Competitive Analysis

What is competitive analysis?

As the name states, competitive analysis is simply analyzing your competitors in order to better your own company.

Advantages of competitive analysis

Just as we mentioned above, this information and data is being gathered so that you can use it for your own advantages. Knowing the weaknesses of your competitors (something like bad customer service) can help you attract frustrated customers in the future.

But more than that, there are plenty of reasons why you should be doing frequent competitive analysis:

• Get benchmarks to help you measure your own success and growth.

• Improve your brand by capitalizing on their weaknesses and building on their strengths.

• Discover new market areas that aren’t covered by any competitors.

There are loads of reasons any business should be doing a competitive analysis. Perhaps the best reason of all is to simply know what you’re up against.

Who uses competitive analysis?

Truthfully, all businesses should be conducting competitive analyses. As long as you have competition, you have a use for competitive analysis.

Competitive analysis example

Depending on the industry, a competitive analysis can be very different. For this example, we’re going to use a generic SaaS. There are a few things that you could easily track in order to have the upper hand:

• Site loading speed

Loading speed is incredibly important. Customers sometimes won’t tolerate even the slightest hiccup.

• Website traffic

Understanding how many people visit their main site each day is incredibly valuable.

• Traffic sources

Where is this traffic coming from? What works well for them might very well work for you, too.

There are a number of simple metrics you can track through the competitive analysis that will give you very useful data.