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How to Do a Competitive Analysis | Case Study Included

In order to be a leader in your industry, you need to know how to perform a competitive analysis.  A competitor analysis is more than a simple SWOT analysis where you find the strength and weaknesses of your market segment. Evaluating your competitors is highly important and must be done through complete market research using an analysis template like the one that we're going to present in this article.

Finding out where your competition excels doesn't have to be a burden if you have the right strategy and necessary tools.

What Is a Competitor Analysis?

Why perform a competitor analysis, how to conduct your competitive analysis, step 1. find your top competitors, step 2. analyze your competitors popularity, step 3. identify the public perception of competitors, step 4. analyze your competitors' social media strategy, step 5. perform an seo competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis in digital marketing is the process of finding strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, relative to those of your own product or service.

There is no exact competitive analysis definition. Yet, you need to know that the strengths within a competitive analysis are the things that make you unique, your key selling point, the ideas around your whole business - which can be about the product or the team. On the opposite side, the weaknesses point out some deficiencies, and things you could improve, when it comes to your brand, or take advantage from, when it comes to the weaknesses of your competitors.

The competitive analysis has the role to make a valid and accurate market positioning and a report on what you are doing best, and where your competitors excel, and learn from that to win more potential customers. A competitive analysis also means picking the right competitors and looking at analytics that include business metrics, digital marketing analysis, social media metrics.

By doing an accurate competitor analysis you'll be able to receive a lot of data and insights for making better business decisions. Similar to an internal research, by evaluating quantitative and qualitative data, if you research your competitors, you will uncover effective strategies and new ideas for increasing your business' performance, be it on social media, on online, or in the physical store.

A well-performed competitor analysis will allow you to:

• Build your unique selling proposition (the statement that describes the benefit of your offer and how you solve your clients' needs).
• Bring business improvements regarding products and services, team management, customer care, delivery and many more.
• Discover new market segments.
• Prioritize goals and future development.
• Create products that are actually required and respond to customer's needs.

For a better understanding of how your competitor analysis framework should look like, we've performed a competitive market research on the cosmetic niche. We've analyzed several metrics on this market segment to conduct a competitive analysis as in-depth as possible, with most of the data being pulled out from brand mention monitoring.

Brand monitoring, when done with the right tools, is more versatile than you'd think. Running an in-depth brand mentions competitive analysis could help you make sure that you are not overlooking any efficient strategies that might be working wonders for your competitors.

They are talking about your company

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Even though you might be aware of some of your market leaders, there might be a few you're missing.

For our case study example, we searched for top leading beauty brands. As social media is a highly important segment within this industry, one of the analyses we've performed was to find the top-performing brands on social media, by the number of followers.

You can also search on Google for the relevant keywords in your business and see the top brands that are ranking for those keywords. And use a spying tool to find out important analytics on every website you want, such as the Mozbar browser extension.

Also, check out Social Media to figure out the businesses that pop out in results in your market. The research we performed helped us understand the niche a little better. Therefore, based on this research performed, we've chosen to continue our competitive analysis on the following brands:

• MAC cosmetics
• Kylie cosmetics
• Anastasia Beverly Hills
• Urban Decay

It’s too complicated and actually impossible to manually track all your competitors’ records and activity, as much manual web scraping you'd be doing.

So, even if you know your competition , the question remains: how do you find who is the most popular brand in your niche?

Most popular = most mentioned

Tools like BrandMentions can make things easier.

Therefore, to answer to our main question, "how to perform a competitive analysis", you need to start performing an in-depth research of your competition. Brand Mentions allows you to track keywords, brands, product names or whatever you need.

Going back to the beauty niche we are analyzing, let's figure out the most popular brands here. We took BrandMentions for a spin, to find out the most popular beauty brand into a very competitive niche by analyzing and monitoring social media metrics. We analyzed the mentions for these beauty brands for a short period of time, October 14 - November 15 , Worldwide for all languages.

After analyzing the results, we saw that Sephora has some interesting discoveries. Compared to the rest of the beauty sites, Sephora has the highest number of mentions on web and social. In the printscreen below, we can see all mentions for each brand categorized by source (web and social).

By far, Sephora outranks the rest of beauty brands on the total amount of mentions on web and social.

The number of mentions could be explained by the fact that Sephora has more influencers that talk about it on Twitter. Results showed that the brand is mentioned by influencers with over 50k followers on Twitter compared to other beauty brands.

BrandMentions has a filter that allows you to filter mentions to see the Twitter posts from people that have a specific number of followers. The Twitter account for each brand was excluded.

Just by taking a look at your competitors and monitoring their brands, you can get a bunch of data:

• compare how often your competitors versus you post on social media
• what outlets mention them more than you
• how many mentions they have had in the last 24 hours
• how many shares their mentions have
• what languages are their mentions written in
• do they have mostly web or social mentions

And yes,  all mentions matter, but some matter more than others.

When looking into your competitor’s yard, look at their best practices and try to figure out what worked best for them.

You must have heard at least once people saying that all publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell your name right. Or that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But is it really so? How much does the public perception influence a brand's popularity? Let's find out!

The  Sentiment Analysis feature  allowed us to have a better understanding on the public perception of the analyzed brands. If we first identified the competitors and looked for the most popular ones, now we can have a look at how they are perceived in the online world.

How did we do that exactly?

We monitored all brands with BrandMentions as we said before, and from all mentions we started to filter them out. Filters are a blessing in this situation, giving you full control over the segment of mentions that you want to analyze.

Trying to manually find all the negative brand mentions that interest you is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

After analyzing the sentiment analysis for each individual beauty brand ,we came to realize that most of them share a higher positive experience with the users.

By looking at the data, for all brands or just some of them, we can draw lots of conclusions. For instance, comparing to other brands, Benefit has the highest number of web and social mentions that have a positive sentiment analysis. If we look at the next graph, we can easily see that Benefits stands out:

Another thing we can observe is the fact that Benefit has the highest number of web mentions with a positive sentiment, as well. But the brand that is leading the positive social mentions is Sephora.

Even though Sephora has the highest number of positive social mentions, overall, compared to the rest of the beauty brands, it has the highest number of negative sentiment. Which might be a downsize for the brand.

Below you can see a comparison with the other cosmetics brand on positive and negative sentiment analysis.

We can see that most of the mentions are from social media and more specifically, from Twitter. The connection with the previous results might be stronger. Often time it has happened that people are more driven to write online about a negative experience, rather than a positive one.

We saw that the negative sentiment had the lowest value compared with the positive and neutral sentiment, with a single exception. Morphe had a higher neutral sentiment than the negative one. Check out the graphic below:

Urban Decay has the most naturally ordered distribution of the sentiment analysis for the mentions analyzed on web and social.

We are not saying that bad publicity couldn't be good publicity for some businesses or individuals. But for most businesses and niches, bad publicity and negative brand mentions are never a reason for joy but an occasion for a crisis communication meeting.

Another interesting thing to observe in the graph above is that Morphe has the highest negative sentiment analysis on social media.

People love it the most, but they also hate is the most, compared to the rest of the brands. If we look particularly at the brand to evaluate the total number of positive vs. negative sentiments, we can see that in the end, a positive experience overcomes the negative one, in terms of absolute numbers.

We've previously talked about Morphe saying that it has a higher number of neutral sentiments, the only brand with this particularity. We can understand that people have mixed feelings when it comes to this brand: You either love it or hate it.

Both positive and negative mentions have a big impact on the purchase decision of a client.

Although it might sound bad to   spy on your competition , this marketing technique is a fully transparent, popular, and white-hat one. How else would we all improve ourselves and our brands if we were to not compare our endeavors with the others? And this is where a brand monitoring tool comes to rescue us.

When doing competitor spying, we are actually building PR relationships.

Both directly and indirectly.

Directly by getting to know your common audience better (the one your competition shares with you) through your competitors’ eyes, win ties with important outlets in the industry, etc.

In addition, while keeping “your enemies” closer, you indirectly relate to and establish a relationship with them. By constantly trying to keep up the pace with or outrun the brightest ones in the niche, and struggling not to ever fall in the pitfalls of black-hat marketing techniques other companies deploy in their strategies, you simply get better and better. In other words, you widen your professional circle.

Competitor spying is the more polite version of eavesdropping. There's no harm in doing it as long as you're using the tools to improve yourself and not disrupt the other.

You can easily gain insights on your competitors' performance and   dig into their success strategies   and use the lessons to your own benefit.

Tracking mentions for your competitor can lead you into discovering social media campaigns, new content ideas, top-performing social channel alongside types of content shared on each platform, plus trending hashtags used and top influencers for each competitor.

For instance, in our case, in the beauty niche, the results might surprise you. If you thought Instagram would be the most used Social Media platform for beauty products, you might be wrong.

According to the analysis performed in BrandMentions, it turned out that Twitter has the highest number of mentions for every beauty brand compared to the other social media marketing platforms.

If you thought that Instagram was the king of the beauty industry, you are wrong.

Of course, Instagram is a powerful Social Media channel, but maybe there's more in that direction. There are some insights related to this social platform, nonetheless. We know that Facebook became stricter about sharing data with third parties, so we can't see private posts. Instagram has shifted the strategy in this direction as well. Instagram started to hide likes in select countries earlier this year, and it will soon do the same in the United States.

This method affects the way we see data, on top of the fact that there are lots of users with private user accounts where even if you have an account you can't see their posts, likes, and stories.

After analyzing all the social mentions for all the beauty brands on all social platforms, here's what we discovered:

• Twitter is the Social Media Platform with the highest number of mentions.
• Twitter is the Social Media Platform with the highest number of mentions with positive sentiment analysis.

It seems that Twitter is a great way to start an influencer marketing strategy; it is also the most popular social media site. Finding all the information will help all marketers, brand managers, and community managers to build the best social media strategies for beauty brands.

When we looked at the distribution of web and social mentions for the beauty brands, we discovered 2 categories:

• more web mentions: MAC and Benefit
• more social mentions: Kylie cosmetics, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Sephora, NYX, Too Faced, Urban Decay, Morphe and Tarte.

It's obvious that social is the king here. We won't bother you with tons of charts and data on all the analysed brands, yet, you need to know that within Brand Mentions you can perform any type of analysis you want when it comes to social mention analysis.

If we analyze one of the competitors, Morphe, we can see that it is more popular on Instagram by the number of mentions. It is seconded by a small number by Anastasia Beverly Hills.

Morphe has lots of mentions on Instagram, but it is on the 8th place when it comes to Instagram followers with 10.3m.

When it comes to answering the question on how to do a competitive analysis  we know that what matter most are the insights you get to find out. And here are some great insights we've extracted for the most popular social media beauty sites scrutinized within our competitive analysis:

1.  For the MAC Brand: 

• MAC has the highest number of influencers on Instagram.
• MAC doesn't have influencers of people with more than 50k followers that mention the brand on Twitter.
• MAC is the least popular on the web and social media judging by the number of mentions. 

2.   For the Sephora Brand: 

• Sephora is one of the most popular beauty brands on social media and the whole web compared to the rest of the brands by the number of mentions.
• Sephora is mentioned by influencers and people with more than 50k followers on Twitter.

3.  For the Morhphe Brand: 

• Morphe shares a positive experience on social media compared to the rest of the beauty brand. It has the highest number of social mentions with a positive sentiment.
• But it also shares the highest value of negative emotions on social.
• Morphe is the top beauty brand on Instagram by the number of mentions compared to the rest of the brands.

4.  For the Benefit Brand: 

• Benefit is on the 10th place by the number of followers on Instagram with 9.8m (see printscreen below), the last place compared to the rest of the brands.
• Benefit offers a higher positive experience by analyzing sentiment analysis for the whole web and social mentions.

After analyzing all the mentions for all the beauty brands, there are lots of insights to help you create social media marketing strategies and find out the top competitors in your niche.

Knowing how to analyze your SEO competition is an important step in determining your overall keyword and SEO strategy. There are many factors involved in the process, and without the correct framework, it can get complicated. Here you can find the steps for the SEO competitor analysis explained, as clear and simple as possible. Within the screenshot below you can see the main steps that you need to take to make sure you perform an SEO competitive analysis at the highest level.

What Tools We Used to Do The Competitive Analysis

We used BrandMentions to analyze the beauty content and all the mentions for each beauty brand : MAC cosmetics, Kylie cosmetics, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Sephora, NYX, Too Faced, Urban Decay, Morphe, Tarte, Benefit.

Each created project had the name of the brand, and we added the keywords, domain URL, Facebook and Twitter account for higher accuracy in finding relevant mentions. We let the tool do its magic and analyze the beauty content on social media and the web.

For the metrics and discoveries made, we used filters and features available in BrandMentions, such as Sentiment Analysis analyzer, web and social sources, mentions from Twitter accounts with a specific number of followers and more. Check out the data for designing your winning social media strategy.

Also, the trigger was when we found a research on Statista with most followed cosmetics brands on Instagram; so we thought of performing a deeper analysis on the topic, and finding the most popular beauty site on Social Media, not only on Instagram. We wanted to see if there more we needed to know. And yes, there was so much more.

For an effective competitive research, there are multiple things that need to be taken into consideration, beside web and social listening. Things like  brand awareness , customer experience, target audience, the search engines you are interested in, target market,  the service or product features, the competitors sales, etc. This is not a  complete guide to obtain competitive advantages  that applies for all. But a competitor analysis template that helps you best identify your competitors and your main competitor strengths and weaknesses.

The best time to start finding out information about your competitors is now. So even if you are a content marketer, a small online store owner or a big ecommerce business , an online marketing specialist or you're in the sales teams, you need to start digging into competitive intelligence.

5 Famous Business Competitor Case Studies Of All Time

Look at any good or famous business competitor case study examples, and one thing immediately becomes clear:

Done well, this approach to competitive analysis can help you identify your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and your own, all while determining those crucial gaps in the market that represent a golden opportunity for your brand.

However, doing not so well and a competitor case study can soon balloon into an overwhelming waste of time which may provide you with a tonne of data on your competition yet offers no real insight on how to use that data to gain a competitive advantage.

To help ensure yours is done well, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide to doing competitive analysis the right way, outlining not only what to look for when analyzing your competition but how to take what you find and put it to work for your business.

What is a Business Competitor Case Study and Why Do You Need One?

Typically, when we think of a business case study, we think of the traditional “Here’s how a business came with a solution to a particular problem.”

For example, there’s a famous case study focusing on the multi-national coffee supply chain Starbucks . After “hitting a wall” in their sales and revenue, the brand found a solution by closing down a significant number of their stores and “reinvigorating” their branding, essentially focussing on quality over quantity.

Other businesses can learn from the Starbucks case study and those like them and, where appropriate, apply what worked to their own brand.

A business competitor case study operates similarly, albeit with some notable differences. In this case, the problem doesn’t belong to another business but your own.

That problem or challenge could be:

• How do we increase our revenues and/or revenue streams?
• How do we re-engage with lapsed/former customers?
• How do we increase our ROI in social media or digital marketing?
• How do we increase our market share?

Or it could be any number of other challenges.

Whatever the case may be, carrying out this kind of competitive analysis helps you find the solution by looking at your main competition. If growing your market share is your main priority, identifying a weakness that your competitor has can help you develop new ideas on how you can offer customers something they’re simply not getting from that competitor.

If your digital marketing is leaving a lot to be desired, surveying the landscape to see where you’re falling behind can help you pinpoint precisely where you’re going wrong.

What’s more, making effective use of this competitive intelligence can help you to identify changes in both your audience and the industry as a whole, highlighting trends you can capitalize on, new audiences you could potentially target, or simply new ways to reach and engage with your existing target audience.

5 Famous Business Competitor Case Study Examples

1. the army crew team.

The Army Crew Team is an all-time classic business competitor case study that has a lot to teach us about how we work as a team. The coach of West Point’s varsity Army Crew team took his eight top individual rowers and placed them together in one boat. In a second boat, he placed his eight second-tier rowers.

The team in the second boat consistently beat the team in the first boat, despite the first boat consisting of better performing individual rowers. The case study shows that, collectively, a team can be more than the sum of its individual parts and that there’s more to getting great work out of a team than simply gathering together your star performers.

For businesses looking at the best ways to get the most out of their teams, this is an essential case study to look at.

See also: Twitter Competitors Analysis

2. Malden Mills

Two weeks before Christmas 1995, the Malden Mills factory burned to the ground.

Employees feared and assumed that they’d be unemployed until the factory was rebuilt, but the company’s CEO, Aaron Feuerstein, invested $25 million of company money to ensure those employees would still have a wage and benefits while the factory was rebuilt.

In one regard, this worked out well. When the factory reopened, the employees who had been well taken care of worked harder than ever. Productivity was at an all-time high and business boomed. In another regard, the cost of paying for the factory rebuild as well as taking care of employees landed Malden Mills in bankruptcy court three times.

This famous case study is used time and time again to present an argument for the pros and cons of philanthropy and making difficult decisions regarding employee satisfaction.

3. Apple Inc.

For the longest time, Apple was known as “Apple Computers” a name that perfectly summed up their focus on the personal computer market. In 2007, however, they dropped the “computers” part and simply became “Apple Inc.” This was more than just a name change for the company, it was part of an entire rebranding a shift in focus from personal computers to iPods, iPhones, iPads, and the like.

It was a strategy that paid off for them. Apple was already a well-known company beforehand, but after their “rebirth” in 2007, they truly became not only a household name but one of the most successful and profitable businesses of all time.

This famous case study is used a lot to demonstrate the benefits of taking the company in an entirely different direction rather than trying to compete in an already overcrowded market.

The ‘ Cadbury Ethical Dilema ‘ is a popular case study that is frequently presented to MBA students taking part in business case study competitions. Chocolate manufacturers Cadbury had prided themselves on their strong values and fair ethical practices. So it came as a huge blow to the brand when it was discovered that child labor was being used to produce cocoa on Côte d’Ivoire cocoa farms.

The House of Representatives passed legislation in the US which meant that companies who could prove their chocolate was produced without forced labor could print “slave-labor free” labels on their chocolate.

Naturally, this would paint companies who couldn’t prove that in a bad light, so the industry as a whole asked for time to essentially clean up its act. When the agreed deadline for doing so came to an end, Cadbury were left with a dilemma – did they continue to stall for time or did they find another way to ensure ethical management of their supply chain?

This case study remains famous for pointing out the difficulties in managing ethical practices and is well worth looking at for considering the impact that the practices of others in your supply chain can have on your business.

5. Coffee 2016

Another well-known case study that should be familiar to anyone who ever competed in a business case study competition in the last few years. Student teams were asked to come up with ideas for improving the returns generated by everyone involved in the production and consumption of coffee from the grower right through to the consumer.

The case was famous as it has so much to teach businesses and business students alike about marketing practices and supply chain logistics.

How to Create a Business Competitor Case Study

So, that takes care of the what and the why, but what about the how? Below, you’ll find a simple nine-step process to help you get the ball rolling with your own competitor analysis.

1. Determine Which Products/Services to Evaluate

If your business offers more than one product or service, you may find that analyzing your competitors becomes much less of a headache when you focus on just one of them or at least one type. For example, if you make sports clothing, you may choose to focus on your competition in the running gear market or concentrate on developing a strategy to increase revenues from your line of sports shoes.

If you’re a digital marketing agency, you might want to narrow down your competitive research to just Search Engine Optimization or how you can improve the service you offer to a web design client.

That’s not to say that you can’t research more than one aspect of your business, but doing so may mean that you end up producing data that isn’t always relevant and doesn’t help you to make the kind of strategic decisions you really need to make.

2. Determining Your Competitors for a Business Competitor Case Study

On the whole, your business is likely to have three types of competitors.

Direct Competitor

A direct competitor is any business that sells the same product or service in the same category to meet the same need for the same audience. Your biggest competitor, the one people most closely compare your business to, is more than likely going to fall in this category, as are any others that are actively competing for your share of the market.

If you sell sports shoes to female marathon runners, another company that sells sports shoes to female marathon runners would be your direct competitor. If you run a local car washing service and another business three blocks over also offer a local car washing service, they’re in direct competition with you.

Indirect Competitor

An indirect competitor is a business that sells a different product or service to meet the same need of the same audience. A common example is fast food restaurants.

McDonald’s and Burger King both sell fast food burgers (products) to hungry people (audience) so that those people can fulfill that hunger (need). If I’m hungry and want the convenience of fast food and the delicious taste of a burger, I could spend my money at either restaurant, which makes them direct competitors.

However, if I’m just hungry and want something convenient, whether it’s a burger or not, I might choose to go to McDonald’s or head next door to Pizza Hut or Subway. All three brands are in the same category (fast food), all three brands meet my need for a convenient way to satisfy hunger, but all three do so with different types of products, making them indirect competitors.

Replacement Competitor

A replacement competitor meets the same needs for the same audience but using different products or services in a different category. For example, I could choose to go to McDonald’s to fill my hunger, but I might also choose to go to Target and buy ingredients to make a homemade dinner.

To go back to the car wash example I used earlier – If you run a local car wash and the auto repair shop next door sells car cleaning supplies, that would make them a replacement competition. Your customer could choose to substitute using your service to buy some cleaning supplies and do the job himself.

Potential and Future Competitors

When determining your competition, it’s worth noting that just because a business isn’t currently in your market segment doesn’t mean they won’t eventually. This is why it’s worth noting your potential and future competitors too.

Potential competitors are those who may sell the same products, even with the same category but haven’t yet entered your market. For example, a company that operates exclusively in the next town, city, or state over to you may not be a direct competitor yet, but they have the potential to be if they chose to move into your town/city/state.

Likewise, if you run a limousine hire service focusing exclusively on corporate clients and another company across town focuses exclusively on limousine hire for weddings, they too have the potential to be a competitor. A future competitor is much more likely to become direct competitors, such as an expanding national chain.

To really get the most value out of your eventual competitive analysis report, it pays to consider all of these types of clients and their impact on your business.

How to Find Your Competitors for a Competitive Analysis

There are some competitors that you don’t have to look very hard to find. You know they’re there. They are the businesses and brand names that are hard to ignore, the ones everyone compares you to do.

Still, don’t just limit your research there.

Head to Google.

Search for the kind of keywords you’d expect people to use for your business.

Who else comes up beside you?

Search for your business name.

What are other businesses paying for Google ads around your business?

What about social media? Who are people talking about?

You can also use tools such as the Audience Overlap tool provided by Alexa , which helps you to not only track down your competition but develop and deliver on your entire competitive intelligence project. Don’t discount offline methods either. Magazines, trade publications, and even asking your target audience directly via focus groups, surveys, and so on can all prove helpful.

3. Start Your Research

Although Google can be a very powerful tool for finding out about your competitors, don’t just limit yourself to a quick search or browse their website. Yes, that’s important, especially if you’re both predominantly online brands. If your competitors have a physical presence, it’s important to check that out too.

You may want to treat this the same way you would a typical market research project and get a group of people to experience your competitor’s business, their customer service, sales experience, products, and so on. That way, you get a much wider range of opinions and can look for trends and common themes that can influence the strategic decisions you need to make to gain a competitive advantage.

4. Analyze Your Findings

With the research done, it’s time to collate what you’ve found into your competitive analysis report. This may take the form of graphs, charts, written insights, anything that can help you present a compelling business case as to why your brand needs to be made.

5. Identify Action Points

Speaking of which, the point of analyzing your competition isn’t to pay attention to how many social media followers they have or how they compare to you in terms of brand recognition; it’s to provide you with actionable steps that you can take to achieve your business goals.

So with that in mind, figure out what you’re actually going to do due to your competitor research. Will you be rethinking your price points? Revamping your customer service? Starting again with a completely different digital marketing strategy?

6. Take a Snapshot of Your Business Pre-Changes

Before you implement those steps, be sure to look at how your business is currently performing.

Consider your main KPIs and any data relating to how you’re currently doing. After all, it’s going to make it much easier to determine if the steps you’ve taken have been effective when you’ve got some real, measurable statistics to play with.

7. Implement the actions

This next step may sound simple, but it’s where the real work comes in. Whatever actionable steps you decide to take, whether it’s coming up with a brand new social media plan, establishing yourself as a market leader, or simply ensuring that every client receives first-class customer service, now’s the time to make that happen.

8. Measure the Results

When you’ve made your changes, measure your results.

Compare where you are now to where you were when you took that snapshot in step six.

9. Repeat as necessary

Last but not least, it’s important not to fall into the habit of thinking that competitive analysis is a one-and-done affair.

If there’s one universal truth about the business landscape, it’s that things change constantly. New trends emerge, new customers arrive on the scene, once loyal customers become former customers. As such, it’s important to analyze your competition as a regular component of your overall competitive strategy.

What to Include in a Business Competitor Case Study

You’ve now got a complete strategy to put your competitive analysis report together, but what exactly should you include in that report, and what aspects of your competitor’s business should you research?

The following are essential aspects that will help you to put together the most effective competitor case study.

1. Features

Starting with the basics, look at your customers’ product or service, which competes with yours, and note all of its features. For the best results, do this for each competitor and add your findings to a spreadsheet. This will make it easy to compare products and see what you’re missing.

It may even show you what your competitors are missing, highlighting a hidden advantage that you may not have previously capitalized on.

2. Market Share

Determining their market share will help you identify who your main competitor is and who you and who you may need to focus your attention on.

3. Price points

Pay attention to what the competition charges and consider what insights you can gain about your own pricing.

4. Marketing types

Your competition’s SEO marketing strategy, where they invest their ad spend, the kind of social media marketing tools they use are all important.

What keywords are they using to draw traffic?

How do your competitor’s websites compare to yours?

What are their PPC campaigns like?

All of these questions will help you determine their strengths and weaknesses from a digital standpoint.

Don’t forget about other forms of media, either.

Do they advertise in print publications? If so, which ones?

What about TV, radio, and other advertising platforms?

5. Online popularity

How do they fare in terms of social media engagement and website traffic? How does that compare to your own online presence?

Here, you’re looking more at quantifiable numbers. Likes, follows, mentions, page views, etc., should all be taken into consideration. They may not be the most important factor for some aspects of your business, but if you’re looking to up the game with your marketing and communication strategy or your SEO strategy, these numbers are worth considering.

6. Public perception and reputation

Here, we’re focusing on quality over quantity. One company may have more social media mentions than you, but if all those mentions are negative, it’s a different story. Social listening tools can be a big help in discovering what people are saying about your competitor’s brand online and can prove to be a valuable way to discover the perception of your competitors from a client perspective.

Away from social media, you might also want to consider news releases, blogs, and news articles as a means of discovering what kind of reputation your competitors have in the wider media.

7. Search Engine Optimization

An SEO marketing strategy is vital for just about any business in the digital age, but how do the strategies of competing businesses compare to yours, and what can that teach you. Here’s where keyword research and looking at their inbound marketing strategy, their approach to content marketing, and technical SEO aspects will all be important.

What makes other businesses in your market unique? What do they promote as being their reason for standing out from the crowd? Along with any sales literature, you might want to look at their mission and values statements and the kind of language they use in social media bios to get a good idea of their USPs.

9. Strengths and Weaknesses

Any good business competitor case study will feature a list of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and insight into what opportunities this presents for your business.

Just as you might do a SWOT analysis for your business, a similar approach may help you analyze what other brands do well, how that influences the things you need to improve on, and what they don’t do so well, and how you do can capitalize on that.

10. Geography

In this regard, when we talk about geography, we’re not just talking about the town, city, or region your competitors operate in. Although that’s important, it’s just as important to note whether they have physical bricks-and-mortar venues in those towns or whether they’re a strictly eCommerce or digital-only operation.

What are the Advantages of Conducting a Competitor Analysis?

Identify your own weak spots

Competitor analysis doesn’t just identify your competitors’ weaknesses and gaps in the market. It may also highlight gaps in any areas for improvement in your own company. By comparing your brand to others, you get a different perspective than you’d get from standard SWOT analysis, and this can pay dividends when it comes to driving your company forward.

Improve your marketing and SEO efforts

Competitive strategy analysis isn’t just about products, services, and customers. It can also identify the SEO techniques used by competitors and come up with appropriate keywords to help you improve your organic search results.

Define your Benchmarks and Fine-Tune Your KPIs

Input your findings into a competitive analysis template, and it will soon become apparent what areas your business needs to be focusing on. This can prove invaluable when it comes time to determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and decide what -and how- it measures.

Identify gaps in your talent pool

A competitor case study really influences every aspect of your business beyond the direct products or services you sell. Your HR team can use the information to help identify gaps in your talent pool. If there’s a newly emerging market trend that you lack the talent to capitalize upon, your team can use this information to help with the recruitment needed to fill that gap.

What are the Disadvantages of Competitive Analysis?

Too much data, not enough analysis.

It’s easy to get so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of data you can unearth on your competitors that you forget that it’s the analysis of that data that really makes all the difference. It’s important to think about what meaningful conclusions you can draw and what actionable steps you can take as a result.

The impact is lessened if not kept up to date

The landscape of business is constantly changing. It’s not enough to assess the competition when you first start out and then never update it. Industries change, new trends emerge, new competitors arrive on the scene, all of which demand that market research on your competitors remains a key part of your competitive strategy.

Benchmarking performance based on competitors is not always the solution

Comparing your own performance against your competitors may not work so well if your competitors do things wrong or badly. Sure, it’s great to be an industry leader, but if the overall performance of that industry lacks compared to what the market actually demands, you may need to come up with a brand new strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions About Business Competitor Case Study

Question: what is a business case study competition.

Answer: A business case study competition is an event in which student teams compete to develop the best solution to a particular business case study. Though such events aren’t always exclusively for MBA students, most of them are as case study competitions can be a great way to inspire creative thinking and develop skills.

Question: How often should I do a competitive analysis?

Answer: Ideally, competitive analysis should be performed monthly, but if that seems like overkill for your industry, commit to at least once per quarter.

Question: What should be included in a competitive analysis?

Answer: Every competitive analysis report will be different depending on the nature of your business and your industry. However, as a general rule, it should identify who your competitors are, your competitor’s weaknesses, strengths, and overall strategies. Above all, it should provide insight into how you use their strengths and weaknesses to your advantage, whether that’s making improvements where you’re lacking or highlighting to customers what your brand does better than a rival’s.

The Final Word on Creating a Business Competitor Case Study

Whether you call it competitive intelligence gathering, competitive analysis reporting, or compiling a business competitor case study, there are three key points that I want you to take away from this guide:

• Competitive analysis is about identifying your own strengths and weaknesses as much if not more than your competitors.
• All the research and data in the world is unhelpful if it doesn’t provide you with insights into what you’re doing right and what you could be doing better.
• This isn’t a one-and-done project. Analyzing the competition is something you should be doing regularly to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of your industry.
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Competitor analysis can be hard .

It’s particularly hard (and confusing and incredibly time-consuming) if you’re relatively new in business . Most of the data is ridiculously difficult to get. Even if you manage to dig something up, you always seem to be left with more questions than answers.

How did they manage to get $10M in funding?

Did that absurdly expensive ad campaign pay off?

Did their CEO leave because things aren’t going well at the company?

What does it all mean?

At least that’s what I felt when I was just getting started with competitive analysis. Whether you’re facing a similar struggle or just aren’t sure where to start, I hope this article will help you navigate through every step of the process.

In this article, I will share the competitive analysis framework my team and I have developed (through weeks of research and dozens of iterations), and give you some tips on where to look for data that isn’t publicly available so you can have a competitive advantage .

But before we start…

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your direct competitors’ companies, products, and marketing strategies.

To make your analysis truly useful, it’s important to:

• Pick the right competitors to analyze
• Know which aspects of your competitors’ business are worth analyzing
• Know where to look for the data
• Understand how you can use the insights to improve your own business.

Which brings us to why competitor analysis is worth doing in the first place.

Who can benefit from an analysis framework?

This framework will work well for entrepreneurs , business owners , startup founders , product managers , creators , and marketers .

It covers business metrics, a product analysis, and a marketing assessment, with the marketing bit being a little more in-depth. Feel free to skip certain parts if you’re only interested in one aspect, or better yet, delegate some steps to respective teams if you can.

It doesn’t matter much what kind of product you’re selling or how mature your business is. To use this framework, you may already have a fully functional product, an MVP, or even just a product idea. I’ll be using certain analysis tools to facilitate and automate certain bits of the process. Most of them are either freemium or have a free trial available, so all that you’ll need to invest into the analysis is your own time.

Done properly, competitive analysis will give you plenty of quantitative and qualitative data to back your own business decisions and business strategy (and no, I’m not talking about cloning your competitors’ strategies to come up with a second best product, although this can sometimes work ).

Namely, it can help you:

• Develop (or validate) your Unique Value Proposition
• Prioritize your product development by focusing on the aspects of competitors’ products customers value the most
• Improve your product by capitalizing on competitors’ weaknesses customers complain about
• Find your competitors' strengths to get benchmarks to measure your growth against
• Uncover market segments that aren’t fully served by competitors
• Create a new product category by identifying gaps between what your competitors offer and what the customers need

Who even are your competitors?

I can sense you rolling your eyes at me, but hear me out.

If you’re serious about competitive analysis, it’s not enough to just evaluate the two Industry Leaders everyone’s talking about (that kind of analysis will likely get you depressed real quick).

The competitors you pick for the analysis determine the insights you’ll get at the end, and the decisions you’ll make, based in part on those insights. That’s why including different kinds of competitors (big and small, direct and indirect) into the analysis is critical if you want the results to be comprehensive.

Here’s a handy way to think about your competition that’s based off of Myk Pono’s classification :

It’s best to include at least one competitor from each category into your analysis to make it truly comprehensive.

Whether you can instantly think of over a dozen competitors or can barely recall five, it’s a good idea to turn to Google or a different a search engine ( DuckDuckGo , anyone?) and look up your product category. Examine the products within the top 50 results, along with the ads that are displayed in response to your query — more likely than not, you’ll come across companies you’ve forgotten about, or maybe even learn about a few newcomers.

To give you an example, I’m going to imagine I’m launching a vacation rental website — an alternative to AirBnB. Here’s what my list of competitors may look like broken down by categories:

Now that you have a comprehensive list of your competitors with similar products, it’s time to start the actual analysis.

As you go through the process, feel free to use this Google Sheets template I’ve created.

In the spreadsheet, I like to divide the factors into collapsable sections (yes, these do get pretty lengthy). I also tend to add comments under each aspect with details or links that provide more info. Depending on the stage you’re at with your business, you can also add in a column for your own product to quickly see how it compares to competitors.

What’s included in a competitor analysis framework

• Business & Company metrics 1.1. Company overview 1.2. Funding 1.3. Revenue & customers
• Product 2.1. Product features 2.2. Pricing 2.3. Perks 2.4. Technology
• Customers & awareness 3.1. Share of Voice 3.2. Sentiment 3.3. Key topics 3.4. Geography 3.5. Social media platforms
• Marketing 4.1. SEO 4.2. Social media 4.3. Advertising 4.4. Influencers and other partners 4.5. Content Marketing 4.6. Customer acquisition 4.7. Sales 4.8. Customer service 4.9. Unique strengths

I’ll go into depth about each section below, and again feel free to grab this competitor analysis template to follow along .

1. Business & Company metrics

1.1. company overview.

Your analysis should start with digging up the basic info about your competitors: things like the company’s founding year, the names of the CEO and other key people, locations of the company’s offices, how many employees work there, etc.

You’ll usually find bits of this information on competitors’ websites.

The company’s LinkedIn profile is often useful, particularly for employee counts.

And for info on key people, offices, and founding date, CrunchBase is a great resource.

Your competitors’ job openings can also be found on their websites, LinkedIn, and job search sites like Glassdoor and Indeed . Knowing who they are hiring and which teams they are expanding will give you an idea of what steps they’re about to take, both product- and marketing-wise. Are they about to hire their first sales rep or content marketer? Are they looking for a developer with a specific skill set? Combined with what you know about your industry, your competition’s job openings will tell you a lot about where they are going with their business.

You could also take things one step further and see if you can get an understanding of competitors’ corporate culture. The best place to dig through employee reviews is Glassdoor . There, you can find out what employees think about the culture, the team, the pay, the management – and those are often honest opinions because a lot of the feedback is anonymous.

1.2. Funding

Knowing when, how much, and from whom your competitors received funding can also be important, particularly if you plan on raising capital yourself. It will give you a solid idea on how much funding you can expect to get.

On top of that, venture capitalists (VCs) tend to invest in only one company in a given category so as not to cannibalize their own investments. If an VCs’ name is missing from your competitors’ funding history, they might be a good candidate for you: they missed out on the chance to work with a successful competitor, but now they have the opportunity to invest into a promising startup in the industry (you!).

1.3. Revenue & customers

Your competitors’ revenue and number of customers deserve a separate section in your spreadsheet. For some companies, you’ll be able to find estimates on Owler , but those will often be very rough. A Google search for the name of your competitor combined with the words “revenue,” “customers,” etc. might lead you to interviews or press releases where the companies share this information (because, well, everyone likes to brag).

That said, I bet you won’t be able to find every competitor’s revenue figures this way. To help you dig deeper, I have two hacks to share that go beyond a simple Google search:

Hack #1: Set up alerts for competitors’ interviews and conference presentations.

This one requires some time, but it’s very effective in the long run: you’ll be surprised at just how much your competitors give away at event presentations and in interviews, without being aware of you listening. All you need to do is sign up for Awario (there’s a free 14-day trial available), create an alert for the names of your competitors’ CEOs or other key figures (don’t forget to put the names in double quotes to search for an exact match), and select YouTube as the source for the search. And that’s it! You can now binge-watch those videos right in Awario, without having to leave the tool for a minute, noting your findings along the way.

Hack #2: Use this revenue formula

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr offers a simple formula you can use to calculate a competitor’s revenue estimate, provided you know how many people work there. Take the number of employees the company has listed on its LinkedIn profile and multiply that by $150,000 if well-funded ($200,000 if modestly funded). This should give you an estimate you can work with.

Employee count * $150,000 = Revenue estimate

These details, combined with company info like founding year and employee counts, are important so you can use them as a benchmark against your own growth. How much time did it take each of your competitors to get to the revenue figures they have today? Are you doing as well as a current market leader back when it was an early-stage business?

It’s time to evaluate your competitors’ products or services, the actual things they’re selling. What kind of technology are they using to build it? What is their core selling point? Are there any perks that come with the product: a freemium version, complementary free tools, or services?

2.1. Product features

Let’s get down to the core of your competitors’ business – their product and its key features. A word of caution: this will likely be the longest bit of your spreadsheet.

It’s a good idea to divide the features into groups of related ones to keep things organized.

2.2. Pricing

Assessing competitors’ pricing pages is another crucial step in your analysis (if pricing isn’t available on their website, try reaching out to their sales team).

Here are some questions to consider:

• Can you uncover a segment of the market that doesn’t seem to be fully served by competitors’ plans?
• Say, do they have an affordable plan for startups or small businesses? Discounts for students or non-profits?
• Are there data-heavy options available for agencies and big brands, with Enterprise features like an API or white-label options?

Another thing you can draw from competitors’ pricing strategies is great ideas for A/B testing . Do they offer monthly or annual plans? (If it’s both, what is the default option?) How many packages have they got? Identify the opportunities for your experiments, and prioritize the ones that are common for several competitors.

Dig through your competitors’ websites to see if they offer something complimentary with their product. Do they have a free trial or a freemium version? Are there any “free” tools their customers get access to, or perhaps a perks program in partnership with other tools?

2.4. Technology

Competitors’ technology is an important aspect to assess for tech companies. BuiltWith is a great (and free) tool to figure out the tech stack that a competitor uses. Just type in the URL, and you’ll be able to see what technology the website runs on, along with any third-party scripts and plugins it uses, everything from analytics systems, email marketing services, to A/B testing tools, and CRMs.

A lean alternative to BuiltWith is What Runs , which is a browser extension that analyzes any webpage you’re on.

On top of that, looking at competitors’ job postings (yes, again) is a great way to see what kind of technology stack they’re using by analyzing the skills they require from candidates. To look for job openings, check your competitors’ websites and job search sites like Glassdoor and Indeed .

3. Customers & awareness

Your next big step in analyzing the competition is looking at what their customers have to say about them. In this section, you’ll look at each brand’s Share of Voice, the sentiment behind their mentions, the key topics customers bring up when they talk about your competitors, and more. To measure these, you’ll need a social listening tool like Awario or Mention .

3.1. Share of Voice

Ideally, you’d want to measure the market share for each of your competitors. But alas, it’s nearly impossible. One substitute metric you could use is Share of Voice – the volume of mentions your competitors get on social media and the web compared to each other.

To measure share of voice , create an alert for each competitor’s brand in Awario, give the tool some time to collect the mentions, and jump to the Alert Comparison report to see how much each competitor is talked about on social and the web.

It’s a good idea to keep these alerts running for the long-term (as opposed to just looking at Share of Voice once). This way, you’ll be able to see spikes in their volume of mentions, track what their customers are saying, and see how their (and your own) Share of Voice evolves over time.

3.2. Sentiment

The caveat of measuring the level of awareness a competitor has is that awareness isn’t always a good thing. What if there’s been a data scandal one of the competitors is involved in? What if their customer service is horrible, causing an influx of negative mentions?

That’s not the only reason why measuring the sentiment behind the mentions of your competitors is important. It will also help you understand what these companies’ customers love and hate about their product the most.

On top of that, it can also serve as a benchmark when you analyze the sentiment behind the mentions of your own brand and product. Let’s say, 40% of your mentions are positive, 20% are negative, and the rest are neutral. How do you know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing without a benchmark?

3.3. Key topics

What do your customers focus on when they mention your competitors’ products or write customer reviews?

What do they love and hate the most?

Identifying the key topics within your competitors’ mentions will give quick answers to these questions so you don’t have to dig through mentions by hand. You can find these topic clouds in a social listening dashboard. From there, you can click on any topic to explore the mentions in-depth.

Interestingly, these topic clouds can also offer insight into various aspects of your competitors’ business – and they may help you fill the gaps in other sections in your competitor analysis spreadsheet. Here’s one example: those are the key topics for Loom, a screen recording app, from which you can learn a few useful things if you look closely.

Looks like the company a) has just raised some money, b) offers remote jobs, and c) has just announced a new feature they’re building. And you discovered all that at a glance! Of course, you can further explore any topic by clicking on it to see all the mentions that contain the word/phrase.

3.4. Geography

Looking at the geography and demographics of your competitors’ mentions will let you figure out which markets they are focusing on the most (and, with any luck, find an area that isn’t too saturated yet). You’ll find a map of each brand’s mentions in Awario’s dashboard and reports, along with the breakdown of mentions by language.

Try adjusting the date range in the report to see if there’s been any changes in languages/countries recently. This could mean that your competitors are focusing on a new emerging market – an opportunity you might be interested to explore.

3.5. Social media platforms

Just like with geography, this one will give you an idea on where your competitors’ audience hangs out so you can use these findings in your own marketing strategy and social media strategy. On top of that, if you see platforms that appear to be heavily underused (but do look relevant), those may also be worth experimenting with. Just like with the previous factors, you can compare the platforms side-by-side using Awario’s Alert Comparison report.

4. Marketing

From the SEO perspective, there are two most important things about competition you should focus on: the keywords they rank for and the backlinks they’ve got. The former will give you a solid idea on what type of search terms bring them traffic and sales (so you can shape your own keyword strategy), and the latter will show what authoritative websites in your niche link to them (those will likely be relevant to your website too).

For both tasks, you can use SEO PowerSuite (you can get the free version here ). The toolkit includes 4 apps for different aspects of SEO, but we’ll only need 2 of those to analyze competitors.

Rank Tracker will help you with the keywords. Navigate to the tool’s Ranking Keywords module and type in a competitor’s URL. You’ll see a list of terms they rank for, along with the search volume for each term in your country of choice. It’s a good idea to move the most popular terms to Target Keywords right away so you can keep them for your records. Repeat the process for every competitor, noting their estimated search traffic and top keywords they rank for.

For backlink analysis, you’ll need SEO SpyGlass. Launch the tool and create a project for one of your competitors. Next, jump to Domain Comparison . One by one, specify your competitors’ websites and take a look at how they compare.

Next, jump to Link Intersection – a module that shows you the domains that link to more than one of your competitors. You can sort them by InLink Rank to see the most authoritative websites on your list. Those are likely relevant industry websites that will make a great addition to your backlink profile – make sure to save them so you can reach out and see if you can get a backlink from there.

4.2. Social media

The next step is analyzing what, when, and how your competitors are doing on social media. Rival IQ is a useful tool for this task, and they have a 14-day free trial available. Once you’ve signed up for the tool, specify your competitors’ websites, and the platform will automatically pull their social media profiles.

From there, you’ll be able to see which social networks they’re active on, how many followers they have, how much engagement their posts get, etc. Those insights will be handy to benchmark your own strategy against. The tool will also show you the best times and days of the week to post, based on the engagement competitors’ posts get.

On top of that, it may be a good idea to research if your competitors have a community on social media – a Facebook group or a subreddit dedicated to their product. How big is the community? Are the users engaged?

4.3. Advertising

To get an idea of your competitors’ ad strategy, SimilarWeb is a great (and free) starting point. Enter the URL of a competitor’s website and navigate to the Search section – it will show you if your competitors have any search ads running, and, if they do, what their target keywords are.

The Display section below will show you whether a competitor is running any display ads, and, if they are, which platforms bring them the most traffic.

For Facebook ads, simply open a competitor’s Facebook page and click on Info and ads .

Alternatively, you can use Facebook’s Ad Library to search for your competitors’ ads. Unfortunately, these tools won’t reveal targeting rules your competitors use, but you’ll still get a solid idea of how many ads they’re running, and perhaps get inspiration for your own advertising efforts.

If native ads or other kinds of paid content are a thing in your niche, you can also try searching for “sponsored by [competitor]”, “author” “[competitor]”, etc. in a search engine of your choice (the quotes will make sure you’re looking for an exact match, and all of the words in the query are taken into account). Take note of authoritative platforms you come across and try reaching out to them to inquire about sponsored posts.

4.4. Influencers and other partners

At this point, we’re interested in exploring the partnerships your competitors have that help spread the word about their products. We’ll look at influencers endorsing your competition, publishers they work with, and media platforms they guest blog on, if any.

For the analysis, you’ll need the same social media monitoring alerts for your competitors’ brand you’ve already created in Awario. In your feed, make sure to group the mentions by Authors and sort them by Reach to see the most influential posts first (Reach is calculated based on the number of followers and engagements on social media, and based on the site’s estimated traffic for results from news, blogs, and the web).

This will let you see the most influential posts that mention your competition, including social media posts and blog articles from around the web. Take note of the influencers or publishers they work with – chances are they will be happy to work with you as well.

On top of that, you can also turn to SimilarWeb to see what referral sources are bringing the most visits to your competitors’ websites. Chances are you’ll also find a bunch of blogs and media platforms that generate substantial traffic to their sites.

4.5. Content Marketing

If content is part of your competitors’ strategy, it’s important that you analyze their blog and what they tend to write about. Are the readers engaged? Do the posts get shared around social media a lot? Does the competitor accept guest posts?

BuzzSumo is a great tool to help you out. It will show you the most shared posts on any blog within the past year, so you can get inspiration for your own posts and a better idea of what kind of content resonates with your target audience the best.

4.6. Customer acquisition

I know, a lot of the points above were actually customer acquisition techniques; but this section is reserved for the ones that weren’t outlined before. Do your competitors have a referral strategy? Do they have an affiliate program? Do they sponsor or exhibit at industry conferences? Do they acquire customers in any other creative way?

If applicable, it’s also important to analyze your competitors’ sales strategy. Do they do product demos? What does contacting a rep look like? Is there a phone number you can call?

The best thing to do is try and book a demo (or a call) with every company yourself, taking careful note of every step. Do they require filling out dozens of fields for you to talk to sales? Will they refuse to hold a demo just because your company is “too small”? Is their time zone convenient? How long does it take them to reply?

All of this will help you spot strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ sales strategy to help you shape your own.

4.8. Customer service

Does every competitor offer Customer Support for all customers, or does it start with a particular plan? What channels do they provide support on: is it email, live chat, phone, social media, or all of the above? What is their response time? Do they offer Account Management for Enterprise customers?

Analyzing your competitors’ customer service will help you improve your own. The truth is, in large companies, customer care is often almost non-existent; for a new business in the industry, that’s a great area to capitalize on. If that’s true in your case, make sure to highlight the quality of your customer service on your website.

4.9. Unique strengths

Is there anything else that gives a competitor on your list an unfair advantage over everyone else? For example, is their CEO or somebody else on the team an industry influencer? Does the company publish amazing books that are also free? Have the founders launched successful products before? Make note of each competitor’s unique strengths that are hard to emulate.

What’s next?

Once you’re done with every step of competitive analysis, I’m sure you’ve got a clear understanding of the market and more than a handful of ideas on how to improve your own product. While the research is still fresh in your mind, one bonus step I’d highly recommend to everyone performing the analysis is to map your competitors on a Strategy Canvas (from the book Blue Ocean Strategy ).

A Strategy Canvas is a chart that breaks down your competitors by various aspects of their businesses and products (the pricing and other aspects specific to your product category).

The easiest way to plot this is a line chart, with each factor assigned a score depending on how well it is executed.

Here’s an example from the book: a Strategy Canvas for Southwest, one of the first low-cost airlines in the US, compared to the 2 categories that could be considered its competitors: air travel at the time and car travel.

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy

Depending on the kind of competitors you’ve analyzed, you’ll likely see that most of them follow one or two distinct patterns: those will be the major categories you’re competing with (though they may not be as different as cars and airplanes). It’s time to plot your own product on the canvas and see how it compares to the competitors.

Finally, think of ways to make your product stand out. From your research, recall the things your audience needs more and less of. Blue Ocean Strategy offers a nice way to think about the factors on the canvas in terms of applying them to your own product, called the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid.

• Think of features you could eliminate to lower the cost of your solution : the ones that seem superfluous, are rarely mentioned by customers, and are particularly costly. For Southwest vs. traditional airlines, those were seating class choices and hub connectivity.
• Think of the factors you can reduce way below the industry standard : the ones that need to be there, but can be leveled down significantly. It’s great if price is going to be one of them! For Southwest, those were the prices, meals, and lounges.
• Time to think about the aspects you’ll raise well above the industry standard , especially if they won’t cost you a fortune. What do customers wish they’d get more of? For Southwest, that was the friendliness of the service and the speed of travel.
• Lastly, try and create new features that your closest competitors don’t offer (or borrow them from another product category). With Southwest, it was the frequent departures that traditional airlines didn’t have – but car travel did.

Remember: the idea of a competitive analysis isn’t to steal what they’re doing, it is to understand where your business falls in the market and find new opportunities to make your product stand out.

Eventually, focusing on your customers and gaps between supply and demand will serve you much better than focusing on the competition. And that’s what competitor analysis is for – finding ways to serve the customer better.

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How to create a competitive analysis (with examples)

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. In this guide, we’ll outline how to do a competitive analysis and explain how you can use this marketing strategy to improve your business.

Whether you’re running a business or playing in a football game, understanding your competition is crucial for success. While you may not be scoring touchdowns in the office, your goal is to score business deals with clients or win customers with your products. The method of preparation for athletes and business owners is similar—once you understand your strengths and weaknesses versus your competitors’, you can level up. 

What is a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. 

Direct competitors market the same product to the same audience as you, while indirect competitors market the same product to a different audience. After identifying your competitors, you can use the information you gather to see where you stand in the market landscape. 

What to include in a competitive analysis

The purpose of this type of analysis is to get a competitive advantage in the market and improve your business strategy. Without a competitive analysis, it’s difficult to know what others are doing to win clients or customers in your target market. A competitive analysis report may include:

A description of your company’s target market

Details about your product or service versus the competitors’

Current and projected market share, sales, and revenues

Pricing comparison

Marketing and social media strategy analysis

Differences in customer ratings

You’ll compare each detail of your product or service versus the competition to assess strategy efficacy. By comparing success metrics across companies, you can make data-driven decisions.

How to do a competitive analysis

Follow these five steps to create your competitive analysis report and get a broad view of where you fit in the market. This process can help you analyze a handful of competitors at one time and better approach your target customers.

1. Create a competitor overview

In step one, select between five and 10 competitors to compare against your company. The competitors you choose should have similar product or service offerings and a similar business model to you. You should also choose a mix of both direct and indirect competitors so you can see how new markets might affect your company. Choosing both startup and seasoned competitors will further diversify your analysis.

Tip: To find competitors in your industry, use Google or Amazon to search for your product or service. The top results that emerge are likely your competitors. If you’re a startup or you serve a niche market, you may need to dive deeper into the rankings to find your direct competitors.

2. Conduct market research

Once you know the competitors you want to analyze, you’ll begin in-depth market research. This will be a mixture of primary and secondary research. Primary research comes directly from customers or the product itself, while secondary research is information that’s already compiled. Then, keep track of the data you collect in a user research template .

Primary market research may include: 

Purchasing competitors’ products or services

Interviewing customers

Conducting online surveys of customers 

Holding in-person focus groups

Secondary market research may include:

Examining competitors’ websites

Assessing the current economic situation

Identifying technological developments 

Reading company records

Tip: Search engine analysis tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you examine competitors’ websites and obtain crucial SEO information such as the keywords they’re targeting, the number of backlinks they have, and the overall health of their website. 

3. Compare product features

The next step in your analysis involves a comparison of your product to your competitors’ products. This comparison should break down the products feature by feature. While every product has its own unique features, most products will likely include:

Service offered

Age of audience served

Number of features

Style and design

Ease of use

Type and number of warranties

Customer support offered

Product quality

Tip: If your features table gets too long, abbreviate this step by listing the features you believe are of most importance to your analysis. Important features may include cost, product benefits, and ease of use.

4. Compare product marketing

The next step in your analysis will look similar to the one before, except you’ll compare the marketing efforts of your competitors instead of the product features. Unlike the product features matrix you created, you’ll need to go deeper to unveil each company’s marketing plan . 

Areas you’ll want to analyze include:

Social media

Website copy

Press releases

Product copy

As you analyze the above, ask questions to dig deeper into each company’s marketing strategies. The questions you should ask will vary by industry, but may include:

What story are they trying to tell?

What value do they bring to their customers?

What’s their company mission?

What’s their brand voice?

Tip: You can identify your competitors’ target demographic in this step by referencing their customer base, either from their website or from testimonials. This information can help you build customer personas. When you can picture who your competitor actively targets, you can better understand their marketing tactics. 

5. Use a SWOT analysis

Competitive intelligence will make up a significant part of your competitor analysis framework, but once you’ve gathered your information, you can turn the focus back to your company. A SWOT analysis helps you identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. It also helps turn weaknesses into opportunities and assess threats you face based on your competition.

During a SWOT analysis, ask yourself:

What do we do well?

What could we improve?

Are there market gaps in our services?

What new market trends are on the horizon?

Tip: Your research from the previous steps in the competitive analysis will help you answer these questions and fill in your SWOT analysis. You can visually present your findings in a SWOT matrix, which is a four-box chart divided by category.

6. Identify your place in the market landscape

The last step in your competitive analysis is to understand where you stand in the market landscape. To do this, you’ll create a graph with an X and Y axis. The two axes should represent the most important factors for being competitive in your market. 

For example, the X-axis may represent customer satisfaction, while the Y-axis may represent presence in the market. You’ll then plot each competitor on the graph according to their (x,y) coordinates. You’ll also plot your company on this chart, which will give you an idea of where you stand in relation to your competitors. 

This graph is included for informational purposes and does not represent Asana’s market landscape or any specific industry’s market landscape. 

Tip: In this example, you’ll see three companies that have a greater market presence and greater customer satisfaction than yours, while two companies have a similar market presence but higher customer satisfaction. This data should jumpstart the problem-solving process because you now know which competitors are the biggest threats and you can see where you fall short. 

Competitive analysis example

Imagine you work at a marketing startup that provides SEO for dentists, which is a niche industry and only has a few competitors. You decide to conduct a market analysis for your business. To do so, you would:

Step 1: Use Google to compile a list of your competitors. 

Steps 2, 3, and 4: Use your competitors’ websites, as well as SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, to deep-dive into the service offerings and marketing strategies of each company. 

Step 5: Focusing back on your own company, you conduct a SWOT analysis to assess your own strategic goals and get a visual of your strengths and weaknesses. 

Step 6: Finally, you create a graph of the market landscape and conclude that there are two companies beating your company in customer satisfaction and market presence. 

After compiling this information into a table like the one below, you consider a unique strategy. To beat out your competitors, you can use localization. Instead of marketing to dentists nationwide like your competitors are doing, you decide to focus your marketing strategy on one region, state, or city. Once you’ve become the known SEO company for dentists in that city, you’ll branch out. 

You won’t know what conclusions you can draw from your competitive analysis until you do the work and see the results. Whether you decide on a new pricing strategy, a way to level up your marketing, or a revamp of your product, understanding your competition can provide significant insight.

Drawbacks of competitive analysis

There are some drawbacks to competitive analysis you should consider before moving forward with your report. While these drawbacks are minor, understanding them can make you an even better manager or business owner. 

Don’t forget to take action

You don’t just want to gather the information from your competitive analysis—you also want to take action on that information. The data itself will only show you where you fit into the market landscape. The key to competitive analysis is using it to problem solve and improve your company’s strategic plan .

Be wary of confirmation bias

Confirmation bias means interpreting information based on the beliefs you already hold. This is bad because it can cause you to hold on to false beliefs. To avoid bias, you should rely on all the data available to back up your decisions. In the example above, the business owner may believe they’re the best in the SEO dental market at social media. Because of this belief, when they do market research for social media, they may only collect enough information to confirm their own bias—even if their competitors are statistically better at social media. However, if they were to rely on all the data available, they could eliminate this bias.

Update your analysis regularly

A competitive analysis report represents a snapshot of the market landscape as it currently stands. This report can help you gain enough information to make changes to your company, but you shouldn’t refer to the document again unless you update the information regularly. Market trends are always changing, and although it’s tedious to update your report, doing so will ensure you get accurate insight into your competitors at all times. 

Boost your marketing strategy with competitive analysis

Learning your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses will make you a better marketer. If you don’t know the competition you’re up against, you can’t beat them. Using competitive analysis can boost your marketing strategy and allow you to capture your target audience faster.

Competitive analysis must lead to action, which means following up on your findings with clear business goals and a strong business plan. Once you do your competitive analysis, you can use the templates below to put your plan into action.

Related resources

Data-driven decision making: A step-by-step guide

How Asana uses work management for employee onboarding

4 ways to establish roles and responsibilities for team success

Cost control: How to monitor project spending to increase profitability

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Blog Marketing How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

Written by: Midori Nediger Nov 09, 2023

Your business will always have competition.

And if you don’t know what that competition is up to, you could be missing out on huge opportunities.

That’s why a competitive analysis is so crucial to your success as a business. It gives you the tools to quickly adapt to any changes in the competitive landscape and potentially capitalize on industry trends that your competitors haven’t even noticed.

So let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is a competitive analysis report?

A competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors compared to those of your own business.

Typically, a competitive analysis report will contain:

• A description of your business’s target market
• Details about the features of your product compared to your competitors’ products
• A breakdown of current and projected market share, sales, and revenues
• Comparisons of pricing models
• An analysis of marketing strategy and social media strategy
• A description of customer ratings of the features of each competitor

Whether you’re a startup trying to break into the marketplace , a consultant trying to get results for your client, or an established company looking to cement your foothold against the competition, a well-researched competitive analysis gives you the tools you need to make strategic decisions.

Your competitive analysis should inform your marketing plan , your business plan , your consultant report and every part of your high-level business strategy.

But how do you actually create a competitive analysis report?

How to make competitor analysis report :

• Start with a competitor overview
• Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends
• Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix
• Summarize your strengths and weaknesses with a SWOT analysis
• Show where you fit in the competitive landscape
• Use a competitor analysis template for a professional look and feel

The level of detail you include in each section of your competitive analysis report will vary depending on the stage of your business growth and your goals. For example, a startup might create a report that focuses on market research, while an established business might dive into detail on an emerging competitor.

But let’s talk about the parts of a competitive analysis that every report should include.

1. Start with a competitor overview

A strong report shows exactly what a company must out-compete to be successful.

Meaning you must audit any product or service that currently solves the problem your business is trying to solve for customers and write a quick profile for each competitor.

Like the template below, each competitor profile might include:

• The company’s revenue and market share
• The company’s size and information about their management team
• A broad description of the company’s strengths and weaknesses
• An overview of how the company is perceived by customers

This overview will help your readers get a big-picture view of the market landscape.

2. Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends

You can’t create a competitive analysis report without doing extensive market research , which is all about gathering information to understand your customers, identify opportunities to grow, and recognize trends in the industry.

This research can help you put together the customer personas that will guide business and marketing decisions down the line, and allow you to plan for any shifts that might disrupt the marketplace.

You can conduct primary market research, with:

• Customer interviews
• Online surveys or questionnaires
• In-person focus groups
• Purchasing a competitor product to study packaging and delivery experience

Or secondary market research, by:

• Reading company records
• Examining the current economic conditions
• Researching relevant technological developments

When assembling your market research you may just want provide a high-level summary of the industry trends, like this competitor analysis example shows:

Or you may want to dive into detail on the demographics of a particular consumer segment, like this:

But if you’re a consultant or advisor struggling to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, the report below would be ideal. Covering everything from market forecasts to consumer profiles, it can help you get clients and decision-makers on board.

3. Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix

The feature comparison is arguably the most important part of the competitive analysis. Breaking down your product and your competitors’ products feature-by-feature will allow you to see what really sets everyone apart.

In addition to specific product features, here are some attributes that you might include in a feature comparison matrix:

• Product quality
• Number of features
• Ease of use
• Customer support
• Brand/style/image

The most common format for a features analysis is a simple matrix with you and your competitors along one side and all of the relevant features along the other. You can check off or rate how you perform in each area:

But these tables can get pretty long. Another approach is to focus on the things that provide the most value to the user, like in this competitor analysis example from Mint. It only includes ease of use, costs, and benefits:

If you want to visualize your comparisons in an engaging way, you could use a comparison infographic . 

Great resources for this section of your competitive analysis report are product rating sites like Capterra and G2Crowd . They’ll give you an unbiased view of your company and your competitors.

And as with any market research, it’s critical that you speak with real people who use your product and your competitors’ products. That’s the only way to get an accurate picture of how your target customers rate the competition .

4. Summarize your strengths and weaknesses in a SWOT analysis

When you’re conducting research for your competitive analysis, it’s going to be messy. You’ll have a lot of data and it’ll be hard for an outsider to understand.

That’s what makes the SWOT analysis so essential.

A SWOT analysis is a framework for evaluating your competitive position by listing your key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It can act like a short summary of the rest of your competitive analysis report for anyone who doesn’t have time to dig into the details.

Click the template above to enter our online SWOT analysis maker tool. Customize the template to your liking–no design no-how required.

Here are some questions to kickstart your SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: What are we doing really well (in terms of marketing, products, sales, branding, technology, etc.)?
• Weaknesses: What are we struggling with? What’s holding us back?
• Opportunities: What’s the weakest area for our biggest competitor? Are there any gaps in the market that aren’t current being addressed? What has recently changed in our business or the market?
• Threats: What is our biggest competitor doing much better than us? What new products/features are they working on? What problems aren’t we currently addressing?

In your report, you could arrange your SWOT analysis in a simple list, but it can be helpful to use color-coded quadrants, like the competitor analysis example below. Note how each quadrant is paired with an icon:

5. Show where you fit in the competitive landscape

After summarizing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it’s time to look at the bigger picture. It’s time to figure out where every major competitor currently fits into the competitive landscape.

The most popular way of doing this is to identify the two dimensions that are most important for being competitive in your industry and plot them on a matrix, like this one from the Boston Consulting Group:

And this one from G2 Crowd (which looks at market presence and customer satisfaction):

You may want to focus on where you fit in the market landscape based on your own biggest strengths and weaknesses, or the biggest threats and opportunities you identified in the SWOT analysis.

Or, it may be enough just to summarize in words the features and benefits that set your apart from your competitors (which is a great way to end your report on a high note).

Competitor analysis examples for strategic planning

Let’s delve into some competitor analysis examples that can empower your organization to navigate the market effectively.

1. Competitor analysis example for marketing specialists

Imagine this: You are a Marketing Specialist and your goal is to establish a strong online presence and attract a diverse user base. However, you face stiff competition from established players in the market. Here are some things you should look into when doing your competitor analysis:

Competitor analysis focus:

• SEO strategies: Analyze competitors’ websites to understand their SEO strategies. Identify high-ranking keywords, backlink strategies, and content optimization techniques . Alternatively, if you’re running a local business, you might want to analyze and scrape Google Maps listings to better assess how companies are optimizing Google My Business to generate leads.
• Social media engagement: Examine competitors’ social media presence. Evaluate the type of content that garners engagement, the frequency of posts, and audience interactions.
• Online advertising: Investigate competitors’ online advertising campaigns. Are they leveraging Google Ads, social media ads, or other platforms? Assess the messaging, visuals, and targeting criteria.
• Content marketing: Scrutinize competitors’ content marketing efforts. Identify the topics that resonate with their audience, the formats they use (blogs, videos, infographics), and the platforms they prioritize.

Here’s a SWOT analysis template to help you get started:

2. Competitor analysis example for SME business development managers

Imagine this: As the business development manager for a medium sized start up, you are tasked with expanding the client base. The market is crowded with similar service providers, and differentiation is key. When doing your competitor analysis report, look into:

• Client testimonials and case studies: Explore competitors’ websites for client testimonials and case studies. Identify success stories and areas where clients express satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
• Service offerings: Analyze the range of services offered by competitors. Identify gaps in their offerings or areas where you can provide additional value to clients.
• Pricing models: Investigate competitors’ pricing structures. Are they offering packages, subscription models, or customized solutions? Determine whether there’s room for a more competitive pricing strategy .
• Partnerships and collaborations: Explore potential partnerships or collaborations that competitors have formed. This can provide insights into untapped markets or innovative service delivery methods.

Here’s a competitor analysis comparison chart template that you could use:

3. Competitor analysis example for product managers

Imagine this: You are a Product Manager for a consumer electronics company tasked with improving your company’s products and services. The market is buzzing with innovation, and staying ahead requires a deep understanding of competitor products.

• Feature comparison: Conduct a detailed feature-by-feature comparison of your product with competitors. Identify unique features that set your product apart and areas where you can enhance or differentiate.
• User experience (UX): Evaluate the user experience of competitors’ products. Analyze customer reviews, app ratings, and usability feedback to understand pain points and areas for improvement.
• Technological advancements: Investigate the technological capabilities of competitors. Are they integrating AI, IoT, or other cutting-edge technologies? Assess whether there are emerging technologies you can leverage.
• Product lifecycle management: Examine competitors’ product release cycles. Identify patterns in their product launches and assess whether there are opportunities for strategic timing or gap exploitation.

To help you get started, use this competitive analysis report template to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the product or service

How to present a competitor analysis

Presenting a competitor analysis effectively involves organizing and communicating information about your competitors in a clear and concise manner. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to present a competitor analysis:

• Introduction: Start with a brief introduction to set the stage. Outline the purpose of the competitor analysis and its significance in the current market context.
• Competitor identification: Clearly list and identify the main competitors. Include both direct and indirect competitors. Briefly describe each competitor’s core business and market presence.
• Key metrics and performance: Present key metrics and performance indicators for each competitor. This may include market share, revenue, growth rate, and any other relevant quantitative data.
• SWOT analysis: Conduct a concise SWOT analysis for each competitor. Summarize their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use a simple visual representation if possible.
• Market positioning: Discuss how each competitor is positioned in the market. This could include their target audience, unique selling propositions, and any specific market niches they occupy. Also, focus on finding keywords , as your competitor’s targeted keywords are the main source of information on their online market performance.
• Strategic moves: Highlight recent strategic moves made by your competitors. This could include product launches, partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, or changes in pricing strategy. Discuss how these moves impact the competitive landscape.
• Recommendations and implications: Based on the analysis, provide recommendations and implications for your company. Identify opportunities to capitalize on competitors’ weaknesses and outline potential threats that need to be addressed. Discuss any adjustments to your own strategy that may be necessary in response to the competitive landscape.

3 tips to improve your competitive analysis report design

How you design your competitive analysis report can have a significant impact on your business success. The right report design can inspire stakeholders to take action based on your findings, while a mediocre design may reflect poorly on your hard work.

Here are a few report design best practices to keep in mind when designing your competitive analysis report:

• Start with a competitive analysis report template
• Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent
• Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

1. Start with a competitor analysis template

The quickest way to lose the confidence of your stakeholders is to present a messy, amateur report design. Besides distracting from the content of the report, it might even put your credibility at risk.

Starting with a pre-designed competitor analysis template, like the one below, takes almost all of the design work out of the mix so you can focus on the content (while still impressing your stakeholders).

And if you’re a consultant competing for a project, a pre-designed template may just give you the edge you need to land that client.

Click on any of our templates; you’ll enter our online drag and drop report maker tool. No design know-how required.

2. Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent

If you take a look at the competitor analysis template below, you might notice that the designer has switched up the layout from page to page, but many of the other design elements are kept consistent.

That consistency helps the report design feel cohesive while making it easier for readers to quickly skim for key pieces of information.

Here are a few quick guidelines for keeping important design elements consistent:

• Use the same color scheme throughout your report (with one highlight color to draw attention to key takeaways and important numbers)
• Use the same font styles for your headers, subheaders, and body text (with no more than 2-3 font styles per report)
• Use the same style of visuals throughout your report (like flat icons or illustrated icons… but not both)

3. Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

The challenge with a competitive analysis report is that you collect heaps of background research, and you have to condense it into a brief report that your client will actually read.

And written summaries will only get you so far.

Visuals like charts and tables are a much better way to communicate a lot of research quickly and concisely, as seen in the market research summary below.

Even lists can be made more engaging and informative by spacing out list items and giving more emphasis to headers:

The more you can replace descriptive paragraphs and long lists with thoughtful visuals, the more your readers will thank you.

A competitive analysis will allow you to think up effective strategies to battle your competition and establish yourself in your target market.

And a report that communicates the findings of your competitive analysis will ensure stakeholders are on board and in the know.

Now that you know how to design a competitive analysis report, you’re ready to get started:

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How to do competitor analysis for ux design (2024), saviour egbe, january 5, 2024.

UX competitor analysis is a critical step in the UX design process. By understanding your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, you can identify areas where you can improve your own designs and create a better experience for your users.

In today's competitive market, it's more important than ever to have a strong user experience (UX). Users have high expectations for the products and services they use, and they're quick to switch to a competitor if they're not satisfied.

UX competitive analysis can help you understand what your competitors are doing well, and where they could improve. By identifying your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, you can develop a UX strategy that will help you stand out from the crowd.

In this guide, we'll take a deep dive into competitor analysis for UXR. We'll cover the following topics:

What is Competitive Analysis in UX?

When should you conduct a ux competitive analysis, what products should you run competitor analysis on, top 6 ways to conduct competitor analysis in ux, how do you present ux competitor analysis findings, ux competitive analysis: prioritizing design changes, keep in mind: tips and tricks, competitor analysis template + example.

Competitor analysis is a UX research process that UX designers or researchers use to understand their competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. This information can then be used to identify areas where they can improve their own designs, such as:

• Features and functionality: What features do your competitors offer that your product or service doesn't? Are there any features that your users are asking for that your competitors don't offer?
• User experience: How easy is it for users to use your competitors' products or services? Are there any pain points that your users are experiencing?
• Marketing and sales strategy: How are your competitors marketing and selling their products or services? What are their strengths and weaknesses in this area?

The goal of competitor analysis is to:

1. Be aware of what’s already available in the market, what others are doing well or badly 2. Find opportunities to differentiate your own product or service from the competition 3. Provide inspiration for how you might want to approach a problem or user flow

What are the four components of Competitor Analysis?

There are four key parts to competitor analysis. Make sure you go through each step:

• Identifying Your Goals. Before diving into the analysis, clearly define your objectives. What do you hope to learn from this process? Are you looking to improve a specific aspect of your user experience, or do you want a comprehensive understanding of your competitors' UX strategies? Setting clear goals will guide your research and ensure you stay focused on what matters most. ‍
• Identifying Your Competitors. Next, determine which competitors to include in your analysis. Consider direct competitors offering similar products, as well as indirect competitors who may target the same user base with alternative solutions. Don't forget about potential future competitors who could disrupt the market. Tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner and Alexa's Audience Overlap tool can help you identify relevant competitors. ‍
• Analyzing Key Metrics & Capabilities. Now it's time to dive deep into your competitors' UX. Examine their user interfaces, interaction designs, and overall user flows. Look for patterns in their design choices and consider how they address user needs. Frameworks like SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) or Porter's Five Forces can provide structure to your analysis (more on this below 👇) . Don't forget to consider factors like usability, accessibility, and emotional design. ‍
• Developing an Actionable Strategy. Finally, translate your findings into a clear, actionable strategy for your own product. Identify areas where you can differentiate yourself from competitors and prioritize UX improvements that will have the greatest impact on your users. Consider how you can leverage your competitors' weaknesses and capitalize on market opportunities. Remember, the goal is not to copy your competitors but to learn from their successes and failures to create a superior user experience.

By following these four components of competitor analysis, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of your product's position in the market and identify opportunities to create a standout user experience. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into the data, and let your competitor insights guide you towards UX success!

Ideally, it should be an ongoing process, but there are certain key moments when it becomes crucial. These include before launching a new product, when entering a new market, when you notice significant changes in your competitors' strategies, or when you're looking to redesign or improve your existing product.

Teams especially conduct competitor analysis when they’re doing a UX audit. If you’re conducting a full site UX audit for your app or webpage, adding competitor analysis insights to the mix can help take your UX upgrades to the next level.

If you want to outsource this work, Baymard Institute provides a complete E-Commerce UX Audit.

To truly understand your competition, you need to look at direct competitors of your product (products built to solve the exact problem you’re working on) and indirect competitors (products not built for your target audience but that are being used regardless).

Here are the 4 types of competitors to consider for your analysis:

1. Direct UX Competitor Analysis: This type of analysis focuses on your direct competitors, which are companies that offer  products or services in the same categories as you do.

By understanding your direct competitors' strengths and weaknesses, you can identify areas where you can improve or differentiate your own products or services. For instance, if your competitors have focused on creating a complex tool with every possible functionality, you could differentiate by providing a simpler, self-serve product that meets the users’ core needs.

Let’s take an example. In the product analytics market, companies like MixPanel and Amplitude offer full-featured solutions that include all the bells and whistles you may need. However, they’re complex to set up and use. Alternatives like June so have emerged as competitors that offer a simple, stream-lined product analytics solution you can set up in one day, even if they don’t offer every feature MixPanel does.

By reviewing competitors in the marketplace and identifying something they do badly (speed to insight, ease of use) that a set of users care a lot about, June was able to create a strong product offering.

2. Indirect UX Competitor Analysis: This type of analysis focuses on your indirect competitors, which are companies that offer different products or services, but that could potentially compete with you for your customers. 

By understanding your indirect competitors' offerings, you can identify new opportunities to reach your target market or identify unmet user needs. 

Going back to the example of June.so— it is still possible to review product analytics data in an excel sheet. In fact, many teams do just that even though excel isn’t technically a product analytics tool.

By reviewing Excel and how product teams use it for product analytics, June (a product analytics tool) could answer questions like:

• Why do users use excel for analytics at all? What does excel provide that existing tools do not?
• Is there something June can do better than excel—faster, more easily—that would be valuable to users who still rely on excel?

3. Aspirational competitors: These are the industry leaders and innovators that set the bar for exceptional user experiences. Even if they're not direct competitors, aspirational competitors can serve as valuable sources of inspiration and best practices. By studying their UX design choices, you can identify opportunities to elevate your own website and stay ahead of the curve.

4. Disruptive competitors: In today's fast-paced digital landscape, it's important to keep an eye on emerging competitors that have the potential to disrupt your industry. These could be startups with innovative solutions or established companies venturing into new markets. By including disruptive competitors in your UX audit, you can stay attuned to changing user needs and expectations and adapt your design strategy accordingly.

By considering these different types of competitors, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape and make informed decisions about how to optimize your website's user experience. Remember, the goal isn't just to imitate your competitors, but to learn from their successes and failures and use those insights to create a unique and compelling UX that sets your website apart.

When it comes to competitor analysis in UX, there are a number of different types of methods that can be used. Below are some methods we would highly recommend using when you’re trying to deeply understand your competition.

1. Trying your competitors’ products

There’s no better way to learn about a competitor's offering and understand why users use it, than to try it yourself. If you’re analyzing how competitors solved a specific user flow, you may want to test just that flow across products.

For example, if you’re designing a Slack integration, you may want to see how direct competitors and other companies have built a Slack integration.

You may want to answer questions like, how do they help users set up the integration? Is the starting point from Slack or from the product itself? How do they educate users to even discover that this integration exists?

However, if you’re reviewing where your product may strategically lie versus competitors, don’t jump straight into product nitty gritties. Cover your bases by paying attention to the entire user journey: ‍

1. Review the competitor’s website. What does their copy communicate to potential customers? Which features do they highlight most? How are they positioning themselves in the eyes of your customers? ‍

2. Sign up & onboarding. What are the steps to get access to the product? Do customers have to set up a demo to try it out, or is there a self-serve flow? How much friction is there before you can experience the product’s value? ‍

3. Core product features. Review the flow of the product and the specific features you’re competing against. You may want to differentiate yourself by investing more than your competitors have in features that are really meaningful to your users. ‍

4. Sales, marketing & support. A user’s experience is not limited to the time they spend on the product. Every email they get from a company, every support and sales interaction is part of their user experience.

2. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis

What is SWOT analysis? Only one of the most common methods of competitor analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. SWOT is a UX competitor analysis method that can be used to assess a company's or product's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats in its environment.

To do a SWOT analysis, you can follow these steps:

1. Identify the four components . The four components of SWOT analysis are:

• Strengths: These are the positive aspects of a company or product. They can include things like its brand reputation, how well it solves a users’ problem, or any other factor that helps it stand out and win customers.
• Weaknesses: These are the negative aspects of a company or product. They can include things like its prohibitive pricing, lack of innovation, or poor customer service.
• Opportunities: These are the external factors that could benefit a company or product. They can include things like new market trends, new technologies, or changes in customer behavior.
• Threats: These are the external factors that could harm a company or product. They can include things like new competition, changes in regulations, or economic downturns.

2. Gather data. Once you have identified the four components, you need to gather data to support your analysis. This data can be collected through surveys, interviews, market research, and other methods. A quick look at customer reviews of a product on G2 or an App Store is a great place to start. ‍ 3. Analyze the data. Once you have gathered data, you need to analyze it to identify the most important strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Group the data you’ve gathered into themes until you start seeing clear patterns on a competitor's key strengths and weaknesses. Do users love their amazing transcription and AI features ( that’s us! )? Are users complaining about pricing? 4. Develop strategies . Once you have analyzed the data, you need to develop strategies to capitalize on the opportunities and mitigate the threats. These strategies should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

By conducting a SWOT analysis, you can identify areas where you can improve your company's competitive position. For example, if your competitors’ weakness is their poor customer service, you can use this information to differentiate yourself from them and attract new customers.

3. Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing your products or services to those of your competitors. It can be used to identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities for improvement. By benchmarking your UX, you can learn from the best practices of your competitors and make your own products or services more user-friendly and engaging.

Here are some tips on how to use benchmarking for competitor analysis in UX:

• Identify your competitors. Identify 3-4 competitors (direct or indirect ones) you compete against and would like to win market share from. For a product analytics tool like June, this list may include MixPanel, Amplitude, and excel.  
• Choose the right criteria. In your target market, users will care most about 3-4 core criteria. These may be cost, ease of use, customer service, or certain features. Informed by user interviews, list the key criteria your users care about that you can differentiate on. If you don’t know what these are, speak to your users first! Use a product like Looppanel to make it 10x faster to discover insights from these interviews .  ‍
• Collect data. Collect data on these key themes from your competitors by visiting their websites, using their products or services, and reading their customer reviews. ‍
• Analyze the data. Once you have collected data on your competitors' UX, you need to analyze it. List all your data on an excel sheet or Miro board so you can compare across competitors in a single view.  ‍
• Make improvements. Once you have identified areas for improvement, you need to make changes to your own UX. This could involve making changes to the design, functionality, or content of your product or service.

To make it easier for you to run competitive benchmarking analysis, we have created a template you can copy and use .

4. Customer Journey Mapping

This type of UX competitor analysis maps out the customer's experience with your company, from the moment they become aware of your brand to the moment they make a purchase. 

Let's say you are a UX designer for an online retailer. You want to improve the customer journey for your website, so you start by mapping out the customer's experience. You identify the following steps in the customer journey:

• The customer becomes aware of your brand through a search engine or social media.
• The customer visits your website and browses your products.
• The customer adds items to their cart and begins the checkout process.
• The customer enters their shipping and payment information.
• The customer confirms their order and completes the purchase.

Once you have mapped out the customer journey, you can start to identify areas where you can improve the experience.

For instance, you may realize that your users drop off in the checkout process, but your competitors’ flow is much simpler. What can you learn from them? What steps can you remove in your own flow?

5. Customer Review Analysis

Customer reviews are a valuable source of information about your competitors' products or services. They can tell you what customers like and dislike, what they find confusing or frustrating, and what they would like to see improved. By reading customer reviews, you can gain insights into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, their target audience, and how you can improve your own products or services.

Here are some tips on how to use customer reviews for competitor analysis in UX: ‍

1. Find customer reviews for your competitors. Depending on whether your product / service is B2B or B2C, you will find customer reviews in different places.

• B2B: G2, Capterra, GetApp, TrustRadius
• B2C: Google Play Store, Apple Store reviews
• Other sources: social channels where your audience hangs out like communities and Reddit can be meaningful places to find product reviews and feedback.

2. Capture and analyze. Copy as many reviews as you can to an excel sheet or Miro board. Start grouping the reviews based on underlying patterns. Are most users complaining about price? Usability? Or the lack of a feature? 

3. Use the insights to improve your own products or services. Use the insights you gained from the customer reviews to improve your own products or services. This could involve making changes to the design, functionality, or pricing of your product or service.

When using customer reviews for competitor analysis in UX, it is important to keep in mind that:

• Customer reviews can be biased. Some customers may be more likely to leave negative reviews than positive reviews. This is especially true if they have had a negative experience with a product or service.
• Customer reviews can be inaccurate. Some customers may not be fully informed about the product or service they are reviewing. This can lead to inaccurate or misleading reviews.
• Customer reviews can be outdated. Customer reviews can change over time. It is important to read the reviews recently to get the most accurate information.

Customer reviews can be a valuable tool for competitor analysis in UX. However, it is important to use them wisely and to be aware of their limitations.

6. 7Ps of Competitor Analysis

7Ps is another common method of competitor analysis. The 7 Ps framework helps you evaluate your competitors from multiple angles:

• Product: Examine your competitors' features and user interface.
• Price: Analyze their pricing strategies and how they impact user expectations.
• Promotion: Investigate their advertising channels and community engagement.
• Place: Evaluate their distribution channels and how they affect user access.
• People: Look at the key UX leaders and company culture behind their products.
• Process: Examine their UX design processes and methodologies.
• Physical Evidence: Consider case studies, awards, and user testimonials.

As you can tell, the 7 Ps are a comprehensive framework for competitor analysis in UX—you’ll cover all your bases!

So, you've conducted thorough competitor analysis, and now it's time to share your findings with your team and stakeholders. How do you ensure that your insights make a lasting impact? 

Here are some tips for presenting your UX competitor analysis like a pro:

• Start with a clear objective: Begin your presentation by reminding everyone of the goals of your analysis. What were you trying to learn, and why is it important? This will help set the context and keep your audience engaged.
• Use visuals to your advantage: Nobody wants to sit through a wall of text. Use charts, graphs, screenshots, and other visuals to illustrate your key points. This will make your presentation more engaging and easier to follow.
• Highlight key insights and actionable recommendations: Don't just present data; tell a story. What are the most important things you learned from your analysis? What do these insights mean for your product or strategy? Make sure to provide clear, actionable recommendations that your team can start implementing right away.
• Use benchmarking to show where you stand: Benchmarking is a powerful way to show how your product compares to your competitors. Use metrics like user satisfaction, task completion rates, or Net Promoter Score to show where you excel and where you need to improve.
• Keep it concise and focused: Your audience's time is valuable, so make sure to keep your presentation concise and focused on the most important insights. Use appendices or supplementary materials to provide additional details if needed.

By following these tips, you'll be able to present your UX competitor analysis in a way that engages your audience, communicates your key insights, and drives meaningful action. Remember, the goal isn't just to share information, but to inspire your team to create better user experiences based on the lessons learned from your competitors.

Need help improving your presentation skills? Check out this guide on storytelling essentials for UX  

After conducting UX competitive analysis and gathering insights, it's time to prioritize the UX design changes you'll make.

First, categorize your findings into quick wins, medium-term improvements, and long-term initiatives. 

Quick wins are easily implementable changes with immediate impact, while medium-term improvements require more planning but significantly enhance usability. Long-term initiatives align with your overall UX strategy.

When prioritizing, consider the potential impact on user experience, alignment with business goals, and feasibility. Use a scoring system or prioritization matrix to objectively evaluate each change. Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure buy-in and shared understanding.

Track and measure the impact of your changes using analytics, user feedback, and usability testing. Continuously monitor competitors and industry trends to inform ongoing improvements. By prioritizing strategically, you can make data-driven decisions that elevate your product's user experience and keep you ahead of the competition.

Competitor analysis is essential for anyone who wants to create a truly great user experience and a powerful product. By understanding your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, you can identify areas where you can improve your own designs and stand out from the crowd.

Here are a few of the key insights we've learned about UX competitor analysis:

• It's not just about copying your competitors. UX competitor analysis is not about simply copying what your competitors are doing. It's about understanding what they're doing well or not so well, and then using that information to create a better, differentiated experience for your own users.
• It's about finding your own unique value proposition. In today's competitive market, it's not enough to just be "good enough." You need to find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and offer something unique that your users will value.
• It's about continuous improvement. The landscape of UX is constantly evolving, so it's important to keep up with the latest trends and best practices. Competitor analysis can help you identify areas where you can improve your designs and stay ahead of the curve.

If you're looking to create a truly great user experience, UX competitor analysis is a must. By following the insights we've shared, you can gain a deeper understanding of your competitors and use that information to create a better experience for your own users.

Let's take a look at a competitor analysis UX case study.

Imagine that you're a UX designer for a new e-commerce website that sells shoes. Your target audience is young adults who are interested in fashion.

Your direct competitors would be other e-commerce websites that sell shoes, such as Zappos, Foot Locker, and Finish Line. You would want to study these websites to see what features they offer, their pricing, their user interface, and their marketing strategies.

For example, you might find that Zappos offers a wider selection of shoes than you do, or that Foot Locker has a better user interface. Also, you might find that Finish Line had a more effective marketing strategy. This information would help you make decisions about the design of your own website, such as:

• Expanding the selection of shoes to compete with Zappos.
• Improving the user interface to match Foot Locker's.
• Developing a more effective marketing strategy to compete with Finish Line.
• Alternatively, you could choose to appeal to a completely different segment by saying, we’ll have better quality shoes than anyone else in the market.

Your indirect competitors would be companies that sell fashion products, such as clothing, accessories, and makeup. You would want to study these companies to see what trends they're following, what their target audience is, and how they're marketing their products.

For example, you might find that accessories companies are growing quickly by capitilizing on  influencer marketing.  If you share a target audience with them, you could adopt the same marketing strategy for your products.

By conducting this UX/UI competitor analysis, you would be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, as well as opportunities for your own product or service. 

Here is a UX Competitor Analysis template that you can use to analyze the information you’ve gathered: Download UX Competitor Analysis Template .

This template is designed to help you analyze the UX design of your competitors. It includes the basics of the company (competitor name, link, description), as well as space for screenshots of key user flows,, and the top strengths and weaknesses of their approach.

Feel free to copy it to your workspace and customize it for your own needs!

Need tools for running user interviews for your competitor analysis? Check out Looppanel to record, transcribe and analyze your user interviews!

What is the difference between UX competitive and comparative analysis?

While UX competitive analysis focuses on understanding your direct competitors and their offerings, comparative analysis involves evaluating products or services that may not directly compete with yours but serve as inspiration for best practices and design patterns.

For example, a UX competitive analysis might compare Lyft and Uber on their feature / capability set (e.g., car types available, estimated time of arrival). For comparative analysis you might compare luxury high-end brands like Prada and Hermes. Even though they sell different products, they target the same high-end customer. With comparative analysis you might compare these brands their storytelling and brand experience.

What are the considerations for competitive analysis?

Some important considerations for UX competitive analysis include defining clear objectives, selecting relevant competitors, choosing appropriate methods for data collection (such as user interviews, surveys, or usability testing), and ensuring that your findings are actionable and aligned with your overall UX strategy. By keeping these factors in mind, you can conduct a robust UX competitor analysis that drives meaningful improvements in your product's user experience.

What is design analysis of competitors?

Design analysis of competitors involves evaluating the visual design, user interface, and overall user experience of competitors' websites or products. By examining layout, color scheme, typography, and interactive features, you can identify industry trends, best practices, and areas for improvement in your own design. This helps you make informed decisions about your UX strategy and ensure your website or product stands out.

What are the 5 Steps for UX Competitive Analysis for E-Commerce Sites?

The 5 Steps to Performing a UX Competitive Analysis for E-Commerce Sites are:

• Identify competitors: List direct and indirect competitors based on product offerings, target audience, and market share.
• Define evaluation criteria: Determine UX elements to analyze and create a scorecard for consistent evaluation.
• Conduct user research: Gather feedback from your target audience about their experiences with competitors' sites.
• Perform heuristic evaluation: Systematically review each competitor's site using established UX heuristics.
• Synthesize and prioritize findings: Compile insights and recommendations, prioritizing action items based on impact.

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What is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One?

Published: April 24, 2024

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.

Let’s look at how this exercise can help your business before breaking down my 5-step competitive analysis framework.

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.

10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates

Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.

• SWOT Analysis
• Battle Cards
• Feature Comparison
• Strategic Overview

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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.

In the next section, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of conducting a detailed competitive analysis tailored to your brand.

10 Competitive Analysis Templates

Fill out the form to access the templates., 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. 

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. For example, Arcade and Storylane are direct competitors in the demo automation category.
• Indirect competitors. These businesses solve the same problem but with a different solution. They present opportunities for you to expand your offering. For example, Scribe and Whatfix solve the problem of documentation + internal training, but in different ways.
• 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. For example, Ahrefs is a legacy competitor in the SEO industry.
• 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. For example, ChatGPT came in as a disruptor in the conversational AI space and outperformed several 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:

able of the main competitors for Trello:

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.

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.” 

Image Source

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:

Here’s how I benchmarked Asana based on these criteria using the information I could find:

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. 

Here’s a SWOT analysis matrix I created for Asana as a competitor of Trello:

• Determine who your competitors are.
• Determine what products your competitors offer.
• Research your competitors' sales tactics and results.
• Take a look at your competitors' pricing, as well as any perks they offer.
• Ensure you're meeting competitive shipping costs.
• Analyze how your competitors market their products.
• Take note of your competition's content strategy.
• Learn what technology stack your competitors use.
• Analyze the level of engagement on your competitors' content.
• Observe how they promote marketing content.
• Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms.
• Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

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

1. Assess your current product pricing.

The first step in any product analysis is to assess current pricing.

Nintendo offers three models of its Switch console: The smaller lite version is priced at $199, the standard version is $299, and the new OLED version is $349.

Sony, meanwhile, offers two versions of its PlayStation 5 console: The standard edition costs $499, and the digital version, which doesn’t include a disc drive, is $399.

2. Compare key features.

Next is a comparison of key features. In the case of our console example, this means comparing features like processing power, memory, and hard drive space.

3. Pinpoint differentiators.

With basic features compared, it’s time to dive deeper with differentiators. While a glance at the chart above seems to indicate that the PS5 is outperforming its competition, this data only tells part of the story.

Here’s why: The big selling point of the standard and OLED Switch models is that they can be played as either handheld consoles or docked with a base station connected to a TV. What’s more, this “switching” happens seamlessly, allowing players to play whenever, wherever.

The Playstation offering, meanwhile, has leaned into market-exclusive games that are only available on its system to help differentiate them from their competitors.

4. Identify market gaps.

The last step in a competitive product analysis is looking for gaps in the market that could help your company get ahead.

When it comes to the console market, one potential opportunity gaining traction is the delivery of games via cloud-based services rather than physical hardware.

Companies like Nvidia and Google have already made inroads in this space, and if they can overcome issues with bandwidth and latency, it could change the market at scale.

How do you stack up against the competition? Where are you similar, and what sets you apart? This is the goal of competitive analysis.

By understanding where your brand and competitors overlap and diverge, you’re better positioned to make strategic decisions that can help grow your brand.

Of course, it’s one thing to understand the benefits of competitive analysis, and it’s another to actually carry out an analysis that yields actionable results. Don’t worry — we’ve got you covered with a quick example.

Sony vs. Nintendo: Not all fun and games.

Let’s take a look at popular gaming system companies Sony and Nintendo.

Sony’s newest offering — the Playstation 5 — recently hit the market but has been plagued by supply shortages.

Nintendo’s Switch console, meanwhile, has been around for several years but remains a consistent seller, especially among teens and children.

This scenario is familiar for many companies on both sides of the coin; some have introduced new products designed to compete with established market leaders, while others are looking to ensure that reliable sales don’t fall.

Using some of the steps listed above, here’s a quick competitive analysis example.

In our example, it’s Sony vs Nintendo, but it’s also worth considering Microsoft’s Xbox, which occupies the same general market vertical.

This is critical for effective analysis; even if you’re focused on specific competitors and how they compare, it’s worth considering other similar market offerings.

PlayStation offers two PS5 versions, digital and standard, at different price points, while Nintendo offers three versions of its console.

Both companies also sell peripherals — for example, Sony sells virtual reality (VR) add-ons, while Nintendo sells gaming peripherals such as steering wheels, tennis rackets, and differing controller configurations.

When it comes to sales tactics and marketing, Sony and Nintendo have very different approaches.

In part thanks to the recent semiconductor shortage, Sony has driven up demand via scarcity — very low volumes of PS5 consoles remain available. Nintendo, meanwhile, has adopted a broader approach by targeting families as its primary customer base.

This effort is bolstered by the Switch Lite product line, which is smaller and less expensive, making it a popular choice for children.

The numbers tell the tale : Through September 2021, Nintendo sold 14.3 million consoles, while Sony sold 7.8 million.

Sony has the higher price point: Their standard PS5 sells for $499, while Nintendo’s most expensive offering comes in at $349. Both offer robust digital marketplaces and the ability to easily download new games or services.

Here, the key differentiators are flexibility and fidelity. The Switch is flexible — users can dock it with their television and play it like a standard console or pick it up and take it anywhere as a handheld gaming system.

The PS5, meanwhile, has superior graphics hardware and processing power for gamers who want the highest-fidelity experience.

5. Analyze how your competitors market their products.

If you compare the marketing efforts of Nintendo and Sony, the difference is immediately apparent: Sony’s ads feature realistic in-game footage and speak to the exclusive nature of their game titles.

The company has managed to secure deals with several high-profile game developers for exclusive access to new and existing IPs.

Nintendo, meanwhile, uses brightly lit ads showing happy families playing together or children using their smaller Switches while traveling.

6. Analyze the level of engagement on your competitor's content.

Engagement helps drive sales and encourage repeat purchases.

While there are several ways to measure engagement, social media is one of the most straightforward: In general, more followers equates to more engagement and greater market impact.

When it comes to our example, Sony enjoys a significant lead over Nintendo: While the official Playstation Facebook page has 38 million followers, Nintendo has just 5 million.

Competitive analysis is complex, especially when you’re assessing multiple companies and products simultaneously.

To help streamline the process, we’ve created 10 free templates that make it possible to see how you stack up against the competition — and what you can do to increase market share.

Let’s break down our SWOT analysis template. Here’s what it looks like:

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Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

Competitor analysis case study: How to Use a Competitor Analysis Case Study to Learn from Real Life Examples and Best Practices

1. what is a competitor analysis case study and why is it important, 2. a step-by-step guide with tips and tools, 3. criteria and examples, 4. how airbnb used competitor analysis to identify and exploit gaps in the market, 5. what you can learn and apply to your own business.

A competitor analysis case study is a type of research that examines the strategies, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a company's competitors. It helps to understand the competitive landscape, identify gaps and opportunities, and learn from the best practices of successful businesses. A competitor analysis case study can be used for various purposes, such as:

1. Benchmarking : Comparing your own performance, products, services, and processes with those of your competitors can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses , set realistic goals , and improve your quality and efficiency .

2. Market positioning : Understanding how your competitors are perceived by customers , what value propositions they offer, and how they differentiate themselves can help you craft your own unique selling proposition , target the right segments, and communicate your value effectively.

3. Innovation : Studying the innovations and trends that your competitors are adopting or creating can help you spot new opportunities, generate ideas, and stay ahead of the curve .

4. Risk management : Anticipating the moves and actions of your competitors can help you prepare for potential threats, avoid surprises, and respond quickly and effectively .

A competitor analysis case study can be conducted using various methods and sources, such as:

- Secondary research : This involves collecting and analyzing data from existing sources, such as websites, social media , reports, reviews, articles, etc. This can provide a lot of information about the competitors' history, vision, mission, values, products, services, features, prices, customers, markets, etc.

- Primary research : This involves gathering and analyzing data from direct interactions with the competitors or their customers, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, mystery shopping, etc. This can provide more in-depth and specific information about the competitors' performance, satisfaction, loyalty, preferences, needs, pain points, etc.

- SWOT analysis : This is a framework that evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a competitor. It can help to identify the internal and external factors that affect the competitor's success, as well as the areas where they excel or lag behind.

- Porter's five forces analysis : This is a framework that analyzes the competitive forces that shape an industry , such as the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes, the bargaining power of buyers , the bargaining power of suppliers, and the rivalry among existing competitors. It can help to assess the attractiveness and profitability of an industry, as well as the barriers and drivers of competition.

A competitor analysis case study can provide valuable insights and lessons for any business that wants to gain a competitive edge and achieve its goals. However, it is important to remember that a competitor analysis case study is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process that requires regular updates and revisions. Moreover, a competitor analysis case study should not be used to copy or imitate the competitors, but to learn from them and create your own unique and superior value proposition.

What is a competitor analysis case study and why is it important - Competitor analysis case study: How to Use a Competitor Analysis Case Study to Learn from Real Life Examples and Best Practices

Competitor analysis is a vital process for any business that wants to gain a competitive edge in the market . It involves identifying, evaluating, and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, as well as their strategies, products, services, customers, and market share. By conducting a thorough competitor analysis , you can gain valuable insights into your industry , your target audience, and your own performance. You can also identify opportunities and threats , and develop effective strategies to differentiate yourself from your rivals and achieve your business goals .

In this section, we will guide you through the steps of conducting a competitor analysis, and provide you with some tips and tools to make the process easier and more efficient. We will also show you some real-life examples and best practices from successful businesses that have used competitor analysis to gain a competitive advantage. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Define your market and your competitors. The first step is to define the scope and boundaries of your market, and identify who your direct and indirect competitors are. Direct competitors are those who offer similar products or services to the same target audience as you. Indirect competitors are those who offer different products or services , but still satisfy the same customer needs or solve the same problems as you. You can use tools such as Google, social media, industry reports, trade publications, customer surveys, and online reviews to find and list your competitors.

2. Collect and organize information about your competitors. The next step is to gather as much information as possible about your competitors , and organize it in a way that is easy to analyze and compare. You can use tools such as websites, blogs, newsletters, press releases, annual reports, financial statements, SWOT analysis, Porter's five forces analysis, and PESTEL analysis to collect and organize information about your competitors. Some of the key aspects to focus on are:

- Products and services: What are the features, benefits, prices, quality, and availability of your competitors' products and services? How do they compare to yours?

- Customers: Who are your competitors' target customers? What are their demographics, psychographics, needs, preferences, and pain points? How do they perceive and value your competitors' products and services?

- Marketing and sales: What are your competitors' marketing and sales strategies? What are their channels, methods, messages, and budgets? How effective are they in reaching and converting their target customers?

- Strengths and weaknesses: What are your competitors' core competencies and competitive advantages ? What are their limitations and vulnerabilities? How do they affect their performance and profitability?

- Opportunities and threats: What are the external factors that can create or hinder opportunities for your competitors? These can include political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal factors.

3. Analyze and compare your competitors. The third step is to analyze and compare the information you have collected about your competitors, and identify their similarities and differences. You can use tools such as charts, graphs, tables, matrices, and diagrams to visualize and compare your competitors' data. Some of the key questions to ask are:

- How do your competitors rank in terms of market share, revenue, growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and loyalty?

- What are the gaps and overlaps between your competitors' products and services and yours?

- What are the unique selling propositions and value propositions of your competitors and yours?

- How do your competitors position themselves in the market and differentiate themselves from others?

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and yours?

- What are the opportunities and threats for your competitors and yours?

4. Evaluate your competitive position and strategy . The final step is to evaluate your competitive position and strategy, and determine how you can improve them. You can use tools such as benchmarking, gap analysis, and value chain analysis to evaluate your competitive position and strategy. Some of the key questions to ask are:

- How do you compare to your competitors in terms of market share, revenue, growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and loyalty?

- What are your competitive advantages and disadvantages ?

- What are your core competencies and distinctive capabilities?

- What are your goals and objectives?

- What are your current and potential customers' needs, preferences, and pain points?

- How do you meet and exceed your customers' expectations and deliver value to them?

- How do you communicate and promote your products and services to your target customers?

- How do you distribute and deliver your products and services to your target customers?

- How do you measure and monitor your performance and results?

- How do you adapt and innovate to changing market conditions and customer demands?

By following these steps, you can conduct a comprehensive and effective competitor analysis that can help you gain a competitive edge in the market. You can also use the insights and findings from your competitor analysis to develop and implement strategies that can help you achieve your business goals and objectives. To illustrate how to use a competitor analysis case study to learn from real-life examples and best practices, we will now look at some examples of successful businesses that have used competitor analysis to gain a competitive advantage.

A step by step guide with tips and tools - Competitor analysis case study: How to Use a Competitor Analysis Case Study to Learn from Real Life Examples and Best Practices

One of the most important steps in conducting a competitor analysis is choosing the right competitors to analyze. You don't want to waste your time and resources on analyzing irrelevant or outdated competitors, nor do you want to miss out on valuable insights from the ones that matter. How do you decide which competitors to focus on? In this section, we will discuss some criteria and examples that can help you select the best competitors to analyze for your business.

Some of the criteria that you can use to choose your competitors are:

1. market share and growth . You want to analyze the competitors that have a significant share of the market that you are targeting, or that are growing fast in that market. These are the competitors that pose the most threat to your business, and that can also teach you the most about what works and what doesn't in your industry. For example, if you are a new entrant in the online grocery delivery market , you might want to analyze the market leaders like Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Walmart Grocery, as well as the emerging players like Shipt, FreshDirect, and Peapod.

2. Product or service similarity. You want to analyze the competitors that offer a similar product or service to yours, or that solve a similar problem for your customers. These are the competitors that you are directly competing with, and that can help you understand your unique value proposition, your competitive advantage, and your areas of improvement. For example, if you are a software company that provides a project management tool, you might want to analyze the competitors that offer similar features and functionality, such as Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Monday.com.

3. customer segments and personas . You want to analyze the competitors that target the same or similar customer segments and personas as you do, or that have a strong presence in the segments and personas that you want to reach. These are the competitors that can help you learn more about your target market , their needs, preferences, pain points, and behaviors. For example, if you are a clothing brand that caters to young, urban, and trendy women, you might want to analyze the competitors that appeal to the same demographic, such as Zara, H&M, Forever 21, and Topshop.

4. Geographic location. You want to analyze the competitors that operate in the same or similar geographic locations as you do, or that have a strong presence in the locations that you want to expand to. These are the competitors that can help you understand the local market conditions, regulations, opportunities, and challenges. For example, if you are a coffee shop chain that operates in the US, you might want to analyze the competitors that have a similar footprint, such as Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, and Peet's Coffee, as well as the competitors that have a strong presence in the markets that you want to enter, such as Costa Coffee, Tim Hortons, and McCafé.

Criteria and examples - Competitor analysis case study: How to Use a Competitor Analysis Case Study to Learn from Real Life Examples and Best Practices

One of the most successful examples of using competitor analysis to gain a competitive edge is Airbnb, the online marketplace for short-term rentals . Airbnb was founded in 2008 as a way for people to rent out their spare rooms or entire homes to travelers looking for an alternative to hotels. However, Airbnb did not just compete with the traditional hotel industry, but also with other online platforms that offered similar services, such as HomeAway, VRBO, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor. How did Airbnb use competitor analysis to identify and exploit gaps in the market and become one of the most valuable startups in the world? Here are some of the key steps that Airbnb took:

1. Identify the target market and customer segments . Airbnb realized that their target market was not just travelers who wanted to save money, but also those who wanted to have a more authentic and local experience. They also segmented their customers into different personas, such as solo travelers, couples, families, business travelers, and hosts. By understanding the needs, preferences, and pain points of each segment, Airbnb was able to tailor their value proposition and marketing strategy accordingly.

2. analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors. Airbnb conducted a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) of their main competitors, both in the online and offline space. They identified the areas where they had a competitive advantage, such as offering a wider variety of properties, a more user-friendly website and app, a stronger brand identity , and a more loyal and engaged community . They also recognized the areas where they had to improve, such as ensuring the quality and safety of the listings, dealing with legal and regulatory issues , and expanding their global presence .

3. Find the gaps and opportunities in the market . Airbnb used various tools and methods to find the gaps and opportunities in the market that their competitors were not addressing. For example, they used keyword research to discover what people were searching for online, and found that there was a high demand for unique and niche accommodations, such as treehouses, castles, igloos, and boats. They also used customer feedback and reviews to identify the pain points and unmet needs of their users, and found that they wanted more flexibility, personalization, and trust. Based on these insights, Airbnb launched new features and services, such as Airbnb Experiences, Airbnb Plus, Airbnb Luxe, and Airbnb Adventures, to cater to the diverse and evolving needs of their customers.

4. Monitor and measure the performance and impact of the competitor analysis. Airbnb did not stop at conducting a one-time competitor analysis, but rather made it an ongoing process that informed their strategic decisions and actions. They used various metrics and indicators to monitor and measure the performance and impact of their competitor analysis , such as market share, customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, revenue and profitability, and brand awareness and reputation . They also used tools and platforms, such as Google Analytics, SimilarWeb, Social Mention, and SurveyMonkey, to collect and analyze data and feedback from their customers and competitors. By doing so, they were able to track their progress, identify new trends and opportunities , and adjust their strategy accordingly.

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You have just read some of the most interesting and successful competitor analysis case studies from various industries and niches. These case studies show how different businesses have used competitor analysis to gain insights, identify opportunities, and improve their performance. But how can you apply these learnings to your own business? In this section, we will summarize the key takeaways and best practices from the case studies and give you some practical tips on how to use competitor analysis to grow your business.

Here are some of the main lessons you can learn from the case studies :

1. Know your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses . This is the first and most important step of any competitor analysis. You need to identify who your direct and indirect competitors are, what they offer, how they position themselves, and what their unique selling propositions are. You also need to assess their strengths and weaknesses , such as their product quality, customer service, pricing, marketing, and reputation. This will help you understand your competitive landscape and find gaps and opportunities in the market. For example, in the case study of Netflix vs Blockbuster , Netflix knew that Blockbuster had a strong brand recognition and a large network of physical stores, but also had high costs, late fees, and limited selection. Netflix used this information to create a superior online streaming service that offered convenience, affordability, and variety to its customers.

2. Use data and tools to analyze your competitors . Competitor analysis is not based on guesswork or intuition, but on facts and evidence. You need to use data and tools to collect, organize, and analyze information about your competitors. You can use various sources of data, such as websites, social media, reviews, surveys, reports, and industry publications. You can also use tools, such as SWOT analysis , Porter's five forces analysis , benchmarking , and competitive matrix , to help you visualize and compare your competitors. These methods will help you gain a deeper and more objective understanding of your competitors and their strategies. For example, in the case study of Apple vs Samsung , Apple used data and tools to analyze Samsung's products, features, prices, and patents, and used this information to create better and more innovative products and to protect its intellectual property rights .

3. learn from your competitors' successes and failures . Competitor analysis is not only about finding your competitors' weaknesses, but also about learning from their strengths. You can use competitor analysis to identify what your competitors are doing well, what their customers like and value, and what makes them stand out in the market. You can also use competitor analysis to avoid making the same mistakes as your competitors , or to exploit their vulnerabilities and shortcomings. You can use these insights to improve your own products, services, processes, and marketing, and to create a unique and compelling value proposition for your customers. For example, in the case study of Starbucks vs Dunkin' Donuts , Starbucks learned from Dunkin' Donuts' success in offering low-cost and convenient coffee, and expanded its menu, lowered its prices, and increased its drive-through and mobile ordering options. Dunkin' Donuts, on the other hand, learned from Starbucks' success in creating a premium and loyal brand, and improved its quality, variety, and customer experience.

4. Monitor and adapt to your competitors' changes. Competitor analysis is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process. You need to monitor and update your competitor analysis regularly, as your competitors may change their products, prices, promotions, and strategies over time. You also need to adapt to your competitors' changes and respond accordingly. You can use competitor analysis to anticipate your competitors' moves, to react quickly and effectively, and to stay ahead of the curve. You can also use competitor analysis to test and experiment with new ideas and innovations, and to measure and evaluate your results . For example, in the case study of Coca-Cola vs Pepsi , Coca-Cola and Pepsi constantly monitored and adapted to each other's changes, such as introducing new flavors, launching new campaigns, and entering new markets. They also used competitor analysis to test and evaluate their products, such as the famous Pepsi Challenge and the New Coke debacle.

Competitor analysis is a powerful and essential tool for any business that wants to grow and succeed in a competitive market . By using competitor analysis, you can learn from real-life examples and best practices, and apply them to your own business. You can use competitor analysis to gain insights , identify opportunities, and improve your performance. You can also use competitor analysis to create a unique and compelling value proposition for your customers , and to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Competitor analysis can help you achieve your business goals and objectives , and to become a leader in your industry.

If anyone tells you that you're too old to be an entrepreneur or that you have the wrong background, don't listen to them. Go with your gut instincts and pursue your passions. Vivek Wadhwa

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How To Conduct a Competitive Analysis as a UX Designer

Want to conduct an awesome competitive ux analysis download this  free template and follow our step-by-step guide below..

UX designers don’t design new user experiences in a vacuum. No matter how unique or special a product is, it will inevitably compete with something already on the market. That is why it’s valuable to conduct a competitive UX analysis at the start of a new project.

Through the analysis you will evaluate the user experiences of your client’s competitors from your expert perspective as a UX designer. This will help orient you, your client and other stakeholders to the competitive landscape and give you an idea of what user experiences are standard for the market you’re designing for.

A competitive UX analysis will also help you think creatively about where you might be able to innovate in your UX design, as well as features you might want to avoid.

When initially dreaming about the possibilities for their new project, many clients will take inspiration from products that already exist.

If you conduct a competitive UX analysis, it will give you evidence that will enable you and your client to get on the same page about what the market really looks like from a user experience perspective and what that means for your project.

In this article, we’ll delve into the details of competitive UX analysis with the following:

• Why is a competitive UX analysis useful?
• The benefits and limitations of a competitive UX analysis
• A guide to conducting a competitive UX analysis (Plus a free template)
• Key takeaways

We’ve also included a free, downloadable template—you’ll find it in section three.

1. Why is a competitive UX analysis useful?

When you start a new project as a UX designer, there are many research methods you can use to determine who your users are and decide what the best user experience for them will be. On the other hand, competitive UX analysis gives you the opportunity to look outside your project and take in the market as a whole.

Writing for UX Planet, UX consultant Matt Isherwood identifies four reasons to conduct a competitive UX analysis:

To determine standard practices in the market

Depending on the product you’re designing, users likely already have expectations for the user experience and features they might encounter.

For example, if you’re designing a website for a car manufacturer, users will expect that when they select a vehicle they will be able to see photos of both the interior and exterior in every color in which it’s available.

On the other hand, if you’re designing a weather app, users will expect to be able to see the current temperature in their location at the top of the screen along with forecast information below it.

To identify noteworthy user experiences

There will often be one or two competitors in your analysis that offer a particularly good user experience. This might be because they’ve figured out an innovative solution to a problem or they’re using a novel feature that enhances what users are able to do.

But this could also be something like an especially well-placed navigation element or smart use of nomenclature. No matter what it is, these noteworthy user experiences are worth learning from and considering for adaptation and inclusion in your project.

To identify features to avoid

While there will always be competitors doing an especially good job, there will also be competitors at the opposite end of the spectrum.

These competitors offer a poor user experience for any number of reasons, including confusing navigation, difficult to understand user interactions or outdated functionality. These examples will teach you what not to do for your project—such as these ten classic UX design fails .

To notice unique features

As you evaluate various competitors, you may find you notice unique features you may never have considered. For example, if you’re creating a grocery delivery app, perhaps while reviewing competitors you notice one has a feature that allows you to select the level of ripeness of bananas by using a series of photos that show bananas with peels ranging in color from green to brown.

While it may not ultimately apply to your project, it’s worth taking note of these unique features so you can understand where and how competitors are innovating.

2. The benefits and limitations of a competitive UX analysis

A competitive UX analysis will help you orient yourself to the competition and understand the market. After all, users are creatures of habit, and a user who has spent time with your competitors will come to your product with certain expectations based on those previous experiences. As a result, before you design something completely new and unique, you need to understand the standards for a product’s user experience, an evaluation that will greatly benefit the design process .

On the other hand, there are some limitations to a competitive UX analysis that you should keep in mind. First, there may be the temptation to copy the competition. This is not the purpose of competitive UX analysis, however. The purpose is to inform the design process by learning from what your competitors are doing. You should always review several competitors, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of all of them. This will enable you to take inspiration from several sources to create something tailor-made for your product.

Furthermore, a competitive UX analysis can’t tell you where innovation is needed, it can only tell you what already exists. This is why a competitive UX analysis is only one of several research methods you should employ when tackling a UX project.

3. How to do a competitive UX analysis (step by step)

Before we jump in: If you’re conducting your first competitive UX analysis, you may find our downloadable competitive analysis template useful.

1. Identify your objectives

The first thing you need to do when conducting a competitive UX analysis is determine what your objectives are. Make sure you know exactly what you want to learn from this analysis. When you start evaluating competitors you can quickly become overwhelmed by everything involved in a given app, website, or other product. Laying out your objectives beforehand will prevent this from happening.

For example, if you’re creating a new app where users can stream movies and TV shows, one of your objectives might be to understand how competitors draw users’ attention to new entertainment choices.

2. Identify your competitors

Before you get started, you have to settle on the competitors you’ll include in your analysis. One of the first things you should do is ask your client and other stakeholders who they feel are their three or four top competitors. These competitors should automatically be included in your analysis. You should also come up with your own suggestions, especially focusing on competitors that may be less obvious.

Make sure your analysis includes both direct competitors—those that are operating in exactly the same market space—and indirect competitors—those that draw a different audience, like a social network geared exclusively towards young children if you’re working on a social network for adults, or include a similar feature, like a shopping cart tool for a different product than the kind you’re working on.

Ideally you’ll want to include five to ten competitors, but this may be constrained by time or budget issues.

3. Screenshot, take notes, repeat

Now that you know your objectives and have your list of competitors, you’ll visit each competitors’ product and navigate the relevant parts like any user would. As you go, take screenshots and record notes about everything you observe.

The easiest way to do this is to create a folder for all of the screenshots and a spreadsheet for your notes.

The spreadsheet should list all the competitors as well as all the parts of the product you’re evaluating so you’re sure to capture notes for everything you need from every competitor.

Alternatively, you can use an awesome tool like Airtable , a tool that allows you to gather screebshots, notes, links and more, all in one place and ready for you as you start to design your product (or as you conduct a redesign )

4. Compile your findings into a presentation

After you’ve finished going through the competitors, use your screenshots and notes to put together a presentation. You won’t mention every single thing you observed in the presentation, but you should mention the most relevant and noteworthy things.

Most importantly, at the end of the presentation, you should be sure to present a list of recommendations in which you boil down what you learned and explain how it will be put into practice in your project’s UX design.

4. Key takeaways

You should now have a basic understanding of why you should conduct a competitive UX analysis and the basic steps you would take to do so. To sum up:

• When you begin a new UX project, a competitive analysis is a research method that can help you and your client understand what the market for their product currently looks like.
• A competitive UX analysis will help you understand what user experience standards exist in the market sector, and therefore, what users’ expectations of a product in this space might be. The analysis will also give you information about competitors’ strengths and weaknesses as well as unique features they might be using.
• A competitive analysis has the benefit of informing the design process, but it can only show you what already exists in the market, not where innovation may be needed.
• Make sure you have a clear understanding of your objectives for your competitive UX analysis.
•  A competitive UX analysis should include 5-10 competitors and include both direct and indirect examples.
• Ask your client or other stakeholders for recommendations of competitors to include in the analysis, but also come up with your own suggestions.
• For each competitor, take screenshots and notes as you navigate through the parts of the product you’re evaluating.
• Compile your screenshots and notes into a presentation where you highlight the most important information you learned.
• Make sure you include a list of recommendations at the end of your presentation that explain how your analysis will impact your project’s UX design.

Now that you know how to conduct a competitive UX analysis, you might want to learn more. If so, you’ll find the following articles useful:

• Usability testing: Everything you need to know
• What is a UX audit and why should you conduct one?
• How to be a better UX designer in 2020

A Guide to Competitive Analysis: It’s Not Just about Competitors

By Joe Weller | April 16, 2018 (updated February 13, 2024)

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If you were running a cross-country marathon, wouldn’t you want to know something of the terrain and expected weather conditions before you began? The same principle of preparation applies when starting and continuing a business. It’s not enough to focus on your own production and financial goals: You need to understand what’s happening around you, how others create goods or services, the economic forecast, changes in rules and regulations, and more. In other words, you need to conduct a competitive analysis. The thought of searching for and digesting the required information may seem overwhelming, but we make it easy.

In this article, we explain how to focus your analysis by first deciding what questions you want answered. Learn how to find current and potential competitors and how many of them you need to review. Then, we cover the specific aspects of your competitors that you need to consider as well as where to find more information about them. Marketing experts weigh in on how to maintain focus during analysis. We also offer free, downloadable competitive analysis templates to start you on your own information gathering and analysis.

What Is Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis (CA) is a process of identifying competitors and gauging their business and marketing strategies to understand both their strengths and weaknesses and those of your own business. Competitive analysis provides a higher-level perspective of the entire marketing landscape and competitive intelligence.

“Competitive analysis is the process of analyzing all collected information to derive some insight for reducing risk and making better decisions,” explains competitive intelligence expert and author Babette Bensoussan .

“It is about your broader competitive environment,” she says. “I always remind my clients that competitors make up only one element of a business’s competitive environment. Other elements include government, technology, buyers, and suppliers, to name a few that impact how well you can compete.”

What Is the Purpose of a Competitive Analysis?

Researching your competitive landscape is essential to business growth and survival, and helps you offer better products or services to customers. You should gain an understanding of how customers view your company, what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. Therefore, competitive analysis forms a crucial part of marketing plans to help you understand what differentiates your product or service. Particularly when applying for funding, competitive analysis provides valuable insight into business plans. However, competitive analysis offers much more:

• Branding possibilities
• Insight into how competitors design products and messages
• SEO possibilities
• CRO (conversion rate optimization)
• GTM strategies
• User experience (UX) advantages of your and others’ products and websites
• Gaps in the market
• New products and services to develop
• Market trends

According to a Conductor survey , 60 percent of marketers don’t feel proficient in competitive analysis. Many don’t practice it on a regular basis. Knowledge derived from these exercises is critical, and you need to assess competition regularly. Nevertheless, marketing departments often skip competitive analysis, which leaves them with a fragmentary understanding of the landscape and competitors. Being proactive can help you anticipate and prepare for competitor developments and provide you with the agility to take advantage of changes.

According to Bensoussan, “In today’s world of constant change and information overload (whether the information be real or fake), it is critical for any business person to understand the competitive landscape and the forces that impact the profitability and viability of a business.”

What Should Be Included in a Competitive Analysis?

In most cases, a competitive analysis contains a few basic sections, which may vary depending on the size and form of your company and the focus of your analysis:

• A list of your main competitors
• An overview or what you know about them
• Who their target customers are
• A list of their products or services
• What media they use to market their goods and services
• Their current and past marketing strategies
• Their value proposition and effectiveness
• An analysis of all of the strengths and weaknesses of your competition (and your own company)
• An overview of the strategies being used by the competition to achieve their objectives
• An overview of the market and projections for the future

How to Prepare for a Competitive Analysis

One of the crucial prerequisites for a successful competitive analysis is an open mind. Check your beliefs at the door — what you think about your company, your customers, or your competitors isn’t necessarily true. That can be a good thing.

In addition, it is vital to understand why you are conducting an analysis. What are your goals for the business? What are your goals for this analysis? “Always, always be very clear as to what the decision you will be making is all about,” advises Bensoussan. “If you are not clear about your decision, then you will never know if you have good competitive analysis or just some more information.”

She offers these two questions as examples of how different the impact of each answer can be: “Tell me who’s who in the [manufacturing] of zippers?” versus “Should I enter the zipper-manufacturing industry, and can I achieve a return on investment of, say, 15 percent in three years?”

“Which question would help you the most in delivering good quality CA? Which outcome do you think would provide the most value?” Bensoussan asks.

Companies often enlist the help of outside consulting firms dedicated to conducting competitive intelligence research. Guidance on competitive intelligence support, such as database information, software platforms for market program tracking, and more is available through the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals .

Competitor Analysis Frameworks

Over the decades, marketing gurus have developed or advocated several competitive analysis frameworks. Here are six well-known methods to consider.

• Porter’s Five Forces Model: First published in 1979 by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, the Five Forces model provides a view beyond competitors to factors in your industry landscape that may threaten or strengthen your position. The Five Forces include the following:

• Potential New Entrants: Consider how much money, time, and effort it would take for a company to displace you.
• Competitive Rivalry: Determine who your competitors are, who the closest competitors are, and their products, prices, and quality. Fewer rivals mean more opportunity for your unique qualities to shine; many rivals mean more competitors to steal your customers and potentially better deals to lead customers elsewhere.
• Suppliers: The more potential suppliers you have, the better for you. Consider how having fewer suppliers might impact your operation.
• Buyers: If you have many customers, you have the power. Otherwise, buyers can negotiate more advantageous deals elsewhere or find sources other than yours. Consider how you would treat that situation.
• Substitutes (or Complements): A competitor could create a product or model that replaces yours. On the other hand, a new product or service could also complement yours, which would create a symbiotic sales situation. Complements are sometimes considered the sixth force in the model.

Porter stressed the importance of not confusing these constants with temporary disruptions, such as technological innovations or government interventions in industry.

You can download the Five Forces model below to answer your own questions about an industry or business proposition.

Download Five Forces Model

Excel  |  PDF

Industry Life Cycle Overview: Both industries and individual products have life cycles, which reflect the state of sales, whether robust or diminishing. Understand which stage of the life cycle your industry, company, or product is in to help target your marketing efforts. Product life cycles contain such stages as these:

• Introduction: At the introductory stage, a new industry or product is not well known or proven. It is usually marketed to a few early adopters. Because resources focus on product development, testing, and refinement, few or no profits accrue. Marketing focuses on explaining the product, creating awareness around it, and establishing a niche.
• Growth: As awareness grows and the industry or product becomes established, profits may also grow. However, in the growth stage, rival products may also appear. Although improvements require funds, production efficiencies may also develop. Some products have only a short growth phase. For example, a particular fashion may last for only one season. Other products experience a long or extended growth phase, such as software products, which continue their usefulness through upgrades. During the growth stage, marketing centers on differentiating the product, so it stands out from competing products.
• Maturity: In the maturity stage of a product or industry, sales may expand, but at a less accelerated rate. Fewer competitors may dominate the market and may attempt to differentiate on quality or increase sales by touting low costs.
• Saturation: You reach the saturation stage when every customer who could buy the product already owns the product. A lack of innovation or competition from a superior product could result in saturation.
• Decline/Termination: Industries and products decline for several reasons. Innovations may overtake them and render them obsolete. Businesses and product lines may fail to upgrade and innovate. At the decline or termination stage, companies may fold, continue in a smaller market, or merge with larger, successful businesses.  

Strategic Groups Analysis: You perform strategic groups analysis on companies within a business sector, such as automobiles, to see how they vie for their share of consumer expenditure. By dividing companies into strategic groups, you can understand how businesses of different sizes behave in the marketing landscape. Businesses within groups tend to be competitors, whereas businesses in other groups are related but not competitive. For example, running shoes and high-end women’s dress shoes are in different groups. Analyzing companies in this way can also reveal other significant information: direct competitors and their basis for competition; if and how a company can move to another group; and strategic problems and opportunities. Strategic groups are usually plotted on an x-y axis, where two highly relevant criteria form the axes. Here are some examples of criteria:

• Brand ownership
• Company size
• Capacity utilization
• Cost structure
• Geographical market segmentation
• Marketing activities
• Ownership structure
• Sales channels
• Product diversity
• Product quality
• R&D capability
• Vertical and horizontal integration

First, plot the companies where you think they belong on the graph. Now, with all companies plotted, create groupings. If you want, you can use larger or smaller circles to indicate market share. To gain greater insight, perform a Five Forces analysis on them, or consider the mobility barriers that prevent companies from shifting to other strategic groups.  

SWOT: Perhaps one of the most commonly addressed marketing analyses is SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). In essence, SWOT represents what competitors do and do not do well. As you look at SWOT for competitors, also consider it for your own products and services.

• Strengths: What do they do better than you? What are they known for? Is their pricing, inventory, convenience, and level of service better than yours?
• Weaknesses: How do they fall short of your company’s standards? Can you leverage their shortcomings to improve your standing with customers?
• Opportunities: What in your competitors’ landscape can you exploit to your advantage?
• Threats: What in your competitors’ landscape threatens their business position?

Note that strengths and weaknesses focus on internal characteristics, while opportunities and threats concern external forces. SWOT can be performed separately, but it may provide a useful frame for studying a business’ products and services, marketing, and sales.  

Competitive Array: Competitive arrays, also known as competitive matrices , provide a way to quantify characteristics that may be unquantifiable. For example, if company A sells 500 widgets and company B sells 250, it’s clear which company sold more. But how do you quantify the attractiveness of online and print media or innovation? Creating the competitive array can be an individual or group exercise. To start, list your competitors across the top of your writing surface. In the left-most column, list important characteristics. Next, create a column for weighting the importance of each characteristic so that the sum of the characteristics totals one. The higher the weighting, the more important the characteristic (you may have a few characteristics with the same weight). Next, grade each competitor for each characteristic on a scale, such as from one to 10. Now, multiply the grade by the corresponding weight.  

Competitive Value Proposition Analysis: The characteristics of a value proposition are exclusivity, clarity, and credibility. This method concerns how unique the product or service is, how clearly the product message is conveyed, and whether the message is credibly supported by evidence, such as testimonials, statistics, or test results. Because customers remember only a few key advantages of your product from your media promotion, the main value proposition must be correct and clear and mesh with your actual competitive advantage. To figure out how to differentiate your company, you must determine how competitors differentiate themselves from each other. POPs (points of parity), PODs (points of difference), and POIs (points of irrelevance) help you dissect value propositions.

• Points of Parity (POPs): These are elements of customer benefit that both you and your competitors offer.
• Points of Difference (PODs): These are features of customer benefit that you offer but competitors don’t. Keep in mind that not every point of difference is significant to consumers.
• Points of Irrelevance (POIs): These are characteristics that customers don’t care about.

Your unique value proposition (differentiating characteristics) doesn’t need to appeal to every customer. Don’t make your value proposition too general. You can’t be all things to all customers, just as you can’t do what your competitors are doing.

Otherwise, there's no differentiation. You end up being like teenagers, everybody in the same jeans," says Sonia Schechter, Chief Marketing Officer of Marxent , a provider of virtual reality and augmented reality apps for furniture retailers. Therefore, target your message.

Discover your points of parity by using our POP template.

Download Points of Parity Template

Excel  |  Word  |  PDF

Who Are Your Competitors?

As a first step in competitive analysis, marketing guides typically suggest determining who your competitors are. Competitors can be divided into groups of direct competitors, indirect competitors, and future competitors.

• Direct Competitor: These are companies who sell a direct substitute for your product, operate in the same geographic area, and/or offer the same goods (such as groceries) to the same market. Ask who your customers would buy from if you weren’t in business.
• Indirect Competitor: These are companies in the same geographic area whose products occupy the same general, but not specific, category as your own (e.g., a general bakery versus a designer cake store). Indirect competition satisfies the customer’s need for a particular product or service, although that product or service may be different from yours. Similar products operating in different market segments do not represent direct competitors. For example, a high-end seafood restaurant doesn’t compete with a burger place.
• Future Competitor: Future competitors may currently be indirect competitors who change and expand solutions. In the bakery example, the general bakery could hire a high-end designer to compete with the specialty cake maker. Or, the designer cake store could branch out into breads and muffins.

It may be difficult at first to envision what types of organizations you need to analyze and whether you need to analyze all competitors.To identify competitors, ask yourself who your customers would buy from if your product did not exist. Perhaps even more important, consider who your customers think your competitors are. How many competitors you review depends: If only a few companies do what you do, analyze everyone. If you have many competitors, use Pareto analysis to focus on the critical 20 percent. Larger businesses may analyze the top 10, whereas a small business can focus on three. Disregard online competitors unless you plan to sell online.

‌ Download Pareto Chart Template - Excel

How to Find Current Competitors

Some competitors may seem obvious, but sleuthing can reveal challengers you weren’t aware of.

• Google search for a product or service similar to yours. Consider the companies in paid ads and organic returns.
• Try SEMrush to check which domains are using which keywords.
• Ask your current customers who they would choose besides you.
• Check Alexa, Google Trends, or SimilarWeb for general estimates on the popularity of domain names and keywords.
• Review Dun & Bradstreet for new incorporations.
• Consult Derwent for new patent information.
• See who has booths at trade shows.

How to Find Potential Competitors

While you consider the current playing field, you must also keep your eye on what’s coming around the corner. These are the future new entrants in your niche. Consider who might start a  business that would compete with yours. New competitors can be found in related markets, related technologies, or related products. Companies from other geographical areas with similar products may begin to sell in your area, and former employees or managers can start their own companies based on the themes of your business. In addition, consider the following conditions that may encourage competition:

• A company gains competitive advantage.
• Buyers are dissatisfied with suppliers.
• An unmet demand for goods exists.
• Few major barriers to entry exist.
• The industry offers high profit margins.
• The industry offers unrealized growth potential.
• Competitive rivalry is not intense.

It’s Not All about Competitors ( Competitive Doesn’t Always Mean Competitor )

Depending on what your product or service is and where it is in its life cycle, a competitor focus may not be optimal. For example, for emerging technologies, no true competitor may exist.

“Looking too closely at competition is a massive distraction,” Schechter notes. “If you’re selling a commodity or established product, such as a drugstore, which sells the same thing anywhere, you’d be looking at specific issues, like price, location, and assortment.”

Schecter says marketers themselves often don’t understand that what the competition is doing is not important: “Successful marketing is how you define yourself in the landscape. People don’t care about a feature-by-feature description, or even one feature. They buy the package. They like you. You’re different or you’re solving a particular problem. A new business must define and lay out the landscape for the customer.”

To succeed, understanding what customers want is key. “Marketers have nuanced detail, and customers don’t care about that detail,” Schechter continues. “But, you have to listen to their questions and engage in dialogue with them to gain real understanding,” she points out. She cites Apple’s promotion of the camera in the first iPhone as an example of marketers understanding what — out of thousands of potential functions — was important to consumers. “B2B marketing is the same. It’s about listening to customers, figuring out how they’re shopping, and trying to see through their eyes,” Schechter emphasizes.

“Obsessing over competition can get you off track. If you’re listening to customers, you’ll build the right product. But you don’t need to build your dreams on other people’s ideas,” she concludes.

Where to Find Information for a Competitive Analysis

Remember that every department of your business is a potential source for information, including the following areas:

• Sales: Questions for potential, current, and lost customers
• Research and Development: New patents
• Purchasing: Suppliers
• Marketing: Customers and other consumers

Once you’ve determined who your competitors are and what you want to learn about them and from them, you need to go information hunting:

• Visit offices or brick-and-mortar stores. What do they look like? Who’s there?
• Get financial and organizational information from public filings and from sources like Hoovers, Manta, and Dun & Bradstreet.
• Monitor PR Newswire for new developments and changes.
• Some marketing platforms may actually include information about your competitors.

Interviews and Research Surveys

Interviewing competitor customers and consumers who know little about your business is important to overcoming your preconceptions about the business landscape. You probably have specific questions in mind, but here are the basics:

• Why are you shopping for a solution?
• What were the main reasons you chose the company you did?
• Ranked from most important to least important, what are your five shopping criteria?

Media Scanning or Competitor Content Analysis

You can learn much about competitor products and messaging by scanning media. Media doesn’t just include online content (web pages, tweets, and Facebook posts) — it also includes such traditional marketing collateral as white papers, case studies, and data sheets. Moreover, consider reference materials, such as LexisNexis and Hoovers, and trade, business, or news publications for ads, news stories, and press releases. Media and content can reveal not only new products and new branding, but also new positioning and segmentation strategies, pricing, target markets, and promotion strategy.

What Information to Search for in Competitive Analysis

The approach to analysis depends on the questions requiring answers. To organize your analysis, divide it into three aspects: product or services, marketing, and sales. Each aspect contains its own questions and means of analysis.

Products and Services

Your understanding of products and services must be thorough. Investigate the complete product or service line. Try to understand who your competitors’ customers are and what they need. Look at their pricing strategy and see if it differs for online and brick-and-mortar stores. Also, consider how they differentiate from their competitors.

Tracking competitor sales processes can involve more legwork. For public companies, SEC filings provide some financial information about growth or contraction, but, for private companies, information is less readily available. Information about sales channels may be easy to find through a look in the phone book or online. You can also gather details about the sale process by asking current customers why they chose your product over others. You can also acquire valuable information by following up even after you lose a sale in order to understand the customer’s thinking. What do their partner resales programs look like? What are their revenues versus sales volume?

Marketing Efforts in Competitive Analysis

What does the competitor marketing plan entail? How do competitors invest marketing efforts? What can you do even better? A variety of approaches can help you define competitor marketing strategy.

When you identify marketing assets, take a reasonable sample of items — no need to review all of them. Just remember to keep samples consistent among competitors. Also, when reviewing items, consider the quality of the collateral. It should appear professional, with no typos, and in the formal, professional, idiomatic voice. In addition, a solid library of resources, such as consistent blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, videos, webinars, and podcasts may point you to themes and leads you should follow.

E-Marketing Strategy Competitive Analysis

Few businesses today can function without a web presence that helps generate traffic and inquiries or purchases. Some statistics say that prospective buyers visit a website as many as nine times before purchasing and, depending on the product, visit multiple sites before purchasing. Forrester research after 2010 suggests potential customers visit three sites on average before buying. The more sites visited, the more money the customer intends to spend.

Therefore, understanding how your site compares to your nearest competitors can be helpful. To drive eyes to websites, online purveyors use search engine optimization (SEO) to employ the keywords most likely to garner high search ratings in Google (and other search engines). Marketers frequently also use SEM (search engine marketing) to promote a business or product by increasing visits to a website through paid keywords. Look at how saturated their content is with keywords and where they use keywords, whether in H1 and H2 tags, page titles, content, or links. Also, look at the difficulty level of their keywords.

Consider the usability of the steps in the sales funnel as well as the navigation. What do the  landing pages say? Also, look at backlinks (i.e., links from other pages to your competitor’s page) to your web page. See how many backlinks exist — and from which pages — to understand if this is something you can improve for your website.

Structure is important, but quality content also matters. Online marketing collateral appears as blogs, white papers, ebooks, case studies or user stories, videos, webinars, podcasts, and more. But words and pictures themselves are not valuable if they don’t offer any unique information or concise approaches to existing knowledge. Check whether content is shared and which topics attract attention, or, conversely, what that content and those topics are linked to. What do readers comment on, if they do comment? Who else is sharing what your competitors are publishing?

Social Media

Certain social media platforms appeal to some audiences more than others. The channels a company favors can reveal clues to the demographics of their target market. Make note of what social media buttons they include on pages and where on the page they include them.

Software Tools for Understanding Online Competitors

Besides monitoring content, you can monitor the mechanics of competitor websites to glean more data about how marketing strategy and product offerings are changing. Software helps to automate these investigations for you. Following are some of the many products available:

• BuiltWith : See what platform was used to build a page.
• Ghostery : Find trackers on a website.
• SEMrush : Discover company rankings, organic keywords, AdWords, and analyses of backlinks.
• Versionista : Track web page and website changes, SEO changes, and more.
• Visualping : Monitor webpage updates.
• SpyFu : Find competitor keywords and AdWords, including AdWord and keyword variations and history.
• iSpionage : Track PPC and other keywords in competitor campaigns.
• SimilarWeb : Compare competitor websites to your own.
• Heatmaps: Use large amounts of data to provide a visual representation of how users interact with a website. Heatmaps can indicate where users click and look and for how long. Levels of intensity of activity are usually displayed through colors.
• Session Recording Tools: Record user browsing sessions. Session recording tools can yield a wealth of rich data, but raise some privacy concerns.
• Tag Management Systems: Advanced e-marketing implementations use tags to aid analysis and reporting. Tags are snippets of code that are usually added to the <head> tags of a web page.

Web Page User Testing for UX in Competitive Analysis

It’s essential to understand how consumers approach your website, especially for web-based products and marketing. Allow customers to test your site, and even view it yourself from a customer’s perspective, to help eliminate unnecessary steps and streamline your sales funnel. Doing so can also help to illuminate the opportunities for upsells and cross-sells.

Limiting the analysis to two or three competitors offers a manageable amount of insight into usability, which helps you avoid reviewer overload and confusion. For impartial results, don’t reveal to test participants which website is yours.

Ask test participants to enter words in Google or list the words and phrases they would use to find a certain product or service. Not only does this yield potentially fruitful keywords, it also indicates whether your site appears in search returns.

To get a sense of each participant’s impression, have them look at each website for five seconds and answer the following questions:

• What three words would you use to describe the site?
• What is it about? What products or services are offered and for whom?
• How does this website make you feel?

To understand their process, give participants a task to perform on each website. Ask them to answer the following questions:

• What was the worst thing about your visit to this website?
• What aspects of the experience could be improved?
• What did you like about the website?
• What other comments do you have?
• Which website did you like best and why?

How Much Data Do You Need in a Competitive Analysis?

It may seem overwhelming to sit down and search out your competitors’ business situations. That’s why setting a clear intention before you begin an analysis is so important. In addition, Babette Bensoussan advises that you don’t need to analyze everything:

“Over the years, I have learned that once you have 70 percent of the information required for your chosen analytical technique, you can proceed to the analysis,” she explains. “You never really need all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to tell you what the picture is. This same philosophy applies to analysis. More information may not yield better insights nor improve predictive accuracy.”

How Do I Write a Competitor Analysis Report?

The format of your analysis depends on individual choice and the audience. You may also choose to use one kind of format while you work through the analysis, and another when you present findings.

Take a sheet of paper. In the left-most column, write the names of your closest competitors. Across the top of the page, list the main attributes of each product, such as target market, price, size, method of distribution, extent of customer service, prospective buyers, and so on. Then, make a check or a note for each attribute the competitor fulfils. An additional column can contain information about service or product availability, the website, a toll-free phone number, and other general information.

A competitor profile helps you make a detailed record about each competitor, and also allows you to capture snapshots of a business over time. Consider listing some of the following information:

• Location of offices and factories
• Key personalities, history, and trends
• Ownership, organizational structure, and corporate governance
• Number of employees and skill sets
• Management and management style
• Compensation, benefits, and retention rates
• Plant capacity, utilization rate, age of plant, capital investment
• Product mix per plant and shipping logistics
• Products and services
• Depth of product line
• New products developed and success rate
• Research and development details
• Brands and brand loyalty and awareness
• Patents and licenses
• Quality control conformance
• Cash flow and liquidity
• Profit growth profile
• Method of growth (organic or acquisitive)
• Objectives, mission statement, growth plans, acquisitions
• Marketing strategies
• Segments served, market shares, customer base, growth rate, and customer loyalty
• Promotional mix, promotional budgets, advertising themes, ad agency used, online promotional strategy
• Distribution channels (direct and indirect) and exclusivity agreements

Here is a step-by-step process for writing a competitor analysis report:

• Write down your competitors.
• Write what you know about them already.
• Discover who their target customers are.
• Discover their pricing methods.
• Investigate their marketing strategy.
• Figure out their competitive advantage.

Download our competitive analysis landscape template to get ideas for gathering information and reporting analysis results.

Download Competitive Analysis Landscape Template

Excel  |  Word  |  PDF  | Smartsheet

Competitive Analysis for Small Businesses

Small business can be competitive. Beyond meeting financial targets, you need to understand the competitive landscape (short of allowing it to distract you) and then target a niche market.  Many of the same analyses that apply to large businesses also apply to small businesses. However, if this is your first business, or if you don’t have a marketing background, you may want to pay attention to a few aspects.

First, it is helpful to acknowledge how much or how little you know about your competitors by sketching a profile of your top two or three competitors. Next, try to learn all you can about your competition.

You can use the following template to perform a competitive analysis for your small business.

Download Small Business Competitive Analysis Template

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What Is a Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan?

Competitive analysis should play a key role in the preparation of a business plan. Particularly if you seek outside funding, your knowledge of the competitive landscape will show your understanding of your business and the market forces at play.

When starting a business, consider all the analysis questions described above, but pay particular attention to issues of growth and opportunity. Consider addressing the following circumstances:

• Whether current competitors target a specific niche or offer products to the mass market
• If, how, and why competitors are growing or reducing business
• How your company will be stronger than competitors and better able to exploit changes in the market landscape
• What you will offer customers that no one else does (your competitive advantage)

In the business plan, describe the competitive landscape as it relates to direct and indirect competitors and opportunities and risks, emphasizing your competitive advantage. This competitive analysis can form the basis for your first marketing plan.

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How to Perform a Competitor Analysis (Examples & Templates)

Written by: Masooma Memon

Thorough competitor analysis is a crucial aspect of any marketing plan .

It helps you understand how challenging it could be to crack a market, what strategies could work, and how you can best position your brand.

It can also tell you what strategies won’t work, what the customer’s expectations are and how much they’re willing to pay.

Without it, you likely won’t survive a day in a new market.

You need to study your competition not only when you’re starting out but also periodically after cementing your feet in the market. This way, you can stay on top of your game, consistently growing your market share.

Not sure where to start?

We’ve got an easy, 6-step competitor analysis template for you in this guide. We’ll also share templates to help you document your findings.

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Table of Contents

What is a competitor analysis, the benefits of competitor analysis for businesses, how to conduct a competitor analysis (step-by-step), 10 competitor analysis templates to use right away, ready to try out this competitor analysis template.

Competitor analysis is the strategic research of your competitors to study their strengths and weaknesses.

By taking the time to analyze your current and potential competitors, you can identify areas for improvement. You want to look out for things like their value proposition, product, marketing and sales tactics.

Besides helping you find gaps in the market, studying your competition helps in the following ways:

• Identify ways to outperform your competitors.
• Understand market trends so you can make sure your business is consistently meeting and even exceeding industry standards.
• Learn what your competitors are doing right. This is important for staying relevant in your market and growing your market share.
• Find out how your product is different from other similar products. This helps you improve brand positioning and informs your marketing copy.

A competitor analysis seeks to study all available information on your competitors, including their pricing, differentiators, positioning, product portfolio, strengths and weaknesses.

The steps below will help you uncover all this and more.

Step 1: Create a List of Your Competitors

Chances are you can recall who your competitors are in a breath.

But if you’re new, identifying who your direct and indirect competitors are will take some time.

Keep in mind that direct competitors offer products and services similar to yours, positioning them as a substitute for your business. They also mostly target the same audience.

On the flip side, indirect competitors are businesses that don’t necessarily offer the same product or service. However, their offering can solve the same customer problem that your business solves.

An easy, cost-effective way to identify competitors is by typing in your product type into the Google search bar.

Let’s suppose you have a project management software . A quick Google search on this will turn up names of companies offering the same type of software.

For creating a comprehensive list of competitors, make sure you google synonyms too. This could be a “project management tool” for the example above.

Another useful tactic is to conduct the same research on social media .

Type in what your business does and you’ll see similar business names pop up.

You can also surf hashtags to learn how other companies are using them.

Lastly, if you’re conducting market research interviews , pay attention to the brand names that target buyers mention in their interviews.

Step 2: Study Competitors’ Product Offerings and Market Share

Once you know who your competitors are, start studying them one by one.

Go through their product portfolio. Look at the products they offer, how they position and price them. Record your findings in a worksheet so you can track and analyze the data you’re gathering. Visme allows you to do this quickly and easily.

You can also grab a template from Visme’s template gallery and create a product and pricing sketch for each competitor. This will make it easy for you to visualize individual competitors.

To determine competitors’ market share, use Statista or a similar resource to get your hands on the numbers.

Track and visualize your findings in this template.

Step 3: Perform a SWOT Analysis

A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis helps you study what competitors are doing to win customers. You can also use it to identify gaps in your market .

For example, let's say a competitor’s customer support team takes pretty long to get back to customers. You can use the information to provide faster customer support and a better experience for customers.

As you hunt for competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, study the following areas:

• Sales strategy
• Brand positioning
• Marketing plan
• Discounts strategy
• Website experience
• Customer support and experience

Running an ecommerce business? Study competitors’ shipping and product return strategies as well.

An effective way to jump-start studying competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and more is through social listening. The goal? To identify what customers are saying about brands on social media channels they use, including chat forums and groups they are a part of.

A similar approach is to study customer reviews. This will help you understand what your competitors’ customers are saying about them.

Are they satisfied with the product quality? Or are they put off by their onboarding process? Do their support requests take long to get answered?

As you go about researching, record your findings in a SWOT analysis template like this one:

If you’re a Visme user, you have the benefit of coordinating your SWOT research efforts with your team.

If you and your business partner are working together on the research work, you can both access and edit the worksheet in Visme at the same time.

To do this, use the Share option from the top right side of your project dashboard in Visme. Select "Share Privately" and add your partner to the project.

From there, you two can collaborate on design , leaving comments for each other.

Step 4: Dig Deeper Into Competitors’ Pricing Strategy

We’ve already mentioned that you need to make notes on how your competitors price their products. But studying their pricing strategy goes deeper.

First, review what discounts competitors offer. Then look at how often they offer discounts.

Studying your competitors’ promo strategies will help you understand how they’re attracting customers and growing sales. It will also give you a good idea of how much the target market is willing to pay and what their expectations are in terms of discounts.

In addition to the manual research to uncover individual competitor pricing, use the same research tools mentioned above — social listening and customer reviews. They'll help identify what customers are saying. Pay attention to how customers respond to the discounts and promotions that competitors run.

Some businesses tend to offer discounts shortly after they launch new products. This can be a turn-off for shoppers who like to shop for the latest collections to stand out from their peers.

Similarly, other businesses extend product deals now and then despite telling customers it’s their last chance to buy.

See if and how that annoys customers and if there’s an opportunity for you to offer something more relevant and unique to the target market.

Step 5: Analyze Competitors’ Marketing Strategy

It’s important to study how competitors are raising brand awareness and moving leads down their marketing funnel .

Begin by identifying where your leading competitors are funneling their resources. Is it PPC they’re investing in? Or are they taking the community-building approach to attract, engage and nurture customers?

Chances are your competitors are big on educating customers, so they’re investing in content marketing .

Also, look at which channels competitors are focusing on. Is it Twitter or Reddit? Or do they have a strong presence on Instagram ?

The answer to this will help you understand where your target audience is present and which marketing channels you should focus on.

Take Clearscope , an SEO content optimization tool, for example. They take an educational approach to their marketing by creating lots of webinar content.

Ahrefs , another SEO tool, on the other hand, is also big on the educational approach. But they create blog content, not webinars.

Step 6: Document Your Research

In this last step, compile all your research in written format.

Create an action plan that includes a tactical list of steps to take. This way, you can discuss and prioritize steps to take with your team. Aim to be concise as you create this competitor analysis document.

If you create a wordy report, nobody will read it. But if you create a document that summarizes your findings and visualizes data in the form of charts and graphs, more people will read and appreciate your hard work.

Want some good news? Visme makes it uber-simple to create easy-to-read graphs and charts . It can help you create an easily shareable and visually engaging analysis document.

Design graphs using templates like the one below:

Alternatively, create new charts in your presentation or report .

All you have to do is to head to Charts & Graphs on the left side of your design dashboard and choose the type of chart you want to create.

From there, Visme gives you a chart to enter data so it can create a custom graph for your project. You can resize the graph you create, tweak its color, animate it and add other interacgive effects.

When you are done designing your document you can easily share it with the rest of your team . Head to the Share button at the top right corner of your design dashboard.

Now select Share Privately from the left side and give permission to team members. Choose whether they can view your work, comment on it, or edit it.

If you prefer to get a link for the work you’ve created, simply grab it from the bottom of the page and share it with your team.

By going into Advanced Settings on the left side, followed by Privacy . You can also allow your team to download the competitor analysis report as a PDF.

And, finally, for the templates that we promised:

1. Retail Store Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

Use this infographic template to record your competitors’ pricing, unique selling proposition (USP), revenue and more.

Since the information is arranged in a table format, you can easily study how each competitor stands against another and how they compare to business.

2. Competitor Analysis Interactive Presentation Template

If you’re looking to pitch some growth ideas to your executive team, this interactive competitor analysis template is for you.

It’s neatly designed so that all information is easy to read.

There are a handful of slides in the template that use tables to compare competitors. You can also always add more slides or remove some to suit your needs.

3. Logistics Firm Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

This is the perfect template for studying and comparing two competitors.

If you prefer, you can also use the beautifully designed template to analyze your business against your leading competitor.

And if need be, you can add another row for comparing another competitor.

4. Edtech Company Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

This is another competitor analysis template to pitch two competitors against one another.

What makes it different from the template above is that it arranges all the comparative pointers at the center. This way, you won’t need to keep looking to the left side to see which pointer you’re studying.

5. Sales Consultant Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This is a great template to record findings on each competitor.

By using it, you can easily get a snapshot of each of your competitor’s free and paid products, USP, features, target market and the marketing channels they use.

6. Media and Marketing Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This template is perfect for recording not just your competitors’ products, features and pricing but also their SWOT analysis.

Consequently, this competitor analysis template can serve as your readable database with all your research findings.

7. Nonprofit SWOT Analysis Infographic Template

If you’re looking to record your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, then this template is perfect.

And if you’re conducting several competitors’ SWOT analyses, make sure you use this template for each one of them.

8. TrackFast Technologies Sales Battlecard Template

This competitor analysis template is useful for comparing your business with your leading competition.

As well as a comparative table, it also features space to record other essential details such as company overview, key differentiators, customer pain points and benefits.

9. Design Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This one is a simple, minimally-designed competitor analysis template for comparing various competitors.

If you need to add another column, you can easily do so by editing the template in Visme.

10. Design Tool Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

Lastly, we’ve got this competitor analysis template.

Its best feature is that the template divides each column into sub-categories, which makes it easy to analyze each aspect.

For example, within the product column, you can easily learn about a competitor’s product features, pricing and USP.

So you see, competitor analysis is critical for tapping into and growing in a market.

But remember, analyzing your competitors and their moves is only part of the task. The other part involves documenting your findings in an easy-to-read and understandable way. This is key to making sure your team implements the findings from the research.

Want to start recording your findings? Sign up for Visme’s document creator for free today and start documenting actionable takeaways.

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UX Competitive Analysis w/Template & Example

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In this article, we will talk about the UX analysis of your competitors. What is it, why do you need it, and how to conduct one, and which research methods to use?

Key Takeaways:

👉 Competitor analysis broadly means evaluating your competition’s strengths and weaknesses

👉 UX audit of competitors can help you: stay atop industry standards, identify market gaps and growth opportunities , get insights into how to design a product that meets your users’ expectation

👉 Competitor analysis can be done in the form of: 1.) an expert review 2.) competitive usability testing with larger sample of real users

👉 Conducting competitive usability testing provides unbiased data compared to an expert review , which can be biased and not reflect your real users’ opinions

👉 For competitive usability testing you can use tools such as a specialized tool for competitive usability testing, tree testing, preference test, 5 second test and first click test (all these tools are offered by UXtweak)

🐝 Register for a free account on UXtweak now and try it out!

What is competitive analysis? 

Competitive analysis is a method of researching your direct and indirect competitors and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. The aim is to gain more in-depth knowledge of your competitors’ strategies and their market position, especially in relation to your business. It can help you get valuable insights into how to run your business (and how not to), identify opportunities in the market, and what design decisions you should or shouldn’t make.

Competitive analysis has its place in every area of business, and user experience is no exception.  On the contrary, it is, or at least it should be, a crucial part of the design and UX research journey.

Why is competitive analysis important in UX design?

Competitive UX analysis helps to inform and guide the design process. It is important because it provides UX designers valuable insights into user needs , preferences, and expectations, as well as the design trends and standards in the market. Additionally, UX competitive analysis research helps to identify market gaps and opportunities for differentiation and innovation.

Competitive analysis in UX research can take the form of expert reviews , where an experienced usability practitioner reviews the designs using heuristic evaluation and their expertise and knowledge of usability, or competitive usability evaluations, where users complete a set of tasks using 2 or more competing sites. In this article, we will talk about both of those approaches.

Looking for a good tool to conduct competitive analysis?

UXtweak’s got you covered!  We developed a whole new  Competitive Analysis tool  to help you understand what users love or where they struggle and create a winning product strategy using competitor sites in usability testing. And guess what’s even better? It’s free!

Analyse your Competition with UXtweak!

Identify growth opportunities, stay atop of market trends and meet your users' expectations.

Competitive analysis UX advantages

Before we get into the step-by-step process of how to do a UX competitor analysis, let’s first look at what are its biggest advantages. 

After you conduct your research, you will:

• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your digital products in relation to your competitors
• Gain a deeper understanding of the market, its users, and their needs
• Learn about the industry trends and market insights
• Discover usability issues to fix and features to improve to create user-friendly products
• Define a course for long-term growth

When to do a UX competitive analysis?

It is best to conduct a UX competitive analysis when you are in the early stages of the design process your digital product (website, app, etc.). That being said, don’t despair if you haven’t executed any yet. You will benefit from a competitor analysis even if you already are an established business. 

Following your first analysis, it is beneficial to get back to it in different stages of your business and update it regularly at least once a year. Naturally, your competition and your market evolve and so should you. Think of it as an iterative process that will keep you alert and on top of your competitive advantage.

Learn more about  Competitive Audits  and how to do them efficiently.

How to do a competitor analysis in UX design?

1. Specify your goals

First, you should decide what you aim to learn with your UX competitive analysis. Coming up with a UX strategy to define this can be a great approach. The outcome of this will determine if you will conduct a high-level analysis or if you will focus on specific aspects of your website or app. 

You should also consider what your company’s position is when conducting a UX competitive analysis. This not only changes your perspective but also sets the stage for tools and the opportunities coming with them. 

What different positions do we have in mind?

You are in the early stages of a new product development and you are looking at your competitors to inspire yourself. A list of strengths to replicate and mistakes to avoid might be the core of your findings. 

You are thinking about entering a new market or industry, trying to find a place for new products or innovations

You are monitoring the changes in the competitive landscape, with the goal of not falling behind as the market evolves

You are planning a marketing campaign. Your goal is to understand what your competition is doing and outperform them with your strategy.

2. Create a list of your competitors

When creating a list of your competitors for the analysis, keep in mind you don’t need a large number. Usually, three to five are enough to compare yourself with. Decide if you want to include both direct and indirect competitors.

Direct competitors : These are companies that offer the same or very similar product as you and will provide potentially more easily accessible insights, but analyzing your

Indirect competitors : Companies that offer a different product than you, however, users are able to meet the same need with this product as with yours

Feel free to use smaller businesses but also bigger players in your field. If your customers can meet their needs there, you should include the business in your analysis. 

3. Identify key features and flows

Before you start gathering the actionable insights, do yourself a favor and prepare a matrix document where you will log and organize your findings. 

Now, looking at your competitor’s website/app,  define the most significant flows and identify features that users interact with . It can look something like this:

Sign up and login

Purchase of a product

Subscription to a service

Searching on a website

Making an appointment

Or any other task within the competitive landscape that applies to your business.

When you’re done with the list, imagine you are the user and perform each action on your list. 

Don’t forget to write down everything in your matrix document. Include notes about what you liked and disliked, what worked, or what surprised you. If you are comparing websites, be sure to visit them using both desktop and mobile devices. 

4. Analyze the data

Looking at the data and user feedback you’ve collected, it’s time to name the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and yours as well. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is perfect for this. Ask yourself questions such as: What business value does your competition bring? How was your user experience using their website? Are the user journeys effective?

During the analysis, you will surely stumble upon something your competitor does differently. Do not feel the urge to replicate each feature straight away.  Just because your competitor has something you don’t, it doesn’t mean it is the best approach. Sometimes, however, you might not be sure. If such a situation occurs and you are not sure what to do, read below how you can resolve it using one of the UXtweak tools. 

5. Define actionable next steps

When your analysis is done it should be clear what are the biggest usability issues of your website/ mobile app. It is now the time to define actionable steps you will take to make improvements. 

Divide the tasks into short-term and long-term and plan the redesign and/or implementation.

Competitive analysis using UXtweak (What do your users think?)

Now we know what competitor analysis is, why it is important, and how to conduct one. Above we have described general steps you should take when you compare the usability of your website or app with your competitors. 

However, there is a crucial aspect to consider.  You as a business owner or a website/app designer are biased and the data you will collect will never be 100% accurate to what an actual user may find important. Therefore you should also be interested in what your users have to say. 

Let’s take a look at several specific ways you can test elements or features of your website/app using UXtweak tools. 

We have also prepared a tailor-made template in which you can record the data that will come up from your analyses. You can download it at the end of this article.

1. Run Competitive Usability Testing

Run a real user test on the websites of your competitors and find out what works for them and what doesn’t! Mimic competitor’s strengths and avoid found mistakes in the early stages of development. 

With UXtweak’s  Competitive Usability Testing  tool, you can give testers some tasks to accomplish on your and your competitor’s website, compare how they perform, find out what confuses them, and improve your UX based on the findings. A good UX competitive analysis tool, such as UXtweak’s will help you with the analysis by providing metrics and graphs to better understand the data you collected.

Learn more about usability testing in our usability testing guide .

How does it work?

Create a new website testing study and specify the URL of the competitor’s website you want to test

Give users tasks to complete. Before the testing starts, participants will be asked to install UXtweak Chrome Extension to track user activity on any website.

Watch the recordings, find out what works and what doesn’t, and improve your UX!

Here’s a short video tutorial to help you understand the process better!

2. Compare your navigation with Tree Testing

Ask your users to find the same product in your website’s navigation and in the navigation of your competitor. This is even more useful if your website is content-heavy and your business depends on users being able to find the right product or service.  

Take a look at the examples below. Both navigations represent an electronic e-commerce website but the organization slightly differs. Where should the user click if they’re looking for a pair of headphones for running? And in which navigation will they find the item faster?

Picture 1: 2 versions of a tree structure of website navigation transferred to the UXtweak Tree Testing tool . 

3. Find out which design users prefer using a Preference Test

A Preference Test is helpful when you want to find out how your and your competitor’s design or presentation is perceived by your target audience. In some aspects, you might be the users’ choice and in others, they might prefer your competition. It is priceless to learn what you can do better and what elements to highlight. 

For this Preference Test, we have altered the product page pictures, so they each contain the same product photo. This will enable users to focus on the user interface on the right side so they can choose their preferred option.  

Picture 2: Screen of a task in the UXtweak Preference Test tool .

4. Who communicates the message better in the first 5 seconds?

How quickly can your users grasp the main information of your page and what are their very first impressions? You can easily find it out using a Five Second Test for your and your competitor’s website. 

Comparing the results for both websites/apps can uncover what’s missing or which areas of your homepage you should tweak to deliver your message more clearly. 

Picture 3: Competitor homepage A for Five Second Test, GetYourGuide.com, an online travel agency and marketplace for tour guides, excursions, and other activities. 

Picture 4: Competitor homepage B for Five Second Test, WithLocals.com, an experiential travel company that connects travelers with local hosts.

Picture 5: Competitor homepage C for Five Second Test, Bookatrekking.com, a professional trekking company that connects hikers across popular destinations – Mont Blanc, Alta Via, Malerweg, etc.

5. Who is more user-friendly? Find out with First Click Test

All of the above – navigation, design, and communication of a website, lead the users to perform an action. Whether it is a primary or a secondary task, users need to know where to click in order to become your customers. 

Test your website/app using the First Click Test to see if you make it easy for your users or if they struggle. Repeat the same test using your competitor’s website and see who performs better.

To introduce a First Click Test example for your UX competitive analysis, imagine you would like to sign up for a Spanish course with one of the language schools below. Where would you click first?

Picture 6: Competitor homepage A for First Click Test, International House London language school homepage

Picture 7: Competitor homepage B for First Click Test, TELC UK language school homepage

UX competitive analysis template

We have prepared for you a template specifically designed for comparison with your competitors using UXtweak tools as described above. Don’t wait and create your first UXtweak competitive analysis study to collect the insights that will change your business. 

Download UXtweak Competitive Analysis Template

UX competitive analysis example

Now, congratulations on reading this far! Hopefully, you’ve gained new insights into what competitive analysis can mean for you and what conducting it can look like. We are however aware that words only convey so much and it is best to learn by doing. Or observing someone. 

That is why we advise you to check out these demo studies we have prepared and see what a competitive analysis done on a real-life example looks like.

Do users understand how my website works?

What is my competitor doing better?

You can also check out an example of a competitive audit on our blog.

Conclusion:  Staying Ahead of the Game

The main purpose of a competitive analysis is not just about implementing new features or streamlining the flow of your website. It’s really about keeping you on your toes. No matter if your business is big or small, you can still benefit greatly from knowing your competition and the approaches that have already worked for someone else.

Try Competitor Analysis with UXtweak

Stay atop industry trends, meet your users' expectations and identify growth opportunities.

People also ask (FAQ)

Competitive analysis is important in UX design because it helps you understand how your product fits into the market. It can help identify opportunities to differentiate your product from the competition as well as make informed decisions that can lead to a better user experience .

Competitive UX analysis can be conducted using a UX research tool. These are the steps:

• Define your goals
• Identify the competitors
• Identify key features and flows
• Create a test plan 
• Use a Competitive Usability Testing tool
• Analyze the findings

SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats . In UX design , SWOT analysis can be used in competitive analysis to identify competitor strengths and weaknesses, and explore opportunities and threats for your business growth.

UX Researcher with a design and analytical background, she likes to think that even a small change (and a cup of coffee) can make a huge difference.

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Crayon Competitive Intelligence blog

Analyzing your competitive landscape: 4 case studies.

Conducting a competitive analysis can be time-consuming. It takes time to gather intelligence, analyze the insights, share data, and integrate your findings into your strategy. However, if you’re able to take a quick snapshot of your competitive landscape , you’ll be able to get quick and impactful insights about your market. Previously, we walked you through the three dimensions of conducting a snapshot competitive landscape analysis . Now, let’s apply that methodology in a series of case studies — a breakdown of four industries, including Conversational Marketing Software, Point-of-Sale (POS) Solutions, Cybersecurity Technology, and Meal Kit Subscriptions. With data from completed competitive landscape reports, we’ll dive into what it means to be an industry leader.

Breaking Down the Competitive Analysis

Our competitive analysis report breaks down your competitive landscape in three ways: Company Growth & Trajectory, Company Traffic & Social Reach, and Company Homepage & Positioning History. All of these aspects are important in analyzing your competitive landscape for different reasons. For our analysis, we’ve also highlighted three areas of market leadership — Industry Billboard, Market Leader, and Top Challenger.

• The Industry Billboard represents the company with the largest voice in the market, as measured by the company with the best Alexa Rank.
• The Market Leader is the recognized front-runner in the industry, as measured by highest estimated revenue for a public company.
• The Top Challenger is the up-and-comer that is getting the most traction, as measured by highest estimated revenue for a private company. 

Now that we’ve broken down the key areas of focus for these reports, let’s look at how specific companies in a wide range of industries have gotten themselves to those top spots.

The Industry Billboard: Best Alexa Rank

Up first, we took a snapshot of the customer service / conversational marketing software industry, which included Intercom, Podium, Freshdesk, Zendesk, and Drift. To get recognized as an “Industry Billboard,” the company needs to have the lowest Alexa Rank in the industry.

The Top Challenger: Top Private Company by Revenue

Next up, let’s take a look at the Point-of-Sale (POS) industry. In this landscape snapshot, we analyzed NCR, ShopKeep, Toast, Upserve, Square, TouchBistro, and Revel Systems. To get recognized as the Top Challenger, you need to have the highest estimated revenue and be a private company.

In this industry, the Top Challenger is Toast. In this instance, Toast is the top private company in the POS space, based on its estimated revenue, which is in the $500M-$1B range. In comparison to other private companies in this space, they are the revenue leader. This data is important because it gives you insight into how efficient your competitors are, which ones are up-and-coming based on how long they’ve been in business and their revenue, as well as which competitor is leading the charge. Keeping a pulse on funding as well as revenue matters because you can gain insight into how well a company is performing. If your competitors are raising more funding, it might be a sign that something big is about to happen, that you will definitely want to monitor.

Revenue is a good indicator of success for private companies, but let’s focus on their funding. If you notice an increase in funding, keep an eye out for changes across other aspects of their business. When a company is raising capital, it means that they are planning to grow and invest more resources into their strategy - headcount, product capabilities, new offices, etc. Keep an eye on their funding as well as what happens after funding rounds are completed. Any shift in strategy, especially hiring, can give you insight into where they’re going next. Use this intel to get ahead of your competition.

The Market Leader: Top Public Company by Revenue

Similar to the Top Challenger, the Market Leader is based on revenue, but for public companies. In this example, we’re going to look at the Cybersecurity space, featuring Symantec, SentinelOne, Cylance, FireEye, Tanium, Carbon Black, Cybereason, McAfee, and Crowdstrike.

In addition to funding raised, revenue is critical because it’s another measure of the success of a company. Here, the leader is a company that has been around significantly longer than the other players, so they’ve created a sustainable competitive advantage . While it is possible to displace industry leaders , you can also learn from the bigger players in your industry. What did they do over the years to get to where they are today? What did they invest in, who did they hire, how did their product change? By analyzing how they became the industry leader, you’ll be able to iterate on your strategy to incorporate the positive and negative lessons learned by the industry leader. There may be strategies you can apply to your own business, or you may be inspired to try new tactics. Either way, leverage this competitive intelligence to make an impact on your own revenue achievement .

Don’t Forget: Keep an Eye on Messaging and Website Updates

Additional competitive insights to evaluate include homepage updates and messaging history. As an example, we’re going to take a look at the Meal Kit Subscription industry, featuring Purple Carrot, Sun Basket, Blue Apron, Daily Harvest, HelloFresh, Home Chef, and Marley Spoon.

Seeing is believing! Check out Crayon for yourself.

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Introduction to Case Analysis & Critical Thinking

Whether you are competing in a case competition or participating in case studies in your courses, you might be wondering how to approach this process. This video by Professor Zoe Mayhook provides an introduction to the case analysis and critical thinking, and includes the following concepts: 

• Short history of the case method (0:19)
• Business case types (1:05)
• Business case characteristics (1:45)
• SWOT Analysis (4:41)
• Porter's Five Forces (6:36)
• Timeline Analysis (10:12)
• Financial Analysis (10:42)
• Case & Effect Analysis (14:36)
• Concluding thoughts (16:44)
• SWOT Analysis
• Industry Analysis
• Financial Analysis
• Other Analysis Tools

The SWOT Analysis is the process of identifying internal and external factors that affect the competitive positioning of a company. The SWOT mnemonic stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which helps individuals identify and succinctly organize information so that their decisions and recommendations leverage a company’s strengths and opportunities, while also overcoming their weaknesses and possible threats. Sample SWOT Analyses can be found through the following resources.

NOTE: Copy and pasting a published SWOT analysis is plagiarism. They offer a good starting point, but conducting a SWOT analysis for your assignments, case studies, and case competitions should be your own work. 

Learn more about SWOT Analysis

• An Essential Guide to SWOT Analysis
• SWOT Analysis Template

When conducting an industry analysis, it may be useful to consider Porter's Five Forces model . This model helps individuals look at competitive forces within an industry, which can help inform a company’s business strategy. Porter's five forces includes: 

• Competitive Rivalry 
• Threat of New Entry
• Threat of Substitutes 
• Supplier Power
• Buyer Power

Many business databases a Purdue carry industry reports that can help is your analysis. IBISWorld Industry reports is a useful first step, and provides information that utilizes the Porter's Five Forces Model. To learn how to use IBISWorld for Porter's Five Forces research, check out the following article: Using Porter's Fives Forces to Develop Business Strategies (2020).  IBISWorld . 

• Current Industrial Reports (Census) The CIR program provides statistics primarily for production and shipments, but data on inventories, orders, and consumption are collected in a number of surveys. These surveys also measure manufacturing activity in important commodity areas such as textile and apparel, chemicals, primary metals, computer and electronic components, industrial equipment, and consumer goods.

Financial ratios allow provide useful insights, and can be divided into five different classes.

• Profitability Ratios
• Liquidity Ratios
• Activity Ratios
• Leverage Ratios
• Market Value Ratios

Check out the following resources to learn more about financial ratios:

• Key Business Ratios (D&B) Examine industry benchmarks compiled from D&B's database of public and private companies, featuring 14 key business ratios. Choose a one-year or three-year set of ratios for public and private companies in 800 lines of business.
• Corporate Finance Institute | Financial Ratios
• Investopedia | Financial Ratios
• Cascade | Conducting A Strategic Analysis + 8 of the Best Tools to Use Provides background on the strategic management cycle and describe different strategic analysis tools that can be employed.
• ASQ | The 7 Basic Quality Tools for Process Improvement List of analysis tools including check sheets, control charts, histograms, pareto chart, scatter diagrams, and stratification.
• ASQ | Fishbone Diagram This cause analysis tool is considered one of the seven basic quality tools. The fishbone diagram identifies many possible causes for an effect or problem. It can be used to structure a brainstorming session. It immediately sorts ideas into useful categories.
• CFI | PESTEL Analysis PESTEL Analysis is a strategic framework used to evaluate the external environment of a business by breaking down the opportunities and risks into Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal factors.
• HBS | What is Value Chain Analysis? Value chain analysis is a means of evaluating each of the activities in a company’s value chain to understand where opportunities for improvement lie. Conducting a value chain analysis prompts you to consider how each step adds or subtracts value from your final product or service. This, in turn, can help you realize some form of competitive advantage.
• Microsoft Office | Timeline Templates Conduct a timeline analysis with these free templates provided by Microsoft Office.
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• URL: https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/casecompetitions

The Complete Guide to a UX Competitive Analysis

• Design Process
• Hiring designer
• SaaS product
• Web design & Dev
• Product design

Are you looking for a source to develop new product solutions and make interaction with your customers better? Your competitors can help! Of course, indirectly. That requires looking at them from a professional angle. A tool for that, UX Competitive analysis, will help you define what features to add to your product, what patterns to use for better interaction, and how to benchmark your product. However, this is achievable only if you are ready to spend time and effort on comprehensive research.

"UX Competitive analysis will help you define what features to add to your product, what patterns to use for better interaction, and how to benchmark your product."

Users cannot forgive poor experience with the app and application. 27% of businesses have already improved their customer experience score in 2020. Competitor analysis was one of the techniques used to determine what improvements customers need and how to introduce them most effectively.

Many businesses have already added competitor analysis to the list of processes to perform regularly. Yet, many of them do not conduct it professionally — thus, the analysis results do not help them improve their products.

The matter is that competitive analysis, as well as any other technique, requires a proper approach and expertise.

In this article, we are going to reveal what stands behind this process. Competitors will become your source of inspiration. We will share our own experience of using competitive analysis in our practice and explain how we build the process to achieve the results.

What is UX competitive analysis and its importance in the design process

To some extent, we all have performed competitor research at least once: browsing the websites of our market rivals, using their apps, or reading their mailings. However, to be effective, the research must be systemized and have clearly set goals. 

The UX competitive analysis is based on competitive research, a process of determining competitive product features using the competitors’ experience. We learn their approach to the usability and attractiveness of the product (as well as separate features) and investigate what features are crucial for the business.

"The UX competitive analysis is based on competitive research, a process of determining competitive product features using the competitors’ experience."

All in all, user experience competitor research helps us prevent many problems and understand the market’s real needs.

Among other problems competitor analysis helps to solve, we should mention the following:

• a company gets a chance to understand the current position of the product on the market
• it gets possible to define the gaps of existing product
• all strong and weak sides of other companies become visible
• all strong and weak sides of your company become visible as well
• if the product has not been released yet, you can develop a go-to-market strategy that will be more suitable for the current situation

With UX research, we can be sure of any decision regarding the feature list. For example, if the analysis shows us that some feature is no longer in demand, we will delete it from the list of options to develop. If the product has already been released, we consider the option of redesigning it and deleting the features that clients no longer use.

For the design processes, the competitive matrix serves to understand what features have a satisfying implementation — and use this information for our product. If we notice that the implementation of some features is controversial, we also use this to understand how to avoid the same mistakes in our product.

The product feature list is built on UX competitive analysis. Therefore, it directly influences product and design processes.

Typically, UX competitive analysis is based on 3-4 key competitors. The more competitors you use for analysis, the more complicated it becomes: you get too much information and it’s harder to focus on the goals.

For example, during a competitor analysis, we have defined that our market rival X has 10 main effective features or functionality elements. Our product has only 5 of them. Therefore, we expand our product list to 10 features, define the priority for each of them, and start the development process.

Otherwise, after conducting a competitive analysis, we may notice that 5 out of 10 features from our list are out-of-date. 3 of them can be updated. We get a list of 8 features: 5 remain the same, and 3 require additional attention.

The competitive analysis process frequently involves competitive reviews, competitive testing, and competitive tests on the design:

• competitive reviews

analysis of a series of related products. During the review, an expert defines strong and weak points of the design, trends, patterns, and differences. You can narrow the review by analysing only one feature, or you can broaden it to analysing the whole website. The swot approach is frequently used for competitive reviews.

• competitive testing

this is a less popular approach yet very effective. In this case, we invite users to test different products and evaluate the design. A user is given specific tasks, and they have to perform them with the functionality of the product. In competitive testing, you should also include your product in the list.

• competitive tests on the design

competitive analysis can also be used in the evaluation of the design variants for one product. There’s no need to create a full design, a prototype is enough for evaluation. Conducting usability tests is important for any product, and when you have a list of things to compare, tests become more valuable.

Advantages that UX competitive analysis gives to the product?

When we conduct competitive analysis, we always keep in mind that customer behavior changes rapidly. For example, during the first year of Covid 19, retail apps noticed an increase of time spent in mobile apps by 20% . For businesses, this is the trigger that shows the necessity to make apps more interactive and engaging. Therefore, we believe that it’s important to analyze regularly. It will help to:

Define UX strengths and weaknesses

When we analyze our direct and indirect competitors, we can define their strong and weak sides. What do they use to make the UX of their product more satisfying to a user? How can we use their experience in our practice? These are the questions that we need to answer.

It also helps us to define effective solutions and functions that we can implement in our product. 

Investigating the patterns

UХ analysis methods can easily define user behavior patterns used for different products. Our task is to select most suitable patterns for our product and implement them in our design process.

Discovering new areas for growths

For example, new features of functions that our competitors have never used. In the future, some of them may become selling points of the product.

It’s important to pay attention to the functions and features with the same idea but can be implemented differently. You can list approaches to feature implementation and experiment with your feature list in the future.

Creating detailed requirements for the new product

If the product has not been launched yet, we can use the analysis results to create detailed documentation for further development.

It will also be useful if you are planning to improve documentation for already existing products.

When is the right time to perform a UX competitive analysis?

It’s never late to start UX competitive analysis. Yet, we believe that the sooner you start to investigate your competitors, the easier it will be for you to implement changes into your product.

Thus, the best time is at the early stage of product development. In this case, you can easily define the must-have features of your product, write a detailed guide for development, and develop a strategy for further updates and changes. 

There is also an importance of UX competitive analysis on other stages. The matter is that your competitor list will change all the time, as well as the market. It will imply the need to add or remove features and upgrade the product.

A guide to competitive analysis for User Experience design

When creating a guide to competitors` analysis, we’ve used our own experience and best practices of different markets. With the combination of these two aspects, the guide reveals what’s behind the stage of the whole process that frequently involves the whole teamwork on it.

Start with the goals

Use business and product goals as the foundation for defining the goals of the competitive analysis. 

This step is obligatory to answer the most important questions: why you do this and what you are planning to get in the result.

Geography of the analysis

If the product is focused on the local market, you should search for local competitors. But if the product will work on the global market, better to choose another strategy and analyze top global competitors.

The geography of the analysis helps us to set the list of companies that we’re interested in. For example, if you want to create an app for food delivery from one restaurant, we will analyze local competitors. But if you are planning to create an app for food delivery from different restaurants in different regions, you will analyze global competitors, like Uber Eats.

Analysis of direct competitors

When analyzing direct competitors, always pay attention to the following:

• you must have a common area and functionality. The competitor’s product or service must solve the same problems and satisfy the same needs as your product
• you must have the same platform. In the analysis of direct competitors, it's impossible to compare mobile and desktop platforms and offline and online businesses. Thus, if you analyze mobile apps, the competitor must use mobile apps as well.

Analysis of indirect competitors 

For this type of analysis, follow these requirements:

• the products must solve the same problems and satisfy the same needs, but they can be presented on a different platform 
• indirect competitors can work in another business area
• indirect competitors may have another target audience, but still, the functionality of their digital product is close to yours

Sorting the comparison table

A comparison table allows us to work with collected data in various ways: we can color the most and the least important information, define trends and tendencies, point out key information, or determine patterns. Also, we can sort information using available data: traffic level or a number of downloads. We can sort it by describing the order of functionality as well.

We fill in the comparison table to determine and establish competitive features for our product. We conduct detailed analysis for each competitor, which helps us to make successful decisions for our project.

As a result of the UX Competitive analysis, we create a general report and create a feature list.

UX competitive analysis: Klasha Case Study 

Competitor analysis of any company has certain patterns, but the results are always different. The matter is that the markets are different, and some of them have many things to compare. 

For Klasha , a fintech product, UX competitive analysis was a challenge: the business area is huge, the number of competitors is impressive. Klasha is a product that simplifies money transactions for local currencies. 

Before we started the competitor research, we UX audited the existing website. In this case, this was an essential step that helped us define gaps and understand the main problems. Using best practices and our expertise in the market, we created a preliminary list of issues we will deal with.

We collected all necessary information about product usability: features customers use, less popular ones, and features with poor implementation. We used the collected information to determine the priority of the problems to fix. For some of the issues, we offered best practice solutions that could be implemented immediately.

The next step was the conduction of competitors' analysis. We started with the geography and defined Klasha’s main competitors in the region. Later, we analyzed direct and indirect competitors. We listed their features in a comparison table. Detailed information helped us to define the best UX solutions for Klasha’s website problems. Also, we defined a list of features to be implemented in a fintech app working with money transactions in different currencies.

How to conduct UX competitive analysis for your product

UX competitive analysis is more than looking through the list of companies that work in your business area and randomly checking their websites or apps. It requires a profound understanding of UX, user behavior patterns, and business best practices. 

Fortunately, there’s no need to conduct competitive analysis on your own. Arounda is here to help you! We will take everything on us: starting with the UX audit of your product and up to creating a strategy for feature implementation. We will support you at any stage of the design process and explain how our solutions will work for your business.

Our team of dedicated UX experts will analyze your competitors and provide you with a full report. You will finally understand why your consumers do not use app features and what they expect from your product.

If you are not sure what business goals you can solve with design, don’t hesitate to contact us . We will answer your questions and help you with any inquiry!

Vlad Gavriluk

I make sure our clients get the high-quality result from the beginning stage of the idea discovery & strategy to the final digital product.

Have a project in your mind? Let’s communicate

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Competitor Analysis & Customer Journey Intelligence

A US-based customer data platform (CDP) startup approached us for help in a highly competitive market. We understood the challenges the startup was facing and dove into a deep market analysis to get a clear picture of the competitive landscape and uncover opportunities for growth.

Through close collaboration with the startup, we analised key competitors and developed a customised sales strategy that leveraged client's strengths and set it apart from its competitors. The approach emphasised high-value customer targeting, strong relationship-building, and thought leadership to differentiate the platform in the market.

We provided ongoing training and support to the client's sales team, ensuring the successful execution of the strategy. The results were impressive. Within 6 months, the client experienced a significant  20% (!) increase in sales, establishing itself as a leader in the market and laying the foundation for continued growth and success.

Conduct in-depth market and competitor research to understand the customer journey and identify areas for improvement.

Identify key psychological areas for improvement within the client's organisation to enable the company's sales team to be more successful.

Use AI to analyse data and restructure the customer journey to better meet the needs of customers and improve the overall customer experience.

Measure the effectiveness of the changes made and adjust KPIs.

Implement changes to the customer journey and internal processes to drive sales growth and improve the performance and morale of the sales team.

Gathering and analysing data

Gather and analyse a large amounts of data on the customer journey and competitors in order to understand the market and identify areas for improvement.

Identifying the most effective changes to make

Determine the most impactful changes to make to the customer journey and the startup's internal processes.

Balancing needs and preferences of potential customers

Find solutions that were the most beneficial for both the client and potential customers, requiring negotiation and compromise.

Implementing changes

Effectively roll out the changes to the customer journey and internal processes and ensure that they were adopted and effective within the client's organisation. This required careful planning and execution, as well as coordination with various stakeholders.

Measuring the effectiveness of the changes

Accurately measure the impact of the changes made on sales team and adjust the strategy accordingly. This required tracking key metrics such as sales growth and customer satisfaction and using this data to inform day-to-day decision-making.

We conducted an in-depth analysis of the startup's direct competitors using a mix of research methodologies, including competitor analysis and customer surveys. Therefore, we were able to identify potential customers' preferences and recognise areas of improvement that the client should undertake to optimise the customer journey using frameworks such as customer journey mapping.

Using business theories such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and generated data, we then restructured the customer journey using AI to meet customers' needs better, aiming to increase overall satisfaction and engagement with the product:

Identifying key pain points

Developing solutions for pain points

Implementing strategies to improve the overall customer experience

In addition to restructuring the customer journey, we identified key areas for improvement within the client's own organisation that would enable the sales team to be more successful. This included changes such as improving communication strategies between managers and employees to increase transparency and accountability, setting up psychologically-positive incentives based on concrete goals rather than subjective assessments, and investing more resources into training programs for new hires. These initiatives were designed to motivate employees and improve their performance, ultimately leading to higher overall sales success for the business.

The efforts of our work paid off, and it was soon that the client's sales team saw positive results. Their performance improved due to increased knowledge on how to best approach different customer needs, and their morale skyrocketed with newfound enthusiasm towards achieving their goals. The success achieved by the client demonstrates the power of understanding the customer journey and implementing psychological changes within the team to drive growth. 

Increased Sales

One of the most significant achievements of the project was a noticeable rise in sales for the client.

Improved Customer Experience

The focus on improving the customer journey resulted in a more seamless and satisfying experience for customers.

Differentiation in the Market

The customised sales strategy and improved customer experience set the startup apart from its competitors, helping it to stand out in the highly-crowded market.

Stronger Relationships

The focus on relationship-building was key in helping the client build stronger connections with its customers, partners, and employees

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Market & Business Research

We tailor proprietary research methodologies to fit your unique business objectives. Whether it's profiling your customers, gauging demand, or assessing the competitive landscape, our approach ensures you get intelligence that matches your needs. We examine consumers, competitors, and markets from multiple angles to deliver a comprehensive perspective.

Business & Data Analysis

Our advanced analytics platform integrates multivariate data sources into a comprehensive 360° view of your business environment. We analyse data from markets, segments, categories and consumer behaviour from every angle. You gain an information advantage to seize new opportunities ahead of competitors.

Strategy & Innovations

Our analytics go beyond reporting to arm leaders with strategic intelligence that fuels growth. We contextualise data insights into actionable frameworks, forward-looking scenarios, and risk-aware recommendations. Such an evidence-based approach gives you the confidence to pursue new directions and drive innovations through change.

Insights-as-a-Service

In dynamic markets, insights cannot remain static. We distil the latest market data, trends, and competitor moves into monthly briefings tailored to your goals so your strategy can adapt in real-time. This proactive approach arms you with a steady stream of actionable insights to continuously evolve your strategic plans ahead of market shifts.

Our Services:

• Business Strategy

How to Do Competitor Research in Less than 30 Minutes? 

Table of contents.

Time is precious in a marketer’s life, and traditional competitor analysis can be time-consuming. Lucky us, AI tools have transformed this process, providing quick and accurate insights.

For example, using Brand Assistant (inside the Brand24 tool), I analyzed Spotify’s market position. The data showed that Spotify had a reach of 7.3 billion, much higher than Tidal’s 628.5 million. It also showed that Tidal has 10% negative sentiment, while Spotify has only 3%. It turned out that Tidal is somehow linked with completely irrelevant topics!

This AI analysis offers Tidal insights to fine-tune its presence in these places. That’s just one aspect of competitor research and it offers so much more!

Let’s dive deeper, shall we?

Competitor research is the process of identifying and analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to improve your own business strategies. It helps you understand market trends, spot opportunities, and stay ahead of the competition. This is done by gathering data through tools, surveys, and direct comparisons. 

Table of contents:

What is competitor research? Definition

Purposes of competitor research.

• Step 1: Ask AI tools

Step 2: Ask the target audience

Step 3: benchmark with competitor, challenges in competitor research.

Competitors’ research involves identifying their strengths and weaknesses, evaluating their products or services to understand the market, and finding ways to set your business apart.

Analyzing the products and services of your main competitors can provide valuable insights into the target market and industry trends.

Conduct competitor research!

Conducting a competitive analysis holds great potential for improving your own insights.

When I was a teenager, I loved crafts and made many of them. However, I needed money to buy materials. That’s when I had the fantastic idea of opening an online shop on Etsy.

I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have problems selling my work, but what I didn’t predict was that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with producing new ones.

I wondered, “How can I make this work?” and decided to take a look at other similar small businesses. I realized that most people don’t paint each pattern once but keep repeating them. That was the game-changer!

I incorporated this idea into my “business strategy” and kept doing a great job.

You may think this example is silly, and yep, I agree. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare a teenager’s little artsy shop with a REAL BIG business.

But isn’t the process similar? The benefit of a competitor analysis is clear.

Just on a different level 😉

What else can a competitive analysis give you?

Here’s a list of benefits of a competitor research:

• You gain a clear understanding of where your direct competitors excel and where they falter, allowing you to identify opportunities for improving your marketing strategy and brand awareness .
• It’s a fantastic way to learn about the latest trends, consumer preferences, and demands within your industry, helping you to stay relevant and responsive.
• It lets you identify potential threats from direct competitors early, giving you time to develop strategies to counteract them effectively.
• You can discover gaps in your competitors’ offerings.
• You can meet the needs of your own target audience better by analyzing how competitors interact with their customers (including competitors customer service and their marketing strategies).
• It enables to set benchmarks based on competitors’ performance to measure your own growth and success and ensure you maintain or exceed industry trends.
• It’s possible to recognize more efficient processes and practices used by competitors, which can streamline your own business operations and reduce costs.
• You can learn from the effective sales strategies of competitors to enhance your own sales process and increase market share.
• It allows you to understand where competitors are investing (new technologies, markets, or customer segments) to inform your own investment decisions.

So, now that you (most probably) want to do a competitive analysis – let me explain how to do it.

Get insights about your competitors!

How to do competitor research?

There are many ways to do market research, from the least efficient – manual analysis to the most effective…

Hah, got you!

Did you really think it would be just one option?

A detailed competitive analysis is a complex process. I divided it into 3 steps:

Step 1 Ask AI tools

AI still has its lovers or haters… But it undoubtedly speeds up the tasks we would do much longer. In fact, competitive analysis is one of them. The key is to ask the right questions and use advanced tools.

So, ready for a quick test?

I wanted to find information about the direct and indirect competitors to Spotify, find key competitors to Spotify and identify market gaps in the music industry.

These are the questions I asked:

• Who are Spotify’s key competitors?
• How does the music streaming market landscape look like?
• How does Spotify’s sentiment look like compared to Tidal?

Here’s what the answers of ChatGPT 4.0 look like.

• “Who are Spotify’s key competitors?”

The competitors it listed are very accurate, and include some less obvious brands – for example, I wouldn’t find Deezer, it’s a quite specific platform.

• “How does the music streaming market landscape look like?”

The second answer isn’t satisfying to me. I feel like it’s very general, while I expected some hard data in competitive analysis:

And here’s a final answer:

• “How does Spotify’s sentiment look like compared to Tidal?”

This one is quite interesting, but again – super general. Plus, it didn’t provide any actual data.

However, doing a similar competitive analysis manually would take me much longer than 5 minutes, which is exactly how much time I spent on writing these questions and getting answers.

Try Brand24’s AI features!

I like that this tool also provided links to resources so I can easily double-check the information.

This is a more detailed answer on competitive market research. I like the fact that it didn’t provide just the topics but also the specific brand that covers it.

So, as you can easily see, these well-known AI tools are mainly based on search engine data. They will not correctly answer the question of real time data or specific data-driven analysis.

That’s where Brand24’s Brand Assistant comes in handy as it combines the data from the media monitoring tool with ChatGPT “knowledge”.

Brand Assistant

This feature is super similar to the previously mentioned tools. It’s also based on a chat where you ask questions (prompts) to get the answers.

But the main difference is that Brand Assistant is based on data from monitored projects and can present conclusions, insights, and competitive analysis report that ChatGPT and Perplexity won’t. These two tools only give general conclusions and recommendations.

In terms of competitive analysis it’s a super powerful tool, but to harness its full potential – you need to set up projects also for your competitors. 

That way the tool will combine the monitoring data of your brand, your competitors and the general knowledge that ChatGPT has.

Get AI Brand Assistant!

These are the answers from the Brand Assistant:

Brand Assistant uses real-time data from monitored projects to present a comprehensive list of competitors. This ensures accuracy and relevancy, offering a more detailed and up-to-date competitive landscape.

While ChatGPT and Perplexity offer broad and general answers to this question, Brand Assistant provides specific, data-driven insights.

By combining media monitoring data with AI, Brand Assistant delivers a nuanced view of the market landscape, highlighting key players, emerging trends, and potential market gaps with greater accuracy and detail (and actual numbers!).

Brand Assistant stands out in sentiment analysis by using real-time data to compare Spotify’s sentiment with Tidal’s.

Unlike the general and often non-specific responses from ChatGPT and Perplexity, Brand Assistant offers detailed sentiment analysis based on current media monitoring data.

Plus, it even generated a chart to present this sentiment competitor analysis:

Want to test it for yourself?

Analyze your competitors using AI!

Here’s a ready-to-use list of prompts for Brand Assistant:

• How does [your brand]’s user growth compare to [competitors] in the past quarter?
• How does the public sentiment towards [your brand] compare to that of [competitors] on social media platforms?
• Has there been a noticeable shift in the number of negative mentions by [your brand] compared to [competitors] ?
• What trends are emerging in [your industry] preferences, and how are [competitors] adapting to these trends?
• Are there any significant partnerships or collaborations that [competitors] have engaged in that could influence [your brand]’s position in the market?
• What is the geographic market penetration of [your brand] versus competitors, and are there new markets that competitors are tapping into effectively?
• What is the level of brand loyalty for [your brand] users compared to those of other services, such as [competitors] ?
• How did the sentiment of [your brand] changed during the last 3 months and compare it to [competitors]?

Try Brand Assistant!

Next, it’s time to go straight to the source: your target audience.

Talking directly to the people you’re trying to reach can provide valuable insights that no AI tool can match.

Yes, it’s more time-consuming than AI analysis, but the insights you gain can be incredibly valuable and more focused on your brand.

Tips for conducting effective interviews:

• Make sure your questions are clear and directly related to the information you need.
• Combine online surveys, face-to-face interviews, and focus groups to get a well-rounded view.
• Encourage participation by offering small rewards, such as discounts or freebies.
• Look for patterns and trends in the responses to gain actionable insights.
• Avoid leading questions to ensure you get honest, unbiased feedback.

By engaging with your audience, you can uncover hidden preferences, frustrations, and needs.

This step, though time-intensive, can help tailor your strategies to better meet your audience’s expectations, setting you apart from your competitors.

The final step I’ll discuss is benchmarking the results of your competitor research with a competing brand/product/company, etc.

Why is this important, and what value does it provide?

Benchmarking against your competitors helps you understand where you stand in the market.

By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own, you can identify competitive advantage, opportunities for improvement, and areas where you already excel.

This comparison is crucial for setting realistic goals and developing strategies that leverage your own business competitive advantage.

But how to do it?

The easiest way is by using competitor analysis tools .

For example, using the Comparison tab in Brand24, you can directly compare key metrics such as:

• Social Media Reach
• Non-social Reach
• Online Presence Score
• Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE)
• UGC (user generated content)
• Share of Voice

This competitor analysis highlights where your direct competitors are performing well and where they might be falling short, giving you a clear picture of the competitive landscape.

Here’s what it looks like for Spotify and its competitors:

As you can see, Spotify is ruling the music streaming industry!

However, these stats are pretty dry. I personally love to understand the “why” behind them.

Research your competitors!

So why not ask the Brand Assistant?

Let’s find out what’s behind the negative brand mentions of Spotify and why Tidal has so many of them.

It turns out that Tidal’s problem might not be directly related to the service itself but to how the brand is associated with other negatively charged topics.

Isn’t it interesting?

I think the recommendation from Brand Assistant to monitor those mentions even though not having direct link to their service is a great tip. These are some dangerous spheres for the brand and it’s best to be aware how these conversations emerge. It can help to prevent a potential PR crisis.

Let’s now use it as a competitor analysis tool. I asked “How Spoify’s sentiment compares to Tidal’s during the last month?”

And as you can see, it did an amazing job!

Normally I’d have to spent at least an hour to compare this data (even having projects in a social listening tool for both brands).

But the Brand Assistant counted everything and gave me a clear analysis in less than 3 minutes.

Try AI Brand Assistant!

Competitive analysis is a complex process that has its limitations. However, being aware of some challenges makes it easier to overcome them.

That’s why I curated a list of potential challenges in competitor analysis:

• Data availability and accuracy Finding reliable and up-to-date data on competitors can be difficult as the publicly available information may be limited and outdated.
• Interpreting data correctly Analyzing large volumes of data requires expertise and is a crucial part of competitive analysis. Misinterpretation can lead to incorrect conclusions and marketing strategies.
• Resource intensive Conducting thorough competitor research can be time-consuming and costly. That’s why smaller businesses may lack the resources for comprehensive competitive analysis.
• Rapid market changes The market landscape can change quickly, making it hard to keep research current.
• Bias and subjectivity Personal biases can influence how data is interpreted and used.
• Access to proprietary information Some valuable competitor information is proprietary and not publicly accessible. This limits the scope of analysis and insights that can be gathered.
• Legal and ethical concerns Gathering a competitive edge must be done legally and ethically. And avoiding practices that could lead to legal issues or damage reputation is crucial.
• Changing consumer preferences Understanding and predicting shifts in competitors’ markets can be complex. Plus, competitor strategies may not always be aligned with these changes.
• Technological advancements Staying updated with technological changes that affect the industry is essential. At the same time, competitors may adopt new technologies faster, creating a gap.
• Integration of insights Effectively integrating competitor insights into your strategy can be challenging. They change really fast, and sometimes, it’s hard to even identify gaps, not to mention address them.

In today’s fast-paced marketing world, competitor analysis isn’t just important – it’s crucial for staying ahead of the game and keeping up with industry trends.

I think using AI tools is the best thing you can do. 

With their help, you can easily identify market trends, understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and uncover new opportunities for growth.

These tools provide valuable data that can help you stay ahead of the competition, fine-tune your marketing strategies, and enhance your brand’s market share.

Final thoughts:

• Competitor analysis is a crucial part of any successful business strategy. It ensures you remain aware of the target market, adapt to changes quickly, and maintain a competitive advantage.
• AI tools save time and provide much more precise insights that manual analysis cannot match. They are indispensable for modern competitor analysis.
• Tools like Brand Assistant can give you more than general recommendations. They can analyze detailed, real-time data, conduct sentiment analysis, and so much more!

Ready to transform your competitor research process? Start your free trial with Brand24 today and see the difference AI-powered insights can make!

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PETRONAS Marketing Strategy 2024: A Case Study

PETRONAS, one of the largest fuel networks in Malaysia, has emerged as a leading player in the oil and gas industry. To stay ahead in a competitive market, PETRONAS has developed an innovative marketing strategy for 2024. This case study will delve into the key elements of PETRONAS’ marketing plan, including digital marketing, branding strategy, competitive analysis, market segmentation, and customer behavior analysis.

Key Takeaways:

• PETRONAS operates over 1,000 fuel stations nationwide.
• The Kedai Mesra convenience stores within PETRONAS stations provide added convenience to customers.
• The Setel App offers on-the-go refueling and additional features for a seamless customer experience.
• PETRONAS Dagangan’s ESG practices have earned them a spot on the FTSE4Good Index Series.
• The Segar@Mesra campaign at select PETRONAS stations supports local farmers and fishermen, offering affordable produce.

Stay tuned for the upcoming sections, where we will explore PETRONAS’ digital marketing initiatives and how they leverage their branding strategy to create a compelling brand image to attract customers. Additionally, we will analyze PETRONAS’ competitive landscape and their market research efforts to understand customer behavior. Furthermore, we’ll discuss their advertising campaigns, market entry and growth strategies, limited growth and retrenchment strategies, and the importance of marketing objectives and customer behavior analysis. Finally, we’ll examine how PETRONAS measures the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and the return on investment.

We hope you find this case study insightful and gain valuable insights into the marketing strategies employed by PETRONAS, a trailblazer in the oil and gas industry.

Stay tuned for the upcoming sections where we will explore PETRONAS’ digital marketing initiatives and how they leverage their branding strategy to create a compelling brand image to attract customers. Additionally, we will analyze PETRONAS’ competitive landscape and their market research efforts to understand customer behavior. Furthermore, we’ll discuss their advertising campaigns, market entry and growth strategies, limited growth and retrenchment strategies, and the importance of marketing objectives and customer behavior analysis. Finally, we’ll examine how PETRONAS measures the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and the return on investment.

Digital Marketing in Petronas Marketing Strategy

Petronas incorporates digital marketing techniques to effectively reach its target audience. They utilize various strategies such as online advertising, social media marketing , search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing to enhance their online presence and engage with consumers.

Social media marketing plays a crucial role in Petronas’ digital marketing strategy . By leveraging platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, they can connect with their audience, share valuable content, and build a community around their brand. This approach helps Petronas establish a strong online presence and foster meaningful relationships with their customers.

Another key aspect of Petronas’ digital marketing strategy is search engine optimization. By implementing SEO techniques, Petronas aims to improve their website’s visibility on search engine results pages. This allows them to attract organic traffic from users who are actively searching for information related to their products and services. The use of relevant keywords, optimized metadata, and high-quality content helps Petronas rank higher and increase their chances of being discovered by potential customers.

Content marketing is also emphasized in Petronas’ digital marketing efforts. By creating and sharing valuable content, such as blog articles, videos, and infographics, Petronas aims to provide consumers with useful information and establish themselves as a thought leader in their industry. This not only helps in building brand loyalty but also attracts and engages a larger audience.

Petronas utilizes various digital platforms, including their website, social media channels, and mobile applications, to connect with their target audience. This omnichannel approach allows Petronas to reach consumers through different touchpoints and provide a seamless customer experience across multiple platforms.

By leveraging digital marketing strategies such as online advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and content marketing, Petronas effectively engages with their audience, establishes an online presence, and builds brand loyalty in the digital landscape.

Branding Strategy in Petronas Marketing Strategy

Petronas, one of the leading energy companies, understands the importance of a strong branding strategy in establishing its position in the market . The company utilizes various elements to create a distinctive brand identity that resonates with its target audience.

Brand Identity:

Petronas focuses on crafting a unique brand identity that reflects its values and mission. The company carefully designs its logo, typography, color palette, and visual elements to create a consistent and recognizable brand image. This cohesive visual identity helps Petronas stand out from competitors and enhances brand recall among consumers.

Brand Positioning:

Petronas strategically positions itself in the market to differentiate from other energy companies. The company emphasizes its commitment to excellence, innovation, and sustainability. By highlighting these qualities, Petronas positions itself as a reliable and forward-thinking brand, attracting customers who value these attributes.

Petronas’ extensive network of service stations and convenience stores further reinforces its brand positioning. With more than 1,000 fuel stations and approximately 900 strategically located Kedai Mesra convenience stores nationwide, Petronas ensures its presence is easily accessible to customers, contributing to increased brand visibility and recognition.

Brand Image:

Petronas strives to build a positive brand image by delivering high-quality products and services. The company’s commitment to customer satisfaction, safety, and environmental preservation showcases its responsible and trustworthy image. Through initiatives like the Setel App, which offers convenient services such as parking payment, motor insurance, and auto assistance, Petronas reinforces its dedication to customer convenience and innovative solutions.

Brand Awareness:

Petronas understands the importance of brand awareness in capturing a larger market share. The company engages in various initiatives to increase brand awareness and recognition. Collaborative campaigns, such as the Segar@Mesra campaign in partnership with government agencies, help Petronas connect with local farmers and fishermen, fostering goodwill and strengthening brand perception in local communities.

The Love Local program, which champions local brands by providing a platform for showcasing their products in Kedai Mesra convenience stores, not only supports local businesses but also exposes customers to a diverse range of products. These initiatives contribute to increased brand awareness and serve as a testament to Petronas’ commitment to supporting local communities.

Petronas’ branding strategy plays a significant role in shaping its reputation and market position. Through a strong brand identity, strategic positioning, positive brand image, and targeted brand awareness initiatives, Petronas continues to establish itself as a trusted and respected leader in the energy industry.

Competitive Analysis in Petronas Marketing Strategy

Competitive analysis is a vital component of Petronas’ marketing strategy. To maintain its position as a leader in the industry, Petronas utilizes various analysis techniques, including SWOT analysis, market analysis, industry analysis, and competitor research. These analyses provide valuable insights into the company’s competitors, market trends , and industry dynamics.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis is a powerful tool used by Petronas to evaluate its competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. By understanding their competitors’ strategies and capabilities, Petronas can determine its own competitive advantage and leverage it to stay ahead in the market.

Market Analysis

Petronas conducts thorough market analysis to understand consumer preferences, needs, and behaviors. Through surveys, focus groups, and other market research methods, Petronas identifies consumer insights and trends, allowing the company to tailor its offerings and marketing techniques accordingly.

Industry Analysis

Petronas also performs industry analysis to adapt to changing environments. By considering factors such as regulatory changes and technological advancements, Petronas stays proactive and ensures its marketing strategies align with industry trends and standards.

Competitor Research

Competitor research is an integral part of Petronas’ competitive analysis process. By closely monitoring their competitors’ activities, strategies, and performance, Petronas gains valuable insights that help shape its own marketing initiatives. This research allows Petronas to identify gaps in the market, capitalize on untapped opportunities, and position itself effectively among its competitors.

Market Research in Petronas Marketing Strategy

Market research plays a crucial role in shaping Petronas’ marketing strategy by providing valuable consumer insights, identifying market trends, and understanding customer preferences. By leveraging market segmentation, Petronas can effectively tailor its marketing efforts to reach different customer segments.

Understanding Consumer Behavior

Petronas conducts extensive statistical data analysis on an individual level, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior. This analysis helps Petronas identify customer personas such as Reward Seekers & Bargain Hunters, Travelers, Working Professionals, Automotive enthusiasts, Premium Users, and Families.

Targeted Marketing

Utilizing intelligent creatives, Petronas is able to target specific audience segments with precision. By creating personalized messaging and offers, Petronas achieves customer stickiness and enhances brand loyalty.

Market Segmentation

Through market segmentation, Petronas has identified key customer segments including Fuel, C-Store, and Setel. By understanding the unique characteristics and preferences of each segment, Petronas can develop tailored marketing strategies that resonate with their target audience.

By leveraging market research and consumer insights, Petronas is able to drive innovation, optimize marketing campaigns, and stay ahead of market trends. This data-driven approach has proven to be instrumental in Petronas’ marketing strategy, resulting in increased revenue, customer loyalty, and business growth.

Advertising Campaign in Petronas Marketing Strategy

Petronas employs a comprehensive advertising campaign to strengthen its brand presence and connect with its target audience. By leveraging a mix of traditional and digital marketing channels , Petronas aims to effectively promote its brand and engage consumers across various touchpoints.

The advertising campaign encompasses a range of strategies and tactics to achieve key objectives, including brand promotion, increased customer loyalty, and attracting new customers. By utilizing traditional marketing channels such as TV, radio, and print media, Petronas ensures that its messaging reaches a wide and diverse audience. These traditional channels remain relevant and effective in reaching consumers who prefer more traditional mediums of communication.

However, Petronas also recognizes the importance of digital marketing in today’s landscape. The company leverages various digital platforms, including social media, search engine marketing, and content marketing, to target audiences who are active online. The digital marketing approach enables Petronas to engage with consumers who rely heavily on digital channels for information and entertainment.

Through data-driven insights and behavioral analysis, Petronas identifies and targets specific customer personas to tailor its advertising campaign more effectively. These personas include reward seekers & bargain hunters, travelers, working professionals, automotive enthusiasts, premium users, and families.

One of the distinctive strategies used in Petronas’ advertising campaign is the deployment of intelligent creatives. These creatives are designed to resonate with different target audiences, such as loyalists, switchers, shoppers, and auto freaks. By delivering personalized and engaging content, Petronas aims to enhance customer engagement and reinforce its brand positioning.

The results of Petronas’ advertising campaign are measured through various metrics, including newly acquired customers, station footfall, incremental fuel volume, and marketing innovation . These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the campaign and inform future marketing strategies.

To illustrate the impact of its advertising efforts, Petronas has released the drama series “366.” This series showcases the resilience, fortitude, and togetherness of Malaysians during challenging times. The first episode, “Day 32,” released on Chinese New Year, has already garnered over four million views on YouTube, highlighting the power of storytelling in capturing viewers’ interest and creating a lasting impact.

Anita Azrina Abdul Aziz, senior general manager at Petronas, emphasizes the company’s commitment to creating value and employing judicious advertising strategies that align with the evolving media landscape. Petronas intends to focus on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube for the drama series while considering expansion into other platforms based on audience trends, including TikTok and Instagram.

Despite facing challenges such as shortened production time due to the early Chinese New Year and pandemic uncertainties, Petronas and Ensemble strive to deliver an authentic and memorable experience for viewers. This commitment to quality aligns with Petronas’ broader branding efforts, including previous series like “Land of Light Bulbs” in India, which showcase partnerships and goodwill to strengthen the company’s long-term brand identity.

Ultimately, Petronas remains agile and adaptive in its marketing and communication plans, adjusting strategies to accommodate the impact of the pandemic. The company focuses on engaging with customers, challenging the status quo, and exploring new avenues for growth. Through its innovative advertising campaigns, Petronas continues to elevate its brand and connect meaningfully with consumers.

Market Entry and Growth Strategies for PETRONAS

PETRONAS, a leading player in the oil and gas industry, has been exploring market entry strategies to expand its presence in different sectors and geographical regions. With the aim of achieving substantive growth and overcoming limited growth, the company has adopted innovative strategies to navigate the ever-evolving market dynamics.

When considering market entry, PETRONAS takes into account various factors such as the long-run profit potential, economic and political conditions of foreign markets, market size, and the purchasing power of demanding consumers. By carefully evaluating these aspects, the company can identify lucrative opportunities and make informed decisions regarding its entry into new markets.

The timing of market entry is crucial for PETRONAS, as being an early mover can provide significant advantages. By establishing a presence early on, the company can prevent competitors from gaining a foothold and build strong brand recognition. This enables PETRONAS to develop a loyal customer base and secure a competitive advantage in the market.

Exporting, as a mode of entry, is considered a cost-effective strategy for PETRONAS compared to other methods. It allows the company to understand the culture and consumer demands of the host country while reducing risks associated with setting up local operations. PETRONAS has leveraged its expertise in crude oil production and has exported significant quantities to various Asian markets, especially countries like Singapore, Australia, India, and Thailand.

Another mode of entry adopted by PETRONAS is licensing. This involves leasing the rights to its technology to manufacturers in foreign countries. Licensing offers advantages such as low initial investment for the licensor and the opportunity to explore foreign markets with less effort. By licensing its technology, PETRONAS can expand its reach and penetrate markets where establishing its own operations might be challenging.

With a strong foothold in the oil and gas industry, PETRONAS has made substantial investments in various oil and gas projects globally. These investments, particularly in the Americas and Europe, have allowed the company to diversify its portfolio and explore new growth opportunities. By expanding its presence in different regions, PETRONAS can tap into different markets and leverage its expertise to drive growth.

It is worth noting that PETRONAS has been responsive to market conditions and trends. For instance, in light of the declining liquid fuels production and the oversupply in the LNG market, the company has taken proactive measures to cut its crude oil production and adapt its business strategies. This adaptability ensures that PETRONAS remains agile and resilient in the face of changing market dynamics.

Limited Growth and Retrenchment Strategies for PETRONAS

PETRONAS, a leading company in the strategic management industry, understands the importance of adopting effective strategies to navigate through dynamic business environments. In certain situations, limited growth and retrenchment strategies can be invaluable tools for companies facing financial constraints or seeking to optimize their operations.

Limited growth strategies involve a careful evaluation of resources and market conditions to strike a balance between incremental expansion and mitigating risks. These strategies allow companies like PETRONAS to maintain a stable market position and focus on core competencies while adapting to changing industry dynamics.

Partnerships and Product Diversification

In the pursuit of limited growth, PETRONAS can explore strategic partnerships with other industry players. Collaborating with like-minded organizations can bring together complementary strengths, shared resources, and expertise, enabling both parties to achieve synergistic growth. Additionally, alliances and joint ventures can provide the opportunity to access new markets and customer segments.

Furthermore, product diversification can be a strategic initiative that PETRONAS can consider within the limited growth framework. By expanding its product offerings to cater to evolving customer demands and market trends, PETRONAS can leverage its brand reputation and capitalize on new business opportunities.

Retrenchment and Core Focus

Retrenchment strategies involve a deliberate reduction of costs and restructuring of operations to improve efficiency and optimize resource allocation. In the face of financial constraints or underperforming business segments, PETRONAS can implement retrenchment strategies to streamline its operations and refocus on its core competencies.

This approach allows PETRONAS to eliminate redundant activities, consolidate operations, and redirect resources towards areas that have the potential for higher profitability. By retrenching and refocusing on key business areas, PETRONAS can strengthen its competitive position and ensure long-term sustainability.

Overall, limited growth and retrenchment strategies provide valuable options for companies like PETRONAS to navigate through challenging business environments. These strategic approaches enable organizations to adapt to changing market landscapes, optimize resources, and position themselves for long-term success.

Next, we will explore the importance of marketing objectives and customer behavior analysis in effective strategic planning.

The Importance of Marketing Objectives and Customer Behavior Analysis

Marketing objectives play a crucial role in guiding Petronas’ marketing strategy and helping the company achieve its goals. By setting clear objectives, Petronas can align its efforts and resources towards specific targets, ensuring a focused and effective marketing approach.

One key component of Petronas’ marketing strategy is customer behavior analysis. Understanding the behavior of their target audience is essential for Petronas to develop tailored marketing strategies that resonate with their customers and meet their needs and preferences.

Through customer behavior analysis, Petronas can gain insights into how their target audience interacts with their products and brand. This analysis involves studying factors such as consumer preferences, buying habits, and cultural values.

By examining customer behavior, Petronas can make informed decisions regarding product development and messaging. They can identify trends and opportunities in the market, allowing them to capitalize on these insights to increase market share and revenue.

Additionally, customer behavior analysis helps Petronas better understand their competitors. By conducting competitor analysis through market research, Petronas can gain insights into their competitors’ movements, market positioning, and unique market niches. This knowledge enables them to develop differentiated marketing strategies and carve out their own space in the market.

With Malaysia’s cultural diversity influencing consumer preferences and behaviors, market research becomes even more crucial for Petronas. By conducting comprehensive market research, Petronas can tailor their marketing strategies to resonate with the local culture, values, and preferences of the target audience.

It is important to note that market research in Malaysia differs from mature markets in terms of the development stage, data accessibility, reliability, regulatory environment, and market competition. This makes strategic planning and in-depth market research even more essential for Petronas to make informed investment decisions and craft effective market entry strategies.

Ultimately, marketing objectives and customer behavior analysis give Petronas the insights and direction they need to develop effective marketing campaigns, resonate with their target audience, and achieve their business goals.

Measuring Marketing Campaign Effectiveness and ROI

To gauge the success of marketing campaigns, Petronas employs a data-driven approach that involves evaluating performance metrics and conducting thorough data analysis. By tracking key indicators, Petronas measures the effectiveness of their campaigns and calculates the return on investment (ROI). This strategy allows them to make informed decisions and improve future campaigns, maximizing their marketing campaign effectiveness and ROI.

Setting clear goals and objectives before launching a campaign is crucial. According to research, doing so can lead to a 25% increase in performance metrics. Petronas carefully defines their objectives, ensuring they align with their overall marketing strategy and business goals.

Data-driven optimization plays a significant role in enhancing marketing campaign effectiveness. Through data analysis, Petronas gains valuable insights into audience behavior, preferences, and trends. This enables them to refine their strategies, creative messaging, and targeting to improve campaign performance. In fact, data-driven optimization can improve campaign effectiveness by an average of 30%.

Targeting the right channels is another key aspect of measuring campaign effectiveness and ROI. Research shows that selecting the most appropriate channels can increase campaign ROI by up to 20%. Petronas leverages their knowledge of their target audience and market to select the channels that will reach their desired audience most effectively.

Once campaigns are executed, Petronas emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and analysis. Constantly assessing performance metrics and analyzing data allows them to identify areas for improvement and make real-time adjustments. This iterative process helps Petronas maximize their marketing campaign effectiveness and ROI.

Example: Measuring Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

To illustrate how Petronas measures marketing campaign effectiveness and ROI, let’s consider a recent campaign they launched. The campaign aimed to raise awareness of their latest sustainable energy initiative and drive customer engagement.

Petronas started by setting clear goals and performance metrics for the campaign. These included measuring website traffic, social media engagement, and the number of inquiries generated. By defining these objectives in advance, Petronas could effectively evaluate the campaign’s success.

To track performance, Petronas implemented robust analytics tools to collect relevant data. They monitored website traffic, analyzing user behavior and engagement metrics. Social media analytics provided insights into community engagement and sentiment. Additionally, they closely monitored the number of inquiries received through various channels.

With access to data, Petronas conducted comprehensive analysis. They evaluated the performance metrics against their goals and identified areas of success and areas for improvement. This analysis allowed them to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies accordingly.

Based on the data analysis, Petronas made campaign adjustments in real-time. They refined their messaging to better resonate with their target audience, leveraged high-performing channels, and optimized their ad spend allocation. By continuously monitoring performance and making data-driven optimizations, Petronas ensured their marketing campaign effectiveness was maximized.

The results of Petronas’ analysis showed a significant increase in website traffic, social media engagement, and inquiries generated compared to previous campaigns. This success highlighted the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and demonstrated a positive ROI.

In conclusion, PETRONAS’ marketing strategy offers a compelling case study in effective marketing approach, branding, and digital tactics. Despite the challenging economic conditions, PETRONAS has shown resilience and adaptability in its strategies.

Their focus on market research, competitive analysis, and customer outreach has enabled them to maintain a strong presence in the energy sector and expand their business interests in 35 countries worldwide.

While facing some obstacles in the Chinese market, PETRONAS has learned valuable lessons and is recommended to adopt a more aggressive marketing approach, including forming wholly-owned subsidiaries to enhance competitiveness and expand horizontally.

As PETRONAS continues to operate internationally, connecting with diverse markets and investing in social and environmental initiatives, it remains an industry leader, driven by a functional organizational structure and a dedicated workforce that spans 38 nationalities.

What is Petronas’ marketing strategy for 2024?

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Nina Sheridan is a seasoned author at Latterly.org, a blog renowned for its insightful exploration of the increasingly interconnected worlds of business, technology, and lifestyle. With a keen eye for the dynamic interplay between these sectors, Nina brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to her writing. Her expertise lies in dissecting complex topics and presenting them in an accessible, engaging manner that resonates with a diverse audience.

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