A competitive analysis template is a valuable document businesses use to collect and analyze information about their competitors. This document provides a sortable and easy-to-understand report on your competitors that you can share with board members, leadership teams, or individual contributors.
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What is a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is a structured approach to analyze the market competition or understand the competitive landscape. It is an assessment that enables you to adapt to changes to stay ahead of the trends. Furthermore, if you conduct a competitive analysis thoroughly and regularly, you can get tons of useful information that you can use to improve and optimize your product.
Why should conduct a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is a product management tool that helps managers determine market trends and find gaps in their product offerings. Conducting competitive analysis allows you to avoid making mistakes and beat competitors. It helps managers learn what works and what doesn’t when they try to get market share.
In addition, conducting competitive analysis also helps you in the following scenarios;
- Create benchmarks
- Determine opportunities to better serve customers
- Make strategic decisions
- Identify your pricing strategy
- Determine market gaps
- Identify distribution and marketing strategies
When doing your market research, you need to create a competitor analysis to get an idea of the product-market fit. With this document, you will understand your competitor’s capabilities, pricing, and product positioning. This way, you can create the product that the customer needs.
What to include in a competitive analysis template?
The first step in competitive analysis is determining who the competition is. There are several ways to identify competitors, you may Google yourself or use tools to do a competitive analysis. For your business name, product ideas, and overarching business idea, take a start with a simple web search and relevant social media platforms. Since you need a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape, this research will enable you to explore the competition’s digital footprint in detail. Moreover, you can search the competition on the following platforms;
- Website content
- Social media presence
- News mentions
- Support threads
- Reviews
- Online communities
You need to track the following details while documenting your competitors;
- Name of the business
- Location
- Mission statement
- Product offering
- Messaging
- Pricing
- Target customers
- Competitor’s products
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How to conduct a competitive analysis?
There is no simple way to conduct a competitive analysis, consider the following three steps;
Make a shortlist of your competitors
There are three types of competitors that you need to identify for competitive analysis;
- Direct: these refer to the competitors that offer the same product and target the same customer.
- Indirect: these competitors offer somehow same products or target the same customer.
- Replacement: this type of competitor offers different products or targets the same audience.
You need to look inward first to figure out who your direct and indirect competitors are. Another way to identify your competitors is to research obsessively i.e. Google yourself by using keywords.
Do a thorough research on each competitor
Choose about seven of your most important from your shortlist of competitors. Search all the relevant information on each one. This step allows you to capture the most relevant information about your competitors including the following;
- Company profile: include information like name, foundation date, company size, market share, revenue, and reputation.
- Ideal customer profile: search for information such as ideal customers, motivation, frustrations, and primary buyer.
- Product information: this step includes information on the product, positioning, and product features).
- Market approach: include details such as pricing, distributions, and marketing channels.
- SWOT analysis: the most popular competitive analysis framework that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Build a holistic overview and strategy
Determine how you want to approach your competitors in the market after having their better or more comprehensive overview. The competitive matrix and battle cards are two extremely useful tools that can help you make this assessment. Plotting out a four-quadrant competitive matrix is a way to operationalize the data you collected during your competitive analysis. In addition, to create battle cards for each of your competitors, you need to use the four-quadrant competitive matrix and competitor insights. The battle cards enable you to compare your product against your competitors at a glance.
FAQ’s:
What are the three C’s of competitive analysis?
These are as follows;
- Customer
- Competition
- Company
How to conduct a competitive market analysis?
Consider the following steps;
- Determine your competition
- Audit their content
- Examine their website
- Dive into Social media
- Assess your next steps
