Let’s be honest – it is extremely challenging to succeed in marketing if you don’t keep track of your competition and the overall market.
Even if your product is top-notch and customer service is on-point, it is essential to take a methodical approach and carefully analyze what your most successful competitors are doing to be so effective.
Understanding your competitive landscape is at the heart of coming up with powerful marketing strategies and achieving sustainable growth.
So, let’s look deeper into this topic and talk about what steps you need to take to conduct a thorough competitive landscape analysis for your business.
What Does Competitive Landscape Analysis Mean?
Simply put, a process of identifying and investigating all about your competitors to fully understand where they stand on the market is known as Competitive Landscape analysis.
By “investigating,” we mean researching and learning everything about their marketing moves, sales tactics, product development efforts, and more. This way, it is easier to make more data-driven decisions and set the strategy that is effective for you.
Marketers often confuse competitive landscape analysis with competitor analysis, but there is an important distinction between the two – competitive landscape analysis helps you understand relationships between businesses and their positioning on the market.
Most primarily, analyzing your competitive landscape can give you information on your competitor’s market share, website traffic, and their growth trajectory.
Generally, regularly conducting these types of research helps you stay up-to-date with the trends and get ahead of your competitors on the market.
In fact, research shows that well-executed Data Analysis makes decision-making 5x faster for businesses. This is because of the simple fact that analyzing data helps management understand strategies that work on the market, making it easier to come up with more effective ideas that benefit business growth.
Besides, it is always helpful to have information about your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as strategies that they use to achieve their results.
5 Steps for Conducting a Thorough Competitive Landscape Analysis
Now that you understand what competitive landscape analysis is all about let’s put our learnings into practice and go through the 5 essential steps for executing this strategy:
Take a Look at the Market and Identify Your Competition
The first and probably the most important step in analyzing your competitive landscape is learning about your market and identifying key players on the field.
Start simple and don’t overcomplicate the process – creating a list of the ten strongest competitors and categorizing them into different categories will make the whole analyzing activity more streamlined and easy to follow.
Most commonly, companies tend to categorize their competitors into 4 different points:
- Primary Competitors are companies selling products that are highly similar to yours.
- Secondary Competitors are companies that sell versions of your product but with different features or geography.
- Perceived Competitors are companies that sell completely different products than you, but they could be an alternative purchase of your offer for the same audience.
- Future Competitors are companies that could potentially become your competitors in case they adjust their business direction.
Analyze Their Online Activities on Different Channels
In this step, it’s time to get more analytical and research your competitor’s activities across different channels.
Going only through their website and thoroughly analyzing their pages would not be enough – your competitive landscape research requires much more action nowadays. Here are the channels that are essential for this step:
- Webpages on their site
- Blog posts
- Press materials
- Podcasts, webinars, videos, etc.
- E-books, whitepapers
- Newsletters
- Social media channels
When conducting this research, keep in mind that your goal here is to understand their communication style, what perception they are trying to build, and how they position their brand in front of an audience.
In addition, monitoring their social media activities will easily help you understand what kind of communication is effective for your audience and what types of content pieces they react to the most.
Remember to get a feel of your competitor’s brand persona through this research and think about why they have taken this specific approach.
Evaluate Their Product Offerings and Pricing Models
Another important step for conducting a thorough competitive landscape analysis is mapping out your primary competitor’s product offerings and pricing models that they offer to their customers.
Try answering these questions to get started:
- Is their pricing model similar to yours?
- What kind of offering do they have for the product?
- Do they offer any incentives to their customers upon purchasing the product?
Evaluating their pricing model will help you understand if your pricing model makes sense and if it’s worth it to adjust your offering to stay competitive.
At the same time, you need to explore the learning opportunities from your competitors at all times to understand their strategies, get a competitive edge, and stay ahead in the market.
Understand Their Market Positioning and Branding
After collecting data and analyzing your competitors’ online activities and product offerings, you need to understand how they position themselves in the market and what perception they are trying to create for the public.
It is crucial to create a unique positioning for you on the market to stand out and get attention from your potential customers.
So, in this stage, it would be smart to have a look at your competitors’ styles, themes, and concepts they have chosen for creating their brand. What do they prioritize when communicating with customers? How do they differentiate themselves from others?
This way, it is easier to spot the trends, identify gaps, and come up with a positioning that will instantly get quality attention from your potential customers.
Conduct Analysis and Reflect on Your Learnings
Finally, it is important to collect the information you gathered from your research. Try mapping out all of your learnings and putting them into practice to improve your market positioning and branding.
For this process, there are many frameworks available that serve different purposes to assist you in analyzing data and finding key points for improvements in your business.
Frameworks such as SWOT Analysis, PEST Analysis, and others will help you look at your competitors from different angles and come up with the strategy that works best for you.
Let’s have a look at these frameworks in the next section of this article.
What Types of Competitive Analysis Frameworks Are There?
- SWOT Analysis is an analytical framework that can help you identify your competitor’s positioning in the market. Letters in this acronym stand for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
So, when it comes to analyzing your competitor’s current poisoning, you need to think about their strong and weak points, as well as what opportunities might arise or what threats and external factors are there to cause problems.
- PEST Analysis is another useful framework that can help you assess external factors in your business. Letters in this acronym stand for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological factors.
In this case, you must think about each one of those points and understand how your business will react to these pressures. For example – what implications would this year’s elections have on your and your competitor’s businesses?
- Strategic Group Analysis helps you categorize your competitors into different groups based on the business strategies they have chosen. Here, you should think about their pricing models, marketing tactics, geography, etc.
This kind of analysis can be useful in case you need to understand the nature of your competition. This way, it’s easier to identify opportunities and best practices to implement into your strategy.
- Perceptual Mapping is a framework that takes a visual approach and shows you where certain products, services, or even brands stand in comparison to others in the same market.
Imagine a basic chart with two axes, where the X axis describes one component of a business and the Y axis describes another. These components can be price, quality, efficiency, visibility, etc.
Put Your Learnings Into Action With PRNEWS.IO
One of the most exciting parts of conducting a competitive landscape analysis is that you get to learn all about the strategies that work the best in your industry and implement them to see better results.
For example, if you see that you can capture your audience’s attention by being actively published in different online publications, maybe that’s what you should be doing as part of your strategy.
Introducing PRNews.io – a platform that helps companies maximize the outcomes of their press releases and get guaranteed placements for sponsored content in international online publications.
Sounds interesting? Take a look at the list of our news sources for your potential placements, and get in touch with our team if you have any questions.
Read more:
- Competitive Positioning: Finding One’s Self And Self-Worth In A Competitive Pursuit
- Competitive Intelligence: What It Is & How To Gather It
- How To Manage Competitive Matrix For Effective Competitor Analysis
- What Is Competitive Benchmarking – A Comprehensive Guide
