Competitive Analysis – Usefulness and Who Can Benefit from the Framework

Competitive analysis is an important part of sales and marketing and enables you to offer better and improved products and services to your target audience. In this process, you will be able to find out who your competitors are, the uniqueness of their products, and essentially their marketing strategies. 

Let us find out how competitor analysis will benefit you and the kind of entrepreneurs that can take advantage of the same. We will also explore in brief how to conduct market research. 

How will competitive analysis help and who can derive the benefits?

The online competitor analysis will be helpful for the business owners, founders of startup companies, entrepreneurs, whether old or new, marketers, and product managers. 

How will competitive analysis help you?

Go through the benefits here.

1. It will help you in identifying the value proposition of your product and how they are different from the products of the other vendors. 
2. By going through the reviews of your competitors’ products, you can improve yours in those areas and make sure that what others are not getting in your competitors’ products, you can offer the same to them. You can do so by incorporating additional features or making it more user-friendly. 
3. With the help of several competitor analysis tools available in the market, you can find out the industry standard or set a benchmark against which your brand growth can be assessed. 
4. These tools also help you to know which areas your competitors have not tapped into. So, you can explore these areas and offer something different to your customers which your competitors have not done yet. 

Having said about the benefits of competitor analysis, let us find out the next most important aspect related to the same. 

How to conduct market research?

A competitor analysis must be transparent, and you must be as honest as possible. It must be objective and must fulfill your purpose of writing the analysis framework. 

Here, you will find the 7-step process used for carrying out the competitor analysis framework. 

1. First, make a note of the products or services for evaluation. 
2. Finding the direct and the indirect competitors in the market for those products and services that you want to evaluate is the next step in the analysis framework. 
3. Research their online presence for the products they are selling if virtually is the only mode of doing business for that competitor. If possible, direct or in-person research is the best if your competitors operate from brick-and-mortar outlets as well. Seek feedback from several people and know-how customers rate the products of your competitors. 
4. Whatever feedback and reviews you get, make sure you are recording it in a document. Documentation will include charts for comparison, graphs, and textual content. 
5. Identify those areas where you must improve and work upon your products or services. 
6. Make the necessary improvements wherever applicable. 

Once you have done the above processes, it is time to measure the sales and profit. This measure will be based on the changes you have implemented following the competitive analysis you carried out.