Empower my brand
Empower my brand

Why Should you Conduct Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis as a strategy is nothing new. Our ancestors had to do it before they went to fight battles. And even today as companies continue to fight over market shares, this strategy keeps being applied. The only difference between the two is that in modern times we fight without shedding blood and we use sophisticated tools to help us conduct competitor analysis. 

Competitor Analysis

Why Conduct a Competitor Analysis?

This is essentially an act of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Competitor analysis helps you get a better understanding of your own standing in the market and might provide a distinct advantage over others. The better you understand your competitors, the better are your chances of being a market leader.  Competitor analysis gives you a complete idea of what needs to be improved in which area. While analyzing your competitor’s performance, you are identifying:

  • Market gaps.
  • The keywords they rank for. 
  • Sites which link back to your competitors
  • Their approach to SEO
  • Their top-selling products/services 
  • Reasons why the products/services sell most
  • The standard at which their operations are run
  • The strategies they adopt for marketing and selling

So how does competitor analysis help with all of these? Let us expand on that. 

Know Your Competitors

We think you already have a fair idea of your competitors if you have read this article up to this point. If not, we can quickly browse through some definitions before we move on to the how and why. 

Direct Competitors (Primary)

These are the brands directly competing with you. This means they are selling the same product and services like you to the same audience and maybe even based at the same location. 

Indirect Competitors (Secondary)

Indirect competitors are the brands offering the same or similar products to the same audience. But they are serving a different need. 

Tertiary Competitors

Tertiary competitors are brands offering products or services that are in the same category but not the same. It is important to study these competitors as well in case they launch the same product or service in the future. 

One of the ways you can find out who your competitors are by using tracking tools. Enter your industry keywords and the popular names and relevant businesses pop up. 

How does Competitor Analysis Help?

Asking some questions about your competitors and tracking the data for these will help you analyze your business as compared to your competitors. 

1. What Products/Services are your Competitors Offering?

This is the very basic part of competitor analysis. Make an effort to know the products/services your competitors are offering. The quality of their products, the price point, purchase volumes et cetera. Getting a sense of how their business operates is a good place to start. 

2. Analyze their Sales Tactics

Sometimes you’d find you lost one of your own customers to a competitor. And this might not be because they offer a better version of the product. It might just be that they have a better marketing and sales strategy. Take a look at their sales process. What channels are they selling their products on? Are they partnering with others for the sales process? How are their salespeople pitching? 

You could find most of this information online in their annual report. You could also use your CRM tool and reach out to the customer you lost and try to understand what made them switch. 

3. Competitor Analysis helps with Content Strategy

If you’ve been following marketing trends, you know content is king. Especially if you are in the B2B industry, content marketing is a prime tool for you. Competitor analysis can be of great help for your content strategy. To begin with, take a look at the type of content they produce and the frequency of it. Also, keep a check on how their posts perform. 

The idea is to get a sense of the type of content that is working for them. If their blogs/guides/whitepapers are being shared and read extensively, you need to study their strategy. If it’s failing, you would know what not to write about. Also, with the analysis, you would know if they have missed talking about some product or feature. You can start talking about it and educating the audience. 

Competitor analysis tools also allow you to track your competitor’s performance. You can study metrics like their backlinks, the traffic they get et cetera. This helps you to study their SEO and hence create your own strategy. What themes to focus on? Which keywords to use? All of that!

4. Social Media Performance 

Social media is one of the most important platforms for companies nowadays. There are brands that have built their entire customer base via social media platforms. Hence it goes without saying that studying your competitor’s social media success is important for your success. Understanding what they are doing will help you formulate your own social media strategy. 

Your competitor’s engagement rates tell you about their social media presence and brand visibility. If their engagement levels are high, track the public sentiment around their brand name. Social listening and sentiment analysis tools can help you gauge these metrics. Social media analytics help you track your competitor’s SOV, SOE, engagement levels et cetera. Taking note of your competitor’s actions help you to avoid their mistakes and mimic their strong moves. 

Overall, a properly conducted competitor analysis gives you a well-rounded understanding of the market players. When all of these metrics come together, you get a view of all the business operations. You will know if you are lagging behind your competitors or are ahead of them. Hopefully, this guide has helped answer the question of why we need to conduct competitive analysis!

5 Must-dos for Competitor Analysis

We all think we know our competitors, but do we really? And no, we don’t mean it philosophically. We mean the understanding of our market standing in comparison. This is primarily because the metrics have come to change a lot since Internet marketing. Traditional ways of measuring success against competitors do not fully work today. And you cannot afford to stick to them if you wish to get ahead in a market where competition is stiff. Thorough competitor analysis is key to building a successful business. Here are a few tips to help you out. 

Competitor Analysis

The Correct Way to do Competitive Analysis 

Many companies still employ flawed strategies. Traditional methods may seem effective but they aren’t when you look around the online world. If you look at a competitor’s full-page ad and think you should do it too, you might be wrong. You may not even know much about their target market. Drawing conclusions without doing any foundational research work might cost you more money than you think. 

We are living in the information age, which means you have access to a gold mine of data. Tap into that to actually study your competitor rather than just following them blindly. Where and how to start? Social media and digital content are your sources and social intelligence tools are your friends. Tapping into relevant data and drawing actionable insights has never been this easy. Read more about that here. 

5 Must-Dos of Competitive Analysis

Heading into research work without any goals can cost you precious time. Here are some things to expect and do when you are starting your analysis. 

Delve Deeper into the Reality

Every marketer tries to sugarcoat details and say great things about their brand on the internet. Everyone does that, perhaps even you sometimes. Who doesn’t like to portray a glossy image?  Most see it as a calculated and strategic move. But you have to look beyond it and get the real story. Look at what people are saying about the brand. Taking into account the overall sentiment helps you gauge the real pulse of their success. 

Monitor your Social Reach

Measuring your market share first before planning to expand the business. Telefonica studied 1000 millennials recently, in which 57% used search engines to find information about products and services. And 52% said they used social media as well. Consumers rely heavily on search engines and social media as their primary sources of information. You have to measure your performance against that of your competitors in order to see whether your reach and share of voice is capturing enough of the market share. 

A Mistake to Avoid

When you use social intelligence tools you have a world of data and insights with you. You know a lot about your competitors. You know about their target market, their marketing strategy, the demographics, their SOV et cetera. When you do competitor analysis it is to get a better understanding of your position in the market. You may look at their strengths and weaknesses. If their campaigns are successful, study them in detail. Most marketers make the mistake of copying/stealing others’ content. This is nothing but plagiarism and is a strict no-no. This can bring your brand down in the eyes of your own audience and detract from your image. 

Use the Right Tools

When you study your competitors, it isn’t espionage. It is only a smarter way to do market research. However, if you are smart enough to conduct competitor analysis meticulously, you are smart enough to realize how artificial intelligence tools can help you. You can either choose to stalk your competitor’s online campaigns and social media accounts manually and draw insights like the number of likes and comments. Or you can get into social media analytics to gain insight into their SEO strategy, their target market, overall brand image et cetera. 

Tools like Auris help you keep close tabs on your competitors and do a comparative analysis. With advances in technology, competitor analysis has come to be the easiest way to build your brand’s marketing strategy. 

8 Competitor Analysis Tools for your Brand

If you have been following this space you know we have been laying emphasis on how important competitive analysis and benchmarking are. It is not just us, there’s a very similar saying attributed to Petrarch (as well as Sun Tzu) which goes “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. Competitor analysis is essential for brand survival and the ready availability of digital data makes the process easier. 

In this blog post, we try to put forth our top picks for competitor analysis tools and explain why it must be tried. 

Competitor analysis tools for your brand-min

Qualities to Look for in Competitor Analysis Tools

Competitor analysis tools are available by the dozens. The best pick would be one that serves your defined goals and needs. Here are some important features we considered while picking out our favorites. 

Metrics

A superficial comparison of likes, shares, and comments is not enough to truly judge the performance of a brand. An enterprise tool can offer you deeper insights into demographics and psychographics. These insights tell you what consumers are interested in, and highlight the content with which they are actively engaging and so on. Also, sentiment analysis tells you if your focus is in the correct direction. 

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis can guide your way to win your customers’ hearts. Take the data and apply sentiment analysis to it to find the strongest reactions. The extreme points in positive and negative sentiments will give you a wholesome idea of how to solve your customer’s problems. 

Content Analysis 

Just like you, your competitors are also on social media. What content are they posting? How are they performing online? What channels are they on? Be sure to look at every aspect of your competitors’ online marketing efforts. Benchmarking against the top brands with maximum reach online can help you understand the improvements you could make to your approach.  

Top Competitor Analysis Tools

Which tool to finally invest in? What are your needs? Rest assured there is a tool for every purpose and you will find one that caters to your needs. Here are some top picks.

Auris

Auris is a complete package for social listening with specially tailored features to make competitor analysis smoother. Simply feed in the names of competitors, their facebook URLs, Twitter handles and so on. And you are all set. Auris fetches you the data from across the channels all on the same dashboard. The tool features two tabs for deeper analysis. A comparison dashboard and one which displays the activities of your rivals. 

Auris Competitor analysis set up

The comparison dashboard brings you elaborate charts explaining the reach, engagement rates, and estimated media spends for posts made by your rivals. Auris also allows you to calculate your share of voice and share of mind against your competitors’. This information tool is available free for a test run. 

Auris Competitor analysis dashboard

Phlanx

Phlanx is an influencer auditing tool specially designed for Instagram. It is a useful tool for brands that depend most on Instagram. Phlanx helps you audit influencer accounts by tracking the genuineness of the accounts. Checks whether their follower base consists mostly of fake followers and bots. Tracks their active followers and engagement rate to check if they are the right influencers for your brand. The tool also provides a detailed account of engagement rates from across an array of other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Twitch. 

Phlanx Competitor analysis tool

Rival IQ

In their own words, Rival IQ focuses on making social and SEO data easier to analyze and act upon. Rival IQ lets you compare your brand to competitors with respect to social channels, audience growth, rankings, activities et cetera. Rival IQ allows you to look at key insights like top-performing posts, activities, and engagement metrics. 

RIval IQ

Social Blade

Social blade ranks you and your competitors based on social media statistics gained from platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, Mixer, and Twitter. You can view a summary of metrics like subscriber rank, monetization estimates, and an overall rank based on the number of views and rate of new subscribers. This platform also allows you to search based on specific locations and categories. If you want to know about the top YouTubers in Australia, Social blade can help set up the search. 

Social Blade

Owletter

Owletter makes spying on your competitor’s email strategies easier. Most marketers have subscribed to the newsletters from competitor brands. This effort is to catch a glimpse of your competitor’s strategies and yet they miss out on so much data. With Owletter, brands can understand when their competitors are sending out promotional emails, seasonal changes in emailing strategies, the reputation of a brand email for SPAM et cetera. The longer you use Owletter, the more historical data is available and the more robust your reports are going to be. 

Owletter

Competeshark

Competeshark allows brands to monitor their rivals in real-time and play copycats if they choose to. Without needing to physically visit a competitor’s website and comparing changes. With Competeshark, the process has been automated. They visit your competitor’s websites, reports and so on and study the changes. You can stay updated on price changes, layout changes, design changes or any new trends your competitor is following. 

Competeshark

Datanyze

Datanyze specializes in “technographics” which is where they analyze data to your advantage and tell you where to seel what and to whom. The analysis they provide includes email marketing, advertising, and eCommerce capabilities. Unlike other tools that use demographic data, Datanyze uses technographic data to capture buying signals. 

Datanyze

Wappalyzer

This is one of the tools many marketers are using these days. Wappalyzer goes beyond the realm of social media to analyze competitive data for you. This tool looks into specifics like web frameworks, content management systems, server software and so on. If you wish to know how your rivals are managing their data stream Wappalyzer may be able to help you. 

Wappalyzer

Depending on your requirements and budget you might have gained a fair idea about your ideal tool by now. If you are thinking about whether or not to invest, you have to keep an eye on your competitor. It has to be done either manually or you can choose to opt for an automated tool. Most of these tools can be customized with bespoke filters and options to cater to your needs whether you want to track influencer or monitor brand mentions on the same platform.

Social Listening is Keeping Your Competitors Ahead

Are you unable to understand how your competitor seems to have a better online presence and worried that you are missing out on something important? Then you may want to read on and find some answers, to help you take some control. Let’s talk about how social listening might be helping your competitors and how you still have time to reverse their winning streak.

Social Listening is keeping your competitors ahead

Is Social Listening Really helping Your Competitors?

Social listening has plenty to offer. Are you already using it to your advantage or is your competitor racing ahead and leaving you way behind? Here are some definitive signs which tell you that your competitor is ahead of you using social listening:

  • They respond quickly (response time is far lower than yours) to any negative chatter or social media crisis moment.
  • They seem to know what the customer wants and present it to them on time. They also seem to know why your customers are dissatisfied and are trying to entice them away.
  • They engage with their advocates and find influencers at the same time.
  • They engage with their audience actively.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is time for you to step in.

Respond Quicker and Stay Ahead

If you’ve noticed that your competitors are quite active on social media it might be because they are vigilant to the social mentions of them. Many companies employ social listening tools to help them with digital marketing. The world wide web is a massive space with billions of active users, and it is a daunting task to track your social mentions manually. Social listening helps you track social mentions, gauge public sentiment and respond well in time.

Replying to your customer’s grievances or queries after a long wait time never leaves a good impression. Besides, if you are unable to respond in time while your competitors engage actively with them, it is easy to guess why your competitor would gain business, while you lose custom.

Sentiment Analysis and Other Strategic Insights

Even if you are not keeping an eye on your competitors, they might be keeping a constant eye on your brand’s health. The negative chatter around your brand helps them to lure your audience away. A key strategy to stop such poaching is to plan your digital marketing in such a way as to make your brand visible, trustworthy and relatable. A brand which cares enough would zero in on the pain points of their customers are facing and extend help both offline and online.

sentiment analysis

With social media being a free source of all the data you need, social listening gives you precise insights into its message. Which outlet is gathering the most negative chatter? Why is that particular outlet doing something different/weird? You do not have to dig too deep for the insights, you have to be vigilant enough to respond to the criticism and resolve the problem.

Sentiment analysis helps you gauge the overall perception of your brand. And provide you with deeper insights. Responsive actions can gain you serious fans who could actually promote your brand and endorse it for all the world to see. To identify these influencers/heroes, you have to keep listening to social media buzz to know who loves you. Marketing which happens through positive word-of-mouth is a foolproof way to rank high on a list of trusted brands.

Social Listening provides you with many key metrics that could help you avoid not just losing business to your competitors but also to stay one step ahead of the game. If you are looking for the perfect social listening tool, we can guide you.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

“Your brand name is only as good as your reputation”

The tricky thing about brand reputation is that it is difficult to achieve but extremely easy to lose. People are not complacent about receiving average services anymore. They turn instantly to online review boards and social media to let the world know about their negative experience. This could easily affect or ruin your brand reputation unless capitalized upon by using social intelligence tools like social media monitoring and social listening.

Online Reputation Social MonitoringA study by Dimensional Research claims “90% of customers say buying decisions are influenced by online reviews” and 86% customers confirm that their buying decision is influenced by negative reviews. By listening to and monitoring all the chatter related to your brand, you could save your brand’s reputation through timely action and responses.

Social listening and monitoring can provide you with the business intelligence required to manage and protect your brand’s reputation. But let’s first distinguish between Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring.

How is Social Listening Different from Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring and social media listening are often used interchangeably. And though, they mean almost the same, there is a subtle difference between the two.

“Data is not information” yet “Information is just bits of data”

Social listening and monitoring revolve around the notions of data and information. Social monitoring is essentially nothing but the data that you collect from social media, social listening yields the actual information.

Puzzle analogy for Social Monitoring vs Social ListeningSocial media monitoring presents you with all the bits and pieces of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, but social listening joins every piece at the right place to give you a complete picture. Simply put, social media monitoring can be called a subset of social media listening.

Social monitoring includes searching for and gathering data from review boards, social media sites, and messenger forums.

Social listening helps you analyze the data collected, defines your future course of action and plans in accordance with the insights obtained.

Why Use Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

In a rapidly urbanizing world, the number of internet users is constantly increasing. It is essential to keep listening to the concerns of your customers and respond to them before they turn into a pain point.

Your social media efforts might be doing great on the surface but mere likes do not reflect real success. Let’s look at some of the key reasons why gauging the chatter is beneficial:

  • Online Feedback (positive/negative) helps you to know how your customers perceive your products and services
  • Audience Engagement is possible, when we have feedback, whether positive or negative
  • Brand Advocates can be found among the customers who provide positive feedback to spread a positive impression about our brand
  • Proactive Customer Support is possible in real time if we respond to the issues and concerns of customers
  • Competitor Analysis is possible as we see where they stand with their customers and learn about the reasons behind the popularity of their products and services
  • Lead Generation is possible by establishing a positive connection with existing as well as potential customers.

These insights are highly valuable to a brand manager, as they proactively manage their online reputation.

How can Social Media Listening and Monitoring Help You?

Remember we said social listening helps yield information from the data collected through social monitoring?

Target and planning Social monitoring vs social listeningThis information can help you design an effective action plan to manage your online reputation and to strategize about other functions of your business too! When there is a considerable amount of negative chatter about your customer service, most of them would mention the reason for it. It could be due to long response time, unsatisfactory response or even a rude or uncaring attitude. It can help you chalk out a plan for changing the processes of your customer service department.

Social monitoring measures the scope of future marketing needs. You can gauge the reach your brand has on social media and know how many users are talking about you. This knowledge can help you design future marketing strategies and campaigns.

Business intelligence and social media listening are almost synonymous today. Gain insights into customer satisfaction and react proactively in real time to build a solid online reputation, without incurring huge costs.

Competitor Analysis using Social Listening

Enterprises, like people, try to be recognized for being the best at what they do. Are your competitors allowing your company to achieve this dream? Social listening for competitive intelligence can help you achieve your goals. Competitor analysis offers a sense of how well your company is faring when compared to others in the marketplace.

Competitor analysis holds the answer key to questions like:

Why is my company not the market leader?

What marketing strategies are my competitors using?

What are their weaknesses and strengths?

The idea, of course, is not to mimic your competitors. It is but a part of the game to learn and borrow from or improvise upon their winning strategies. Social listening enables you to do so.

What is Competitor Analysis and Why is it Important?

Planning a good marketing strategy starts with knowing your opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses. Identifying these gets easier when you closely monitor the significant players in your industry and analyze their actions.

Business competitor analysis

By definition, competitor analysis helps you gather information about your competitors to analyze it and derive insights on where your business stands in comparison to them. The actionable insights derived from such competitive intelligence could help you to rise above your competition.

Let’s consider a good example of gaining competitive intelligence through competitor analysis – athletes. Sportspersons and teams must follow an opponent’s game, directly or from recordings to understand their strengths and weaknesses, style and strategy. This knowledge helps them decide their own defensive or offensive strategy easily. This search for an Achilles’ heel is mimicked by businesses. A company’s strategy is backed by competitor intelligence, sound logic, careful judgment.

There must be a reason why 55% of Fortune 500 companies engage extensively in competitor analysis and competitive intelligence for decision making.

How does Social Listening help Conduct Competitor Analysis?

Tech-savvy managers today can get ahead of their competition using social listening powered by artificial intelligence makes it very easy for tech-savvy managers. However, before we discuss that, let’s briefly look at how competitor analysis benefits you:

It helps you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Finds gaps and opportunities within the marketplace

Helps you plan effective marketing and other functional strategies

Aids in planning and strategizing your company’s future course of action

In addition to the usual annual reports, newspaper articles, and press releases, social media is where one looks for data. By social media data, we do not mean skimming through the online content put out by your competitors. Social media listening helps you listen to the positive as well as negative sentiments of their customers and delve deeper into analyzing it.

Wondering what all you can learn through social listening?

Your primary competitors

Say you plan to open a pizzeria in your town, thinking you have no other competitor. Social media mentions can tell you a different story. Maybe people have been tweeting a lot about the recent arrival of Papa John’s or Pizza Hut in town, and you had no idea of their presence at all.

 Share of Voice

Your brand’s exposure as well as a comparison of how much more everyone is talking about your competitors.

Sentiment Analysis

Having a good share of voice is not always a positive thing if many of the mentions denote negative sentiment. Such analysis helps you understand the weaknesses of your competitors and vice versa.

Customer Perceptions - sentiment analysis-min

Public Interests

Say you are planning to revamp your pizzeria. You can tune into social media chats, to see which places are liked by your target audience for their ambience and interiors. Take inspiration from there, and turn your pizzeria into their favorite spot.

SWOT Analysis

Social listening analyzes the data collected to show the weaknesses of your competitors and the opportunities this holds for you.

How to Conduct Competitor Analysis?

Social media listening is a tool for competitor analysis, using which you can derive optimum results with minimal effort. Planning for useful competitive intelligence will include:

Choosing the Right Tool:

With the right tool, monitoring social media data across all channels and analyzing it becomes simple and quick.

Comprehensive Research Template:

You could gain greater clarity on the kind of social listening tool you want, by preparing a detailed template, mentioning the factors which need to be measured, like:

  • Target Market: This helps you understand the demographic and geographical details of your target market. The target market your competitors are focusing on can help you decide your target audience.
  • Differentiation factor: What is unique about your brand which sets you apart from your competitors? Learning about their social media activities, about their products, etc will help you analyze this.
  • Marketing Strategy: How well are your competitors planning their brand presence online and offline, what campaigns are resonating the most among your audience and why? The answers to these questions too lie in the analysis of the data available to help you decide your own marketing strategy.

There can be many attributes to your research. Modeling your research template according to your needs and analyzing the data for each of your competitors in detail will help you prepare a comprehensive business model for your brand.