Understanding competitors is vital for business growth. Especially, B2B businesses have to do it to stay competitive. Analyzing the thought process, implementation and techniques adopted by the competitors can help B2B businesses to churn out enhanced implementations in the existing systems of any business.

Competitive/Competitor Analysis in B2B marketing

Analyzing the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is absolutely essential for B2B business.

Competitive analysis helps realize the stand you have in the market and the competitors. Moreover, it helps learn the market trends and knows what works fine and what do not. Importantly, it helps find the loopholes in the existing system. This paves the path to bring changes to the existing strategies and grow towards attaining future business prospects.

People look for services online. At the same time, they are looking at your competitors as well. They would finally choose the ones that best suit the requirements considering the quality, price and usability standards.

The slightest creative and appealing advantage will push the users to you that could contribute to profits and establish lifetime relationship.

Let us go ahead to know how to perform successful B2B marketing :

Know the competitors, and after a proper study, categorize them as the direct and indirect competitors.

Direct competitors:  They operate in the same geographical location, and your products can directly replace competitors products.

Indirect competitors: Products might not be similar or identical. However, they serve a similar purpose as your products do.

Focusing on direct competitors is suggested, as their scope of improvement is high, and so the business growth. At the same time, it is advised not to neglect indirect competitors completely.

Study competitors efforts:

Understanding competitors’ sales tactics and marketing strategies is significant to know the more refined means and implement them in your strategy.

CRM tools best identify the user who chooses competitors. If the tools do not automate it, then businesses are requested to implement it manually by asking questions users to tell them about why they choose competitors instead of you.

Following are the few questions that can be self posed to know the user’s perspective:

• What opinion do they have about the business products and services?
• Is it due to high prices, they choose competitors instead of yours?
• What are the outstanding features of the products that made competitors outstand?

Look at the Websites:

The primary way to know the competitors is to go through the websites. Check how well they have designed the page layout, the look and feel, user-friendliness,  business information to give a professional impression to your business.

Pose some key questions that help determine the website’s ranking

• Do you find blog sections?
• How has been the Call To Action defined
• What are the various products provided
• Are they using compelling audio and videos to showcase products and services?
• Is the FAQ section available
• Does the site provide the case studies

Social Media presence

Find your competitive presence on Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Check the engagement rate:

• Followers, likes and shares
• Rate of posting
• Count of engaged people

Post observing this. It is time to study your presence with theirs. Also, learning the social media strategy is equally important. The essential questionnaire includes the following:

• Check whether the content drives the users to the suitable landing pages
• Know how well the content is defined concerning quality
• Is there any video and audio integrated with the content?
• Does the content builds followers and draw their attention?

Conclusion :

Having gone through the competitor analysis, it is high time to set your guidelines that contribute to business growth.

Wish to track the competitors’ activities? The solution lies with ONPASSIVE’s O-Desk ( erstwhile O-Lead ), a CRM tool to identify the users matching your business requirements, and the current market analysis.

More such products find a place to explore. O-Create, to design SEO compliant

websites,  and O-Net to execute best of social networking guidelines.