It is a good sign that many creative minds are at work developing more businesses. It will be excellent if all of them flourish. Though it does not usually happen, the idea itself seems to fill happiness.
Competition is always good if taken positively. Competitive Analysis helps any business to improve. Though specific key takeaways of a competitor serve as a reference, using one’s creativity can result in improvised and creative outputs.
In real situations, every business is required to analyze competitive information to stand in the market. Below, we will study the significant details about performing competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis
Competitors are the ones who produce similar or dissimilar products and services as yours within the marketplace. For instance, consider yourselves as a milk biscuits manufacturing company. Another company producing similar milk biscuits, and those companies producing the milk and other flavors of biscuits could be considered your competitors.
And, notably, some of the companies could turn into your competitors by entering into your marketplace.
How can competitive analysis serve any business?
- Help know how customers feel about various products used in the market
- Know competitors shortcomings and strengths
- Improvise the existing marketing strategies to derive more successful results
Studying the competitors :
One question that is likely to bother us when performing a competitive analysis is, do we need to know about all the existing competitors?. The competitors’ numbers could vary depending on the type of industry. Consider all the competitors and know what and how they are executing things.
How is it that you can minimize the competition?
Market segmentation lies as an answer. Apart from this, marketing strategy could be more refined, including the essential aspects such as opening a new business outlet, price enhancements, discount, appealing packing, customer service enhancements, and new product development.
What are the significant steps of competitive analysis?
- Perform market research
- Collect competitor’s information
- Analyze competitor’s information
- Align marketing strategies
Perform market research
On what basis can you perform market research serves as the fundamental question of any business. Let us explore the essential points about the competitors that could help perform market research :
- The major competitors
- Duration of stay in the market
- Product and services
- Competitive advantage
- Customers opinion
- Revenue generated
- Market trend satisfaction
- Marketing strategy
- Growth rate
Collect competitor’s information
The primary sources for collecting competitors information include the following:
- Advertisements : Any business’s advertisements play a key role in helping understand and gain competitors’ information. The pricing details, attractiveness, features, and sales information are known through the advertisements. Notably, the way advertisements are designed, any incorporation of influential talk, the story involved, the characters, the audio, and the video play a significant role.
- Newspapers: Usually, businesses publish the information in the corresponding businesses page section of newspapers. Here is the right place to gain knowledge about the competitors’ focus, interests and ambitions. Moreover, the information about the new product launch and the new technologies used can also be known.
- Books: Even books serve as the primary means to know competitors’ information. Going through the books, one can gain significant knowledge about one’s business.
The author’s experience is the best lesson for anyone to know about the competitors.
Analyze competitor’s information
Prepare a tabular format. List out the products as the columns and the features as the rows. Place a tick mark in the box corresponding to the product and the feature if the product satisfies the features. Now compare yourself with the competitors. If you prove that you satisfy more of the features, you have the edge over others.
Align marketing strategies
Post analyzing the competitors’ information, study one’s position. If the rating is less, it is time to improve the services with the substitute products and services. Discuss the major problems hindering the workflow from producing the results at a faster pace. Improvise the marketing strategy covering the required guidelines for overcoming the difficulties and help face challenges.
Conclusion:
We saw how significant are the various stages of conducting competitive analysis. It sounds good if technologies can support the challenges across the various stages. AI tools are well designed to serve the purpose.
ONPASSIVE, powered by AI technology, has a creative AI product O-Desk ( erstwhile O-Lead ) intended to understand the market situation better and align one’s strategies accordingly.
SK golam Kabir
3 years ago