How to Research Efficiently About Your Competition?

Being competitive is not a choice, but a necessity in today’s hyper-competitive market. If you want to survive, you must keep an eye on your competitors. You must question yourself—who your competitors are? What are your competitors doing? and how their response to the market is impacting you?

To know all this, you must have well-defined competitor research and market analysis processes in place. You must strategically implement the strategy to research your competitors. Find out about their operations, their prices, their value proposition to the clients, etc. It will help you get an edge over your competition.

When was the last time you ran a quick check on your competition? If you’re not sure, you are likely to miss out on some vital information. But before you go ahead and visit their website or have a glimpse of their social media account, have a look at these tips on how you can conduct complete research efficiently.

1. Identify your competitors

To start with, you need to figure out who you are competing with. By identifying your competitors, you can be sure that the data you get to compare with yours is relevant.

You may segregate your competitors as your direct and indirect competitors. All direct competitors are those businesses that operate in your geographic location and sell products that substitute for your product. Indirect competitors do not currently sell the substitute product but can solve a similar customer problem.

For your brand, you need to focus only on direct competitors. But keep the indirect ones on the radar, as they can become direct competitors anytime if they want to. For example—if you are conducting competitor research for your office wear clothing line, another company providing office wear is your direct competitor. But, you can’t completely ignore a company which is currently giving informal clothes and may shift to a substitute for your product in the future.

So, the bottom line is—have a close watch on your direct competitors and routinely run your competitor analysis to identify any shifts.

2. Analyse your competitor’s product/service

Check out the products and services your competitors offer. Study their complete product line and service offerings. Also, take note of the quality of their products/services.

You may also want to understand the pricing and discounts they offer. Additionally, analyse them in terms of cost, how they position themselves, and their sourcing. Also consider what market share they have, their pricing strategy, how they distribute the product and any differentiation strategies they follow.

3. Study the competitor’s sales strategy

The next important point is—conduct a thorough analysis of your competitor’s sales strategy. Here, you would like answers to questions like—what is the sales process of your competitor? What channels are they using? Are they located in multiple locations? Are they reselling through partners? Their expansion plans? How do customers review their products/services? What is their revenue and sales volume? How good is their sales team?

Questions like these will help you understand your competitor’s sales tactics more deeply. Equipped with that information, you can alter your sales strategy and prepare your sales team accordingly.

But How Will You Find All This Information?

To find the information, you can do the following:

• For publicly held companies, you can get annual reports.
• For privately held companies, you need to do some work on your own. You may ask your sales and marketing team to collect information from every prospect about the products/services they have been using and why they want to shift. This way, you can identify your competition and their weaknesses.
• You can ask your sales and marketing team to gather this data through a form or a one-on-one sales call. In case of a lost deal, ask your team to collect data about why you lost your competition.

All this effort will give you essential insights into what customers find good about your product and where you lack compared to your competitors.

4. Know your competitor’s pricing strategy

One significant factor to consider is how your competitors are pricing their products to price your product correctly.

In case you are offering a product that is of superior quality or is feature-rich compared to that of your competitor’s, you may charge a premium price for that. Make sure that your sales team can explain the reason for your high price. However, if you want to keep your product in an affordable range to tap a particular market, you may keep a price lower than your competition. Again, prepare your sales team to explain why you are better than your competitor apart from the low price.

Moreover, you must also consider any incentives offered by your competitor. Is your competitor offering a limited period free trial? Or is it giving any reward points? You must also consider perks depending on your area of business. Apart from various other factors that decide your pricing, a competitor’s pricing strategy is a critical element that cannot be ignored.

5. Learn about the competitor’s shipping cost

If you are in a business where free shipping is a norm (like in e-commerce), you must analyse your competitor’s shipping cost and strategy. As shipping cost is a significant chunk of the overall cost, you need to consider how you can reduce your shipping cost to provide your product at a comparable price.

In case free shipping is not something that you can afford, you need to consider what other perks you can offer to appeal to your customers such as holiday discounts, loyalty points, etc.

6. Evaluate your competitor’s marketing efforts

One of the easiest ways to gauge your competitor’s marketing efforts is to analyse their website. Try to understand how in-depth their marketing efforts are by considering points like—does the website contain a blog section? Do they publish white papers and case studies? Are they running a podcast? How good are they at creating videos and conducting webinars? Is the website full of text content or it has visuals? Do they have attractive infographics? Do they have an FAQ section? Is there any press release? Do they use chatbots? Do they run advertising campaigns online or offline?

By analysing the above, you can compare your marketing efforts and fill the gaps where ever needed.

7. Assess your competitor’s content  

Once you get an idea of what content your competitor is using as part of their marketing strategy, you must dig into the content part.

• Take a few sample blog posts and other content pieces to assess the quality.
• In case the quality is not right, you don’t need to dig further as anyway, it will not affect the traffic since the competitor is not providing any value to the target audience.
• If your competitor offers quality content to the customers, you need to dive deeper and see the publishing frequency.
• In case the frequency of publishing the posts is good, your competitor has a strong content strategy which you need to assess further.
• Now check the grammar, the relevance, the structure, tone and readability, call-to-actions, images, videos, etc.
• Find out if they have an in-house content team?
• Next, you need to find out how well the content strategy is working for your competitor. For this, you need to see the level of engagement their posts get from the target audience in terms of likes, shares, comments, tweets, etc.
• You also need to study your competitor’s content promotion strategy and consider link building, the keywords they are focusing on, tags, image alt text tags, etc.

Conclusion

Perform a thorough evaluation of each of the points mentioned above. You will be able to gauge your strengths and weaknesses compared to that of your competitors, If required, go ahead and perform a SWOT analysis to understand your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Compare it with your strengths and weaknesses. Now you can position yourself better and find any areas of improvement if needed.

Also read:

1) Is Market Research Useful for a Small Business?
2) How to register your business under MSME?
3) How to Reduce RTO in E-Commerce?
4) How to File Income Tax in India? A step-by-step guide