A Guide To Competitive Analysis For Your Business.
Marketing is nothing without powerful competitors. While they make it a difficult path for you having them also ensures you that you are on the way to achieve something great. But are these competitors easy to beat? To keep an eye on your competitor and getting something greater than them may seem a great way out but a more important part is to plan it all out.
Running a business, you are well aware of the importance of a great strategy and the same implies in this aspect. You need to plan out an effective strategy to beat your competitors. This will ensure that you are monitoring your competitor on regular basis and keeping proper updates of their workings. A wonderful thing to do here can be to conduct a competitive analysis. This will provide you in-depth information about your competitors and who amongst them are the key players in the market. So, let’s get going through a wonderful guide on what exactly competitive analysis is and how you can conduct this.
Let’s get started.
What is a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is an analysis report of the competitors which reflects the comparisons between the strengths and weaknesses of your working and your competitors. A nicely considered competitive analysis helps businesses track a record of the barriers and advantages of their aimed market.
What are the factors included in a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is a broad spectrum, it can vary widely depending upon your area of the target. You may focus on a specified area for the analysis or go for a generalized one too.
The major factors that all kinds of competitive analysis would include are:
- Your competitor
- Their target customers
- The unique value of their products or services
- Benefits they offer in their sales
- Their approach for shipping
- Their investments or any funding (if any)
Importance of competitive analysis in e-commerce
Competitive analysis in any kind of business is always helpful but considering the specified aspect of e-commerce, we can say that competitive analysis is a pre-execution work here. You must do this practice before getting into the market. It would help you in various aspects such as:
- Plan your marketing strategy
- Keep track of industry trends
- Provide a good pricing strategy
- Offering the latest communication methods with the consumers
- Keeping track of the gap in the market and making sure that there is a “market in the gap”.
Steps for conduction of competitive analysis
Conducting a great competitive analysis is a wholesome task in itself. But following few simple steps mindfully you can achieve your goal easily.
These steps are:
1. Create a list of your competitors:
Knowing who your competitors make your task of analysis much simpler. You know what your niche is and who are the ones that you need to beat to reach the top. So, create a list of at least 8-10 competitors.
2. Create a spreadsheet:
Collecting data is of no worth if it isn’t recorded properly. To conduct a good competitive analysis, you need to create a spreadsheet with all the major fields with the factors you are willing to cover in the analysis.
3. Identify primary/secondary competitors:
Keeping a track of multiple competitors is fine but to target, a single amongst them may be confusing at times. Differentiate amongst your competitors and identify them as primary, secondary, and tertiary. This would help you target each one of them at the right time.
4. Collect data:
Collecting accurate data is something that you are conducting this analysis for. You can either opt for tools or go for a manual search. But the best way is to first do a tool collection of data and then refine it with a proper manual search. With this, you wouldn’t miss out on any factor and would be able to cross-check the data collected by the tools.