Let’s face it; today’s competitive landscape is fierce. Every aspect of a business is getting harder, and the costs associated with keeping ahead of the competition isn’t going down any time soon.
Yet despite the challenges that await you in the digital market, focusing on data-driven and creative ways to carve out a competitive edge can help propel your business to the finish line faster and more efficiently than the rest.
This brief overview will provide you with the broad strokes of how you can go about identifying and capitalizing on this edge.
Analyzing the Competition
To achieve a competitive edge, you must first gain a broad and deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.
Step one is, in fact, a fact-finding mission to identify the following:
- Their core service and/or product offerings Their USP (unique selling proposition)
- Their Value proposition
- Their Mission statement
- Their marketing channels
Keep in mind that this is a quick step and not yet an in-depth analysis of the aforementioned. The overall objective at this stage is to identify how your offerings address the needs/wants/concerns of your target market more effectively than those of the competition.
You may find that in some areas you lack where they excel. This is ok, and is worth noting when uncovered, as an area of opportunity for further exploration later on.
Uncover Strategies to get a Competitive Edge
For example, if your overall objective is an increase in growth, sales and market share, your focus should be on uncovering the marketing and sales strategies of your competition, and then evaluating which strategies appear to be effective.
Bear in mind that not all the data you need to make a scientific conclusion will be available to you (short of corporate espionage…which we neither recommend nor condone), but through the use of ingenuity and third-party tools and technology such as those available at Competitors App, you can track and uncover your competition’s every public move.
During this stage, one of the best ways to uncover these strategies is to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer or target market. Ask yourself, what would someone looking to purchase these types of products or services do to make an informed purchase decision.
From there, you’ll want to research:
- Google (and possibly other search engines)
- PPC, Display and social adverts
- Content marketing and distribution channels
- Email campaigns, newsletters, etc.
- Re-targeting pixels
- And any other marketing channel that may come up
Data & Analysis of your competition
Data and information collected in the step mentioned above can be used to analyze what seems to be effective versus what is not. Perhaps you found that the competition launched a native display campaign for six months, resulting in what appears to be a NET loss. Conversely, you may find that a strong SEO push has increased their rankings and traffic significantly over the last year.
Implementation
Based on the outcome of your analysis, you should have identified strategic insights into how your efforts, campaigns, and other initiatives stack up to the competition. This information can be used to make intelligent, data-driven decisions that can help propel your company ahead of the competition and give your brand the competitive edge it needs to thrive in today’s market.
We hope you found this brief introduction into competitive analysis and gaining a “leg up” on the competition useful. If you would like to learn more about how we can help provide the insight and data you need to get ahead, don’t hesitate to reach out.
