Analyze Your Competition
If there's a market for your offering, or interest in your subject matter, chances are there's also competition. (But don't get discouraged. A little healthy competition never hurts. And if there's no competition, there's likely a small market.)
Once you establish your brand, you need to assess your competition before you spend a cent marketing your name. By understanding your competition—what they offer, how they offer it, and how it differs from your offering—you'll have a better chance of distinguishing your offering in your prospects' minds.
Review Your Competitors
In other words, it's all about positioning, which you can't do until you know what you're up against. So follow these steps to analyze your competitors:
- Define your customers: If you want to analyze your competition, you should have already have defined your target market. If not, do it now. You need to know your target market's geographic area (local, provincial, national, international, global), demographic details (age, sex, income level, and so forth), motivations, and anything else that will help you find competitors trying to reach them with a similar offering.
- Identify your main competitors: Now that you know your target market, here's a question: If your offering didn't exist, how would your target market meet its needs? The answer will help you identify your competitors. When marketing online, you can usually simplify the process by entering your target keywords into a search engine and reviewing the top results and search marketing ads. It's not the most comprehensive review—some competitors with poorer search ranking may still be important, particularly if your market is more local—but it's an easy and effective way to start.
- Determine your level of detail: Once you identify your main competitors, you'll need to determine what you want to know about them. This will depend somewhat on your offering. For example, if both you and your competitors are selling a service, you'll want a sense of their expertise—what clients they've worked for, how long they've been at it and what relevant credentials they might have. Ask what kind of information you require, how it will inform your marketing and positioning, and how much time and money you can invest in your analysis.
- Compare offerings: Once you know what you want to know, you can start making comparisons. Create a spreadsheet with each item you want to compare in the left column and competitors' names along the top row. Now review each competitor's performance against each item and take notes. There are many questions you should be asking. How does your product or service compare to your competitors'? What are they offering that you aren't? What are you offering that they aren't? How are they meeting—and failing to meet—customers' emotional needs? What are their perceived benefits and strengths? How do their prices compare to yours? What keywords are they targeting? How well is their website performing? What works—and doesn't work—well about their site? You can get much of this information from your competitors' sites themselves. You can also learn a lot by entering their URLs into analytical engines like Alexa.com.
Apply What You Learn
Now that you've analyzed the competition and collected reams of data, what do you do with it?
You want to use the information to understand, define and solidify your place in the market.
To understand your place, be sure to collate your data in a logical and organized way. Visualize it in charts that tell you, at a glance, how you relate to the competition.
To define your place, look for openings. In short, what not to do. For instance, if your main competitor has twice your experience and twice your credentials, you might not want to play those cards in your own marketing. Instead you could differentiate yourself by focusing on your "fresh perspective" and "unconventional approach." This will help you create your unique selling proposition.
To solidify your place, learn a few tricks from your competitors. Let's say, for instance, that your business sells herbal supplements online. You've refined your brand and devised an effective list of keywords, but you realize as you read your competitors ads that they're targeting words you haven't even considered—phrases like "vegan supplements" or "alternative lifestyle" that give them access to an entire demographic you may have missed. Use this information to improve your own marketing.
How Much Effort Should You Invest?
A competitive analysis can be as detailed as you want it to be.
The average MBA spends about 12 hours of course work learning how to map a detailed comparison, complete with cool-looking pie charts. But depending on your offering, you likely won't need that kind of detail.
Start by simply looking at your competitors' sites and ads to sort out their offering and assess their target audience. Then use that information to either mirror their tactics (with minor tweaks, of course) or differentiate your offering, depending on what best serves your bottom line.
And remember: This isn't something you do just once. You need to schedule regular reviews, because your market and competitors constantly change. You need to adapt accordingly—or get left behind.
What's Next?
Now that you've considered your competition, it's time to identify your partners.
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