problem that your business solves.
An easy, cost-effective way to identify competitors is by typing in your product type into the Google search bar.
Let’s suppose you have a project management software. A quick Google search on this will turn up names of companies offering the same type of software.
For creating a comprehensive list of competitors, make sure you google synonyms too. This could be a “project management tool” for the example above.
Another useful tactic is to conduct the same research on social media.
Type in what your business does and you’ll see similar business names pop up.
You can also surf hashtags to learn how other companies are using them.
Lastly, if you’re conducting market research interviews, pay attention to the brand names that target buyers mention in their interviews.
Once you know who your competitors are, start studying them one by one.
Go through their product portfolio. Look at the products they offer, how they position and price them. Record your findings in a worksheet so you can track and analyze the data you’re gathering. Visme allows you to do this quickly and easily.
You can also grab a template from Visme’s template gallery and create a product and pricing sketch for each competitor. This will make it easy for you to visualize individual competitors.
To determine competitors’ market share, use Statista or a similar resource to get your hands on the numbers.
Track and visualize your findings in this template.
A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis helps you study what competitors are doing to win customers. You can also use it to identify gaps in your market.
For example, let's say a competitor’s customer support team takes pretty long to get back to customers. You can use the information to provide faster customer support and a better experience for customers.
As you hunt for competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, study the following areas:
Running an ecommerce business? Study competitors’ shipping and product return strategies as well.
An effective way to jump-start studying competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and more is through social listening. The goal? To identify what customers are saying about brands on social media channels they use, including chat forums and groups they are a part of.
A similar approach is to study customer reviews. This will help you understand what your competitors’ customers are saying about them.
Are they satisfied with the product quality? Or are they put off by their onboarding process? Do their support requests take long to get answered?
As you go about researching, record your findings in a SWOT analysis template like this one:
If you’re a Visme user, you have the benefit of coordinating your SWOT research efforts with your team.
If you and your business partner are working together on the research work, you can both access and edit the worksheet in Visme at the same time.
To do this, use the Share option from the top right side of your project dashboard in Visme. Select "Share Privately" and add your partner to the project.
From there, you two can collaborate on design, leaving comments for each other.
We’ve already mentioned that you need to make notes on how your competitors price their products. But studying their pricing strategy goes deeper.
First, review what discounts competitors offer. Then look at how often they offer discounts.
Studying your competitors’ promo strategies will help you understand how they’re attracting customers and growing sales. It will also give you a good idea of how much the target market is willing to pay and what their expectations are in terms of discounts.
In addition to the manual research to uncover individual competitor pricing, use the same research tools mentioned above — social listening and customer reviews. They'll help identify what customers are saying. Pay attention to how customers respond to the discounts and promotions that competitors run.
Some businesses tend to offer discounts shortly after they launch new products. This can be a turn-off for shoppers who like to shop for the latest collections to stand out from their peers.
Similarly, other businesses extend product deals now and then despite telling customers it’s their last chance to buy.
See if and how that annoys customers and if there’s an opportunity for you to offer something more relevant and unique to the target market.
It’s important to study how competitors are raising brand awareness and moving leads down their marketing funnel.
Begin by identifying where your leading competitors are funneling their resources. Is it PPC they’re investing in? Or are they taking the community-building approach to attract, engage and nurture customers?
Chances are your competitors are big on educating customers, so they’re investing in content marketing.
Also, look at which channels competitors are focusing on. Is it Twitter or Reddit? Or do they have a strong presence on Instagram?
The answer to this will help you understand where your target audience is present and which marketing channels you should focus on.
Take Clearscope, an SEO content optimization tool, for example. They take an educational approach to their marketing by creating lots of webinar content.
Ahrefs, another SEO tool, on the other hand, is also big on the educational approach. But they create blog content, not webinars.
In this last step, compile all your research in written format.
Create an action plan that includes a tactical list of steps to take. This way, you can discuss and prioritize steps to take with your team. Aim to be concise as you create this competitor analysis document.
If you create a wordy report, nobody will read it. But if you create a document that summarizes your findings and visualizes data in the form of charts and graphs, more people will read and appreciate your hard work.
Want some good news? Visme makes it uber-simple to create easy-to-read graphs and charts. It can help you create an easily shareable and visually engaging analysis document.
Design graphs using templates like the one below:
Alternatively, create new charts in your presentation or report.
All you have to do is to head to Charts & Graphs on the left side of your design dashboard and choose the type of chart you want to create.
From there, Visme gives you a chart to enter data so it can create a custom graph for your project. You can resize the graph you create, tweak its color, animate it and add other interacgive effects.
When you are done designing your document you can easily share it with the rest of your team. Head to the Share button at the top right corner of your design dashboard.
Now select Share Privately from the left side and give permission to team members. Choose whether they can view your work, comment on it, or edit it.
If you prefer to get a link for the work you’ve created, simply grab it from the bottom of the page and share it with your team.
By going into Advanced Settings on the left side, followed by Privacy. You can also allow your team to download the competitor analysis report as a PDF.
And, finally, for the templates that we promised:
Use this infographic template to record your competitors’ pricing, unique selling proposition (USP), revenue and more.
Since the information is arranged in a table format, you can easily study how each competitor stands against another and how they compare to business.
If you’re looking to pitch some growth ideas to your executive team, this interactive competitor analysis template is for you.
It’s neatly designed so that all information is easy to read.
There are a handful of slides in the template that use tables to compare competitors. You can also always add more slides or remove some to suit your needs.
This is the perfect template for studying and comparing two competitors.
If you prefer, you can also use the beautifully designed template to analyze your business against your leading competitor.
And if need be, you can add another row for comparing another competitor.
This is another competitor analysis template to pitch two competitors against one another.
What makes it different from the template above is that it arranges all the comparative pointers at the center. This way, you won’t need to keep looking to the left side to see which pointer you’re studying.
This is a great template to record findings on each competitor.
By using it, you can easily get a snapshot of each of your competitor’s free and paid products, USP, features, target market and the marketing channels they use.
This template is perfect for recording not just your competitors’ products, features and pricing but also their SWOT analysis.
Consequently, this competitor analysis template can serve as your readable database with all your research findings.
If you’re looking to record your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, then this template is perfect.
And if you’re conducting several competitors’ SWOT analyses, make sure you use this template for each one of them.
This competitor analysis template is useful for comparing your business with your leading competition.
As well as a comparative table, it also features space to record other essential details such as company overview, key differentiators, customer pain points and benefits.
This one is a simple, minimally-designed competitor analysis template for comparing various competitors.
If you need to add another column, you can easily do so by editing the template in Visme.
Lastly, we’ve got this competitor analysis template.
Its best feature is that the template divides each column into sub-categories, which makes it easy to analyze each aspect.
For example, within the product column, you can easily learn about a competitor’s product features, pricing and USP.
So you see, competitor analysis is critical for tapping into and growing in a market.
But remember, analyzing your competitors and their moves is only part of the task. The other part involves documenting your findings in an easy-to-read and understandable way. This is key to making sure your team implements the findings from the research.
Want to start recording your findings? Sign up for Visme’s document creator for free today and start documenting actionable takeaways.
