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The Beginner’s 4-Step Process to Performing Effective Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is an invaluable strategic research tool that helps your company gauge rivals and discover golden opportunities in the market.

In this post, we’ll show you an effective 4-step process in performing a complete competitive analysis regardless of the industry you’re operating in.

What Is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis involves researching and analyzing competitors to understand their brand, strengths and weaknesses, and overall performance compared to your business. The more you understand your competitors, the easier it is to create successful business strategies that give you an edge in the market.

The Importance of Competitive Analysis in Today’s Digital-Driven Landscape

Everything is discussed on the Internet today, more specifically social media, which means most of your customers are talking about your brand online. Competitive analysis captures these insights so you can understand where your brand stands in the eyes of customers and among your fiercest rivals. 

Performing effective competitive analysis consistently allows your brand to take advantage of today’s digital-driven landscape and achieve phenomenal business results along the way.

The 4-Step Process to Performing Effective Competitive Analysis

 

1. List Your Top Competitors

There are three types of competitors to look out for:

Direct Competitors

Direct competitors offer the same products or services as your brand. Apple and Samsung are direct competitors, for example.

Indirect Competitors

Indirect competitors that do not offer the same products or services but operate in the same vertical. Smartphones, for instance, are indirect competitors to desktops today.

Tertiary Competitors

Tertiary competitors operate in your industry without directly competing with your brand. However, they may pivot or launch new product lines that can rival your company (e.g. Amazon’s AWS service).

2. Assess Your Competitors Fully

You need to analyze every detail of your competitors after listing. A basic competitor analysis checklist includes:

  • Operating revenue and income
  • Number of clients (local and international)
  • Operating areas and offices
  • Number of employees
  • Products and services on offer
  • Digital presence (websites, social media channels, etc.)
  • Recent or important company news and updates

Google should be more than enough in giving you all the information you need. Don’t forget about offline research techniques when analyzing your competitors. Call your competitors, attend industry events, try out their products—be creative but be careful to not be too invasive. The more information you have on your competitors, the better.

3. Analyze Their Content

Content is the next most important factor to assess when analyzing competitors. It’s no secret that great content is what drives digital success today. So, it’s wise to see what and how your competitors are doing in terms of producing content. 

Look at what they’re posting in their blogs. Do they prefer long-form content? What kind of language and tone are they using? Is there an emphasis on valuable content or are they focusing more on industry reports and research?

Blog posts are not the only crucial component in content marketing. Identify what your competitors are doing for videos, lead gen materials (whitepapers, case studies, etc.), Instagram stories, and so forth. You should also consider traditional media like newspapers and TV ads as they can be excellent sources of traffic for certain industries.

4. Identify Their Social Media Strategies

When analyzing your competitors’ social media channels, find out the platforms they’re most active in. For example, a B2B tech company will most likely favor LinkedIn and Twitter over casual platforms like Instagram or Snapchat.

Consider the following metrics when analyzing rival social media strategies:

  • Are their customers active in terms of participation?
  • Which types of content generate the best reaction?
  • What is the messaging your competitors are trying to get across?
  • How is content being presented (casual, professional, fun)?
  • What are the common CTAs and where do they sit in the sales cycle?

You’re better off using technology to gather vital social media data when performing competitive analysis. A tool like Lucidya not only analyzes your customers’ conversations, it also tracks your competitors’ social media activity and performance on every platform—you’ll save hundreds of hours of manual work just by leveraging the right technology.

Another critical metric to keep track of is share of voice. Traditionally, share of voice is the measurement for a brand’s dominance in a particular market or industry. Today, it is often used as the representation of a brand’s social media influence. Again, social media listening tools like Lucidya automatically determine your share of voice in comparison to your competitors so you don’t have to do the tedious data work.

Lucidya’s share of voice feature for social media benchmarking

The example above shows a sample share of voice analysis for three prominent Saudi banks, Alinma Bank, Saudi Investment Bank, and Samba Bank. Aside from share of voice, the report also shows the performance of each bank in terms of audience engagement and social media reach while highlighting the top performers for each category.

Once you’re done with the 4 steps above, you should have enough data to create comprehensive competitive analysis reports. Your findings can then be utilized to great effect across your company, from improving social media marketing strategies to enhancing product development.

How Lucidya Eases Competitive Analysis for Your Business

A complete competitive analysis takes time and effort, but the benefits you reap in the end are second to none. It helps you assess your influence among your target audience, how your competitors are performing, and spot hidden opportunities that can bring in warm leads and generate revenue.

Lucidya is an AI-powered social media listening tool that empowers companies operating in Arabic-speaking countries with in-depth, never-before-seen customer insights. With Lucidya, businesses can build profitable products, boost customer satisfaction, execute successful campaigns, and close more sales thanks to our extensive list of social media listening features.

Ready to empower your competitive analysis strategy?

 

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