We all know the benefits of a good market study and research into what our competition is doing. With the advent of digital marketing and Big Data, you now have a ton of good tools to analyze your competition. That's what this post is about: a guide with the basic steps to analyze your competition and 50 tools that will make your job easier.
tools to analyze competitionSteps and tools to analyze your competition and your market
Step 1: Determine who your competitors are
It may seem obvious to you, but the starting point is to analyze who you compete with and why . Large companies have a perfect grasp of this point, but entrepreneurs and small businesses sometimes overlook this point that they should consider from the creation of their business plans.
We are not going to go into a deep analysis of the competition because that alone would take up an entire article. So we are going to focus on two main groups of competitors:
Direct competitors : These are those who target the same market as you minnesota email list possibly sell the same service or product . This is the case of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Cannon and Nikon, Nike and Adidas, Burger King and McDonald's and so on, a very long list of examples so compelling that you will know what I mean. This is also called "first-degree competition"; they offer the same solutions to identical problems and use the same distribution channels .
Indirect competitors : They are in the same sector , they target the same public, but their services/products do not offer exactly the same thing . They use the same distribution channels and have other aspects in common. This is more difficult to appreciate because it is more subtle and involves the degree of substitutability. This “ second-degree competition ” would occur between Coca-Cola and 7-up, for example.
There is a third level, and we could go on and on about this, but we'll stop here. The most important thing is to clearly define who you are dealing with and why, and at what point your brand objectives and the solutions you provide intersect with theirs.
If you still have doubts and don't know very well how to determine who your competitors are at any scale, here are some tips to help you determine it:
Analyze the range of products or services they offer.
The size of the company, how many employees it has.
What is its geographic scope? Is it an international, regional or local company?
What is your pricing strategy?
It's an ecommerce, does it sell physically, both?
What is the typology of your ideal client?
How old is your brand, is it a leader in its market?
What advertising techniques do you use?
Which suppliers do you work with?
The list is long, but all of these variables can give you a measure of how similar a business is to yours. If you have identified that they are your competitors, you will also know to what degree they are.