How to Complete a Better Competitor Analysis

At the start of your journey to develop your business, you need to take a look at the marketplace you want to jump into. Who is your audience (I cover more on this in another blog)? How saturated is the market? And, who are you up against?

Who you are up against can really impact major business decisions throughout your journey, but what are you looking for when you are looking at your competitors?‍

You need to know your brand inside out before you start looking at your competitors. Try creating a profile on your own business (if you aren’t fully developed yet just get as much as you can) these ideas should get you started:

• Who are you?
• Where are you?
• Your offer - what is your business about
• Your Unique Selling Point (USP) - what is the most important thing about your business?
• What is your brand personality and tone of voice?
• Physical or online?
• Product or service?

Now you know you, you can start to know them. Start by picking 3-5 businesses that have similar offers that will be in direct competition with yourself and fill out a profile the same as yours for each one. The more information you can get the better.‍

Once you know who your competitors are you can start to compare how you shape up. Start by looking at each of your offers. These will probably be similar across all of you, you would expect this otherwise you wouldn't be in competition. But, your USP should be different. This is where you can start to tailor your offer and find your space. 

Let’s break this down to make it easier. You want to start an app-building service. There are already several out there:

New Business App Builds Ltd
SuperFast App Builds Ltd
Fitness App Builds Ltd‍

Each of these businesses is specific to their offer, whether their focus is a specific sector such as fitness or a specific attribute such as speed you can work out who their target audience is and see where you fit in, such as ‘Baking App Builds’ would be in the same space but you can differentiate your audience towards bakers.

This is a simplified version, often you will need to dig into a company a bit to see where you are similar and where you are different so for each competitor make a list of each one.

The next step is to see what they are getting right. There are a few things you can look at which will help:

• Look at their positive reviews
  Their website might have some, Facebook, Google, and Tripadvisor but also is there an industry-specific review site you can look at as well?
  Make note of any reviews that are more specific than ‘nice to work with’, this will help you learn about what your audience values. Any reviews that they have specifically shared as these are likely to focus on their USP.
  
  
• Look through their recent content
  What social platforms are they on and what are they posting? Do they have a regularly updated blog? Have they done a podcast episode in the last 2 years?
  This will not only help you define your audience but see what people are positively engaging with. It is the funny memes or educational content your audience prefers?
• Look at their branding and ‘About Us’
  This one might seem confusing but branding and colouring can influence emotions, and feelings so what is their brand trying to tell you about themselves? Then, what do they say about themselves? Is their brand consistent and is their tone of voice in keeping with their brand?
  
  
• Look through their website
  Is it well-made and easy to navigate? What features does it have? Is there anything you want to adapt to your plan?

This should give you a good start.

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You can do this at the same time as the positive list, perhaps even have them in two columns, positives and negatives. But companies tend to try and cover up their negatives more.

• Look at their negative reviews
  Is there anything in the negative reviews that your business model addresses, or could address? Are these reviews highlighting a problem or gap in the market? Also, look out for how the company is handling them. Are they replying and trying to fix the problem, being argumentative etc. all this will give you useful information
• Look at social media
  Look for negative comments and again how they are being addressed. Often people will complain publicly when they haven't received a response to their direct message. It’s also worth doing a search on social media for any mentions of them. They may not want this content to be related to them but people can still put it out there.

‍Knowing more about what they are getting wrong, whether that be poor customer service or people wanting a variation of their offer can really help you to specify into an area you can see an active audience is interested in.

It's worth knowing a bit about who is working for the competitor. Is the CEO a local person or part of a big corporation? Have a look through LinkedIn and see who works there and what specialities they have.

There are also companies such as Glassdoors that offer anonymous reviews on employers. Are there any problems in the company that would be good to know about?

After you have collected as much as you can about your competitors, you can start to use all this information to see what the gaps in the market are and how the audience needs them solved. Take this information and pair it with your audience research and you can develop a killer brand for your business and that’s a great starting place.