In today’s economy, markets are changing constantly. New companies enter the marketplace continuously making it important to keep up with new trends and strategies. Conducting a competitive analysis is one of many important tools used to analyze and review your business and how it compares to the competition.
What Is Competitive Analysis?
“Competitive analysis helps you learn from businesses competing for your potential customers” (sba.gov). Companies use competitive analysis to inspect the differences between themselves and competitors, examining everything from product pricing to the organization of a website homepage. In this way, companies zero in on specific strengths and weaknesses when compared to active competitors including brand awareness, marketing strategies and digital optimization.
How Do Companies Stand Out?
Many businesses want to stand out from the competition. By creating a strong brand identity- this may be a marketing strategy. A brand identity is the logo, tagline, message, mission and personality of your company. Your brand image is the personality your company portrays through marketing strategies, campaigns, and user experience. Since price is somewhat standardized by competition, these are the areas where companies get to differentiate their products or services and appeal to their customer. An example where a company used its marketing strategy to stand out is the “I’m a Mac” campaign where Apple put out videos of two men, one representing Mac computers and the other representing a PC. The videos all worked to portray the “Mac” as more of an innovative and easy-to-use option when compared to the PC, traits that most people were looking for in their ideal computer.
How Does Competitive Analysis Improve Marketing?
Considering it only “takes about 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about your website… whether they’ll stay or leave” (sweor.com), something as simple as your tagline or homepage organization could easily be the difference between a customer picking you or your competitor. This is where competitive analysis is so helpful. When you look at marketing and branding strategies from other companies, you can draw ideas from the most successful strategies to improve and innovate your own brand, while also making sure to steer clear of the less successful methods. One example of a company using competitive analysis to improve its brand was when Zoom took control of the market from Skype by making its branding more appealing to their target consumer. After analyzing their competition, Zoom saw that Skype was constantly having issues with customers complaining about its over complicated and unreliable system, in response, they took the opportunity to brand themselves as the reliable and easy-to-use video conferencing service. Eventually, once the pandemic hit, Zoom took over the market because their brand catered more to what the average consumer wanted.
How To Do A Competitive Analysis?
Create a competitive analysis by determining who your competitors are, understanding the target audience, and analyzing data (including social media strategies, digital strategies and other metrics). Comparative information can include marketing campaigns, website navigation and user experiences. Once you have defined your competitors and determined what data will be collected, all that’s left is to compare the different aspects of each company and how they seem to correlate to its success or lack thereof. With this analysis done, it’s much easier for your company to determine what actions it should take moving forward to be competitive and achieve success.
Work with us!
The information gained from comparing your company to its competitors is imperative to improving any business, whether that be a large company looking to stay relevant or a small one hoping to kickstart their growth and relevance. This is why over 90% of Fortune 500 companies utilize competitive analysis and yours should too. At sasse we use competitive analysis to provide strategic marketing, branding, and digital optimization to help you stand out from the competition and keep up with the market.
If your business is ready to create a strong brand, differentiate from the competition and conduct a competitive analysis, contact sasse today.
About the Author
Morgan Mercurio is a rising sophomore at Clemson University. Morgan is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in marketing. He enjoys drawing, video games, and of course, helping sasse clients with their marketing strategies.
