- What is a competitor analysis?
- Why complete a competitor analysis?
- How to conduct a competitor analysis
- Social media competitive analysis
- Presenting your analysis – a case study
In marketing, competitive analysis is a type of market research. It involves identifying major competitors, then once you’ve identified current and potential competitors you can start investigating their products, sales and marketing strategies.
By researching your competitors you can gain a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Once you’ve got a good idea of your competitors’ strategies you can use this knowledge to adapt and improve your own strategy.
Competitive research is crucial to your success as a business because it arms you with the ability to quickly identify industry trends and adapt to competitor campaigns or strategies in order to maintain a foothold or out-compete them entirely.
Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a competitor analysis, you’ll be able to:
- Identify gaps in the market
- Gain a better understanding of the market
- Uncover market trends
- Determine market prices
- Develop new products and services
- Market and sell more effectively
- Customer acquisition
1. Identify your competitors
2. Examine your competitor’s website, offerings & customer experience
3. Establish your competitor’s market positioning
4. Analyse your competitor’s prices, sales tactics, marketing techniques and results.
5. Take note of your competition’s content strategy
– Analyse content engagement and promotion
6. Review social media
– Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms
7. Perform a personal and competitor SWOT Analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats)
For a more in-depth explanation of how to complete these steps check out this blog on HubSpot: What’s a Competitive Analysis & How Do You Conduct One?
Pictured here is a competitive analysis framework, a really useful resource created by Myk Pono. To see the full framework, check out: Competitive Analysis: How To Conduct a Competitive Analysis.
Try completing this framework along with the SWOT analysis template (download below) for your Fijian organisation to really get stuck into your competitor analysis!
Having a business presence on social media is becoming increasingly important. These social networks provide fantastic opportunities for companies to interact and share exciting content with customers and followers.
Our partners in Fiji don’t want to fall behind on this trend which is why so many of them are so keen to have you working on their social media strategies! Due to this demand, it seemed appropriate to include a section focused on completing a social media competitor analysis…
Let’s get started…
Brainstorm all the social media channels you can think of — including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit and Twitter — then consider some of the following questions:
- What is their social media presence like overall?
- Which social media channels do they use the most?
- What tone do they use to speak with their customers?
- How often do they interact with their following?
- How frequently do they post?
- What topics are they posting about?
- What types of content are they posting? Text, images, videos, blogs…
- Are there any social media channels they don’t use? Is there an opportunity for you there?
One of our very first virtual interns, Jessie, created some amazing competitor audits for us last summer. Here is a showcase of some of her work to give you a better understanding of how you might like to present your competitor analysis.
As part of her Instagram competitor audit for Think Pacific she looked at:
- Tone
- Format and Content
- Most frequent post types
- Traction
- User interaction
Check out these previews of her slides looking at Contiki’s Instagram page…
Here are downloadable PDFs of Jessie’s work so you can see the documents in more detail.