Every time I work with a new brand, my first order of business is to conduct a competitive analysis. A competitive analysis report helps me understand the brand’s position in the market, map competitors’ strengths/weaknesses, and discover growth opportunities.
In this article, I’ll break down the exact steps I follow to conduct competitor analysis and identify ways to one-up top brands in the market. We’ll cover:
• What is competitive analysis?
• What is competitive market research?
• Competitive Analysis in Marketing
• How To Conduct Competitive Analysis in 5 Steps
• How to Do a Competitive Analysis (the Extended Cut)
• Competitive Product Analysis
• Competitive Analysis Example
• Competitive Analysis Templates
• Competitive Analysis FAQs
Competitive analysis is the process of comparing your competitors against your brand to understand their core differentiators, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s an in-depth breakdown of each competitor’s market position, sales & marketing tactics, growth strategy, and other business-critical aspects to see what they’re doing right and find opportunities for your business.
Competitive analysis gives you a clearer picture of the market landscape to make informed decisions for your growth.
That said, you have to remember that competitive analysis is an opportunity to learn from others. It isn’t:
• Copying successful competitors to the T.
• Trying to undercut others’ pricing.
• A one-and-done exercise.
4 Reasons to Perform Competitive Analysis
If you’re on the fence about investing time and effort in analyzing your competitors, know that it gives you a complete picture of the market and where you stand in it. Here are four main reasons why I perform a competitive analysis exercise whenever working with a brand for the first time:
• Identify your differentiators. Think of competitor analysis as a chance to reflect on your own business and discover what sets you apart from the crowd. And if you’re only starting out, it helps you brainstorm the best opportunities to differentiate your business.
• Find competitors’ strengths. What are your competitors doing right to drive their growth? Analyzing the ins and outs of an industry leader will tell you what they did well to reach the top position in the market.
• Set benchmarks for success. A competitor analysis gives you a realistic idea of mapping your progress with success metrics. While every business has its own path to success, you can always look at a competitor’s trajectory to assess whether you’re on the right track.
• Get closer to your target audience. A good competitor analysis framework zooms in on your audience. It gives you a pulse of your customers by evaluating what they like, dislike, prefer, and complain about when reviewing competing brands.
The bottom line: Whether you’re starting a new business or revamping an existing one, a competitive analysis eliminates guesswork and gives you concrete information to build your business strategy.
What is competitive market research?
Competitive market research is a vital exercise that goes beyond merely comparing products or services. It involves an in-depth analysis of the market metrics that distinguish your offerings from those of your competitors. A thorough market research doesn’t just highlight these differences but leverages them, laying a solid foundation for a sales and marketing strategy that truly differentiates your business in a bustling market.
Essential Aspects to Cover in Competitive Analysis Research
Before we walk through our step-by-step process for conducting competitor analysis, let’s look at the main aspects to include for every competitor:
• Overview. A summary of the company — where it’s located, target market, and target audience.
• Primary offering. A breakdown of what they sell and how they compare against your brand.
• Pricing strategy. A comparison of their pricing for different products with your pricing.
• Positioning. An analysis of their core messaging to see how they position themselves. Customer feedback: A curation of what customers have to say about the brand.
Now, it’s time to learn how to conduct a competitive analysis with an example to contextualize each step.
Competitive Analysis in Marketing
Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a competitor analysis, you’ll be able to:
• Identify gaps in the market.
• Develop new products and services.
• Uncover market trends.
• Market and sell more effectively.
As you can see, learning any of these four components will lead your brand down the path of achievement.
Next, let’s dive into some steps you can take to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis.
How to Conduct Competitive Analysis in 5 Quick Steps
As a content marketer, I’ve performed a competitive analysis for several brands to improve their messaging, plan their marketing strategy, and explore new channels. Here are the five steps I follow to analyze competitors:
1. Identify and categorize all competitors.
The first step is a simple yet strategic one. You have to identify all possible competitors in your industry, even the lesser-known ones. The goal here is to be aware of all the players in the market instead of arbitrarily choosing to ignore a few.
As you find more and more competitors, categorize them into these buckets:
• Direct competitors. These brands offer the same product/service as you to the same target audience. People will often compare you to these brands when making a buying decision.
• Indirect competitors. These businesses solve the same problem but with a different solution. They present opportunities for you to expand your offering.
• Legacy competitors. These are established companies operating in your industry for several years. They have a solid reputation in the market and are a trusted name among customers.
• Emerging competitors. These are new players in the market with an innovative business model and unique value propositions that pose a threat to existing brands.
Here’s a competitive matrix classifying brands in the community and housing space:
Testing It Out
To help you understand each step clearly, we’ll use the example of Trello and create a competitor analysis report using these steps.
Here’s a table of the main competitors for Trello:
Type of competitors:
Competitor names
Direct competitors
Asana, Basecamp, Monday.com, MeisterTask
Indirect competitors
Slack, Notion, Coda
Legacy competitors
Microsoft Project, Jira
Disruptor competitors
ClickUp, Airtable
2. Determine each competitor’s market position.
Once you know all your competitors, start analyzing their position in the market. This step will help you understand where you currently stand in terms of market share and customer satisfaction. It’ll also reveal the big guns in your industry — the leading competitors to prioritize in your analysis report.
Plus, visualizing the market landscape will tell you what’s missing in the current state. You can find gaps and opportunities for your brand to thrive even in a saturated market.
To map competitors’ market positions, create a graph with two factors: market presence (Y-axis) and customer satisfaction (X-axis). Then, place competitors in each of these quadrants:
• Niche. These are brands with a low market share but rank high on customer satisfaction. They’re likely targeting a specific segment of the audience and doing it well.
• Contenders. These brands rank low on customer satisfaction but have a good market presence. They might be new entrants with a strong sales and marketing strategy.
• Leaders. These brands own a big market share and have highly satisfied customers. They’re the dominant players with a solid reputation among your audience.
• High performers. These are another category of new entrants scoring high on customer satisfaction but with a low market share. They’re a good alternative for people not looking to buy from big brands.
This visualization will tell you exactly how crowded the market is. But it’ll also highlight ways to gain momentum and compete with existing brands.
Testing It Out
Here’s a market landscape grid by G2 documenting all of Trello’s competitors in the project management space. For a leading brand like Trello, the goal would be to look at top brands in two quadrants: “Leaders” and “High Performers.”
3. Extensively benchmark key competitors.
Step 2 will narrow down your focus from dozens of competitors to the few most important ones to target. Now, it’s time to examine each competitor thoroughly and prepare a benchmarking report. Remember that this exercise isn’t meant to find shortcomings in every competitor. You have to objectively determine both the good and bad aspects of each brand.
Here are the core factors to consider when benchmarking competitors:
• Quality. Assess the quality of products/services for each competitor. You can compare product features to see what’s giving them an edge over you. You can also evaluate customer reviews to understand what users have to say about the quality of their offering.
• Price. Document the price points for every competitor to understand their pricing tactics. You can also interview their customers to find the value for money from users’ perspectives.
• Customer service. Check how they deliver support — through chat, phone, email, knowledge base, and more. You can also find customer ratings on different third-party platforms.
• Brand reputation. You should also compare each competitor’s reputation in the market to understand how people perceive the brand. Look out for anything critical people say about specific competitors.
• Financial health. If possible, look for performance indicators to assess a brand’s financial progress. You can find data on metrics like revenue growth and profit margins.
This benchmarking exercise will involve a combination of primary and secondary research. Invest enough time in this step to ensure that your competitive analysis is completely airtight.
Check out this example of a competitor benchmarking report for workforce intelligence tools:
Testing It Out
Here’s how I benchmarked Asana based on these criteria using the information I could find:
Criteria:
Asana:
Quality
• 100+ integrations
• Automation rules
• AI features for project management
• Highly praised for user-friendly interface
Price
Offers a free tier and paid plans starting from $10.99/month per user. Advanced features and integrations are available at higher price points.
Customer Service
• Live chat
• Phone support
• Ticket-based support
• Tutorials in Asana Academy
• Knowledge base and community forum
Brand Reputation
Considered one of the best project management tools, with a slightly more robust feature set compared to competitors.
4. Deep dive into their marketing strategy.
While the first few steps will tell you what you can improve in your core product or service, you also need to find how competitors market their products. You need to deep-dive into their marketing strategies to learn how they approach buyers. I analyze every marketing channel, then note my observations on how they speak to their audience and highlight their brand personality.
Here are a few key marketing channels to explore:
• Website. Analyze the website structure and copy to understand their positioning and brand voice.
• Email. Subscribe to emails to learn their cadence, copywriting style, content covered, and other aspects.
• Paid ads. Use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to find if any competitor is running paid ads on search engines.
• Thought leadership. Follow a brand’s thought leadership efforts with content assets like podcasts, webinars, courses, and more.
• Digital PR. Explore whether a brand is investing in digital PR to build buzz around its business and analyze its strategy.
• Social media. See how actively brands use different social channels and what kind of content is working best for them.
• Partnerships. Analyze high-value partnerships to see if brands work closely with any companies and mutually benefit each other.
You can create a detailed document capturing every detail of a competitor’s marketing strategy. This will give you the right direction to plan your marketing efforts.
5. Perform a SWOT analysis.
The final step in a competitive analysis exercise is creating a SWOT analysis matrix for each company. This means you‘ll take note of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Think of it as the final step to consolidate all your research and answer these questions:
• What is your competitor doing well?
• Where do they have an advantage over your brand?
• What is the weakest area for your competitor?
• Where does your brand have the advantage over your competitor?
• In what areas would you consider this competitor a threat?
• Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified?
You can use tools like Miro to visualize this data. Once you visually present this data, you’ll get a clearer idea of where you can outgrow each competitor.
Testing It Out
Here’s a SWOT analysis matrix I created for Asana as a competitor of Trello:
How to Do a Competitive Analysis (the Extended Cut)
To run a complete and effective competitive analysis, use these ten templates, which range in purpose from sales to marketing to product strategy.
Featured Resource: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates
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1. Determine who your competitors are.
First, you‘ll need to figure out who you’re competing with to compare the data accurately. What works in a business like yours may not work for your brand. Divide your “competitors” into two categories: direct and indirect.
Keep these brands on your radar since they could shift positions at any time and cross over into the direct competitor zone. Using our example, Stitch Fix could start a workout line, which would certainly change things for Fabletics.
This is also one of the reasons why you‘ll want to routinely run a competitor analysis. The market can and will shift at any time, and if you’re not constantly scoping it out, you won’t be aware of these changes until it’s too late.
2. Determine what products your competitors offer.
You’ll want to analyze your competitor’s complete product line and the quality of the products or services they’re offering. You should also take note of their pricing and any discounts they’re offering customers.
Some questions to consider include:
• Are they a low-cost or high-cost provider?
• Are they working mainly on volume sales or one-off purchases?
• What is their market share?
• What are the characteristics and needs of their ideal customers?
• Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick-and-mortar?
• How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?
• How do they distribute their products/services?
3. Research your competitors’ sales tactics and results.
Running a sales analysis of your competitors can be a bit tricky.
You’ll want to track down the answers to questions such as:
• What does the sales process look like?
• What channels are they selling through?
• Do they have multiple locations, and how does this give them an advantage?
• Are they expanding? Scaling down?
• Do they have partner reselling programs?
• What are their customers’ reasons for not buying? For ending their relationship with the company?
• What are their revenues each year? What about total sales volume?
• Do they regularly discount their products or services?
• How involved is a salesperson in the process?
These helpful pieces of information will give you an idea of how competitive the sales process is and what information you need to prepare your sales reps with to compete during the final buy stage.
For publicly held companies, you can find annual reports online, but you’ll have to do some sleuthing to find this info from privately owned businesses.
You could find some of this information by searching through your CRM and reaching out to those customers who mentioned they were considering your competitor.
Find out what made them choose your product or service over others out there.
When a competitor is identified, have your sales team dive deeper by asking why they are considering switching to your product. If you’ve already lost the deal, be sure to follow up with the prospect to determine why you lost to your competitor.
4. Take a look at your competitors’ pricing, as well as any perks they offer.
There are a few major factors that go into correctly pricing your product — and one major one is understanding how much your competitors are charging for a similar product or service.
If you feel your product offers superior features compared to those of a competitor, you might consider making your product or service more expensive than industry standards.
However, if you do that, you’ll want to ensure your sales reps are ready to explain why your product is worth the additional cost.
Alternatively, perhaps you feel there‘s a gap in your industry for affordable products. If that’s the case, you might aim to charge less than competitors and appeal to prospects who aren’t looking to break the bank for a high-quality product.
Of course, other factors go into correctly pricing a product, but it‘s critical you stay on top of industry pricing to ensure you’re pricing your product in a way that feels reasonable to prospects.
Additionally, take a look at any perks your competitors offer and how you might match those perks to compete. For instance, perhaps your competitors offer a major referral discount or a month-long free trial version.
These perks could be the reason you‘re losing customers, so if it feels reasonable for your brand, consider where you might match those perks — or provide some unique perks of your own if competitors don’t offer any.
5. Ensure you’re meeting competitive shipping costs.
Did you know expensive shipping is the number one reason for cart abandonment?
Nowadays, free shipping is a major perk that can attract consumers to choose one brand over another. If you work in an industry where shipping is a major factor — like e-commerce — you‘ll want to take a look at competitors’ shipping costs and ensure you’re meeting (if not exceeding) those prices.
If most of your competitors offer free shipping, you‘ll want to look into the option for your own company. If free shipping isn’t a practical option for your business, consider how you might differentiate in other ways — including loyalty programs, holiday discounts, or giveaways on social media.
6. Analyze how your competitors market their products.
Analyzing your competitor’s website is the fastest way to gauge their marketing efforts. This is a great way to see how accessible and engaging their assets are, and if you can, try experimenting with A/B testing your landing pages or website as well. Take note of any of the following items and copy down the specific URL for future reference:
• Do they have a blog?
• Are they creating whitepapers or e-books?
• Do they post videos or webinars?
• Do they have a podcast?
• Are they using static visual content such as infographics and cartoons?
• What about slide decks?
• Do they have a FAQs section?
• Are there featured articles?
• Do you see press releases?
• Do they have a media kit?
• What about case studies?
• Do they publish buying guides and data sheets?
• What online and offline advertising campaigns are they running?
7. Take note of your competition’s content strategy.
Then, take a look at the quantity of these items. Do they have several hundred blog posts or a small handful? Are there five white papers and just one e-book?
Next, determine the frequency of these content assets. Are they publishing something new each week or once a month? How often does a new e-book or case study come out?
Chances are, if you come across a robust archive of content, your competitor has been publishing regularly. Depending on the topics they’re discussing, this content may help you hone in on their lead-generating strategies.
From there, you should move on to evaluating the quality of their content. After all, if the quality is lacking, it won’t matter how often they post since their target audience won’t find much value in it.
Choose a small handful of samples to review instead of tackling every single piece to make the process more manageable.
Your sampler should include content pieces covering a variety of topics, so you’ll have a fairly complete picture of what your competitor shares with their target audience.
When analyzing your competitor’s content, consider the following questions:
• How accurate is their content?
• Are spelling or grammar errors present?
• How in-depth does their content go? (Is it at the introductory level that just scratches the surface, or does it include more advanced topics with high-level ideas?)
• What tone do they use?
• Is the content structured for readability? (Are they using bullet points, bold headings, and numbered lists?)
• Is their content free and available to anyone, or do their readers need to