How will you know how many points you’ll need to win if you don’t know the score? Competitor analysis is priceless for understanding where you stand in a competitive market. It shows you how your competitors attract new customers, engage with them, and make sales, allowing you to outperform them.
In this post, we’ll look at competitor analysis in more detail!
Competitive analysis allows you to understand your major competitors' products, sales, and marketing tactics. So, when doing a competitor analysis, you'll learn everything about how your competition works.
This means, on the one hand, you'll learn what your competitors are doing right. As a result, you'll know what you need to do to stand out from the crowd. Conversely, you'll also learn where your competitors are falling short.
In other words, you'll learn where you're performing better, identify opportunities you can take advantage of, and understand how to meet your shared audience's demands better.
Ultimately, when you perform competitor analysis, you'll gather valuable insights that'll allow you to improve your own business. For instance, a competitor analysis can help you improve your strategies, stay ahead of your competitors, and grab a bigger market share.
Now that we’ve recapped what competitor analysis is, let’s look at how you would analyze your competitors in the modern way.
Let's face it; you can't compare yourself to every single business that sells similar products or offers similar services as you. This means that you'll need to choose your competitors carefully to get the most value from competitor analysis.
If you don't, you risk comparing yourself to businesses you shouldn't, which can be frustrating.
The best approach is to divide your competitors into two categories – direct and indirect. Direct competitors are businesses that offer a product or service similar to yours, while indirect competitors provide different products that could also solve customers' problems.
Once you've divided your competitors like this, start by focusing more on direct competitors.
Once you've made a list of your competitors, you'll need to decide what you'd like to compare. This is simply because there are too many aspects for you to compare them effectively.
So, for your efforts to make the most sense, you'll need to decide on the metrics you'll compare. These metrics can be anything from your competitor's rankings in search engine results, the content they create, their engagement on social media, and more, depending on your specific circumstances.
Similarly, decide if you’ll undergo the competitive analysis to understand products, pricing, operations, or other aspects of your competitors’ functioning.
Before you analyze any of the metrics you've chosen, you should look at your competitors' websites. Their websites form the foundation of their online presence and how they attract customers, after all.
So, look at the design of their websites, consider how easy and engaging their websites are to use, the content they host on their websites, and the copy they use on their sales pages. Keep in mind, though, doing this isn't a once-off exercise. You'll want to do this consistently to see how your competitors change their websites and how these changes impact the other metrics you're tracking.
Now, you don’t have to do it manually every single time. Simply use ScreenshotAPI to grab programmatic screenshots and know when your competitors change their websites, products, or pricing.
Unfortunately, in a market filled with similar products that have comparable pricing and features, the reality is that customers may often choose products based on price.
Thus, to ensure that you're able to compete as effectively as possible, your pricing needs to be competitive. You'll need to figure out the following:
Generally, to be competitive, you'll want your pricing to be the same or lower than your competitors' pricing. Keep in mind, though, if your product or service is demonstrably better than your competitors' offerings, you could charge more.
Ultimately, with the insights you get from the competitor analysis, you'll learn where you can improve your pricing strategy.
Once you've performed the steps above and analyzed the metrics, you'll have a deeper understanding of what’s working for your competitors, what's not, and how they attract their customers.
However, all these insights won't amount to much if you don't use them to identify where you can improve.
So, after reviewing the information you've got about every competitor, you'll need to identify areas where you can improve your business. When you do, you'll improve your website, messaging, and positioning, attracting more customers and increasing your revenue.
Finally, when doing competitor analysis, you’ll need to use the right competitor tracking tools.
For example, when you want to know what keywords your competitors use to rank their websites in search results, you’ll probably need an SEO tool. Likewise, you'll need a website profiler to have a deeper understanding of what frameworks and technologies your competitors use on their websites.
These tools will allow you to gather the information you need to seamlessly improve your efforts.
And speaking of tools, you should include ScreenshotAPI in your competitor analysis toolkit. Our platform allows you to take programmatic screenshots of websites in seconds.
Once taken, you can save these screenshots in any format you'd like. You can even take timed screenshots at certain times of the day and extract the text from screenshots.
Ultimately, with our tool, you'll always know what your competitors are doing to reach their customers and how they price their products. All you have to do then is make improvements to attract more customers!
To learn more about our platform and how it can provide the competitor insights you need, get started for free today.
