You know the saying, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Perhaps no other statement can be more reflective of the need for a strategic competitive analysis from a market research company.
Competitive intelligence or CI is a growing need among companies and brands to help organizations understand how they compare on key components such as websites, service offerings, pricing, marketing approaches, and social media.
All of this can be answered as part of a competitive analysis market research study.
Keep your customers close and your competitors closer. Learn how to utilize a competitive analysis market research company to win market share.
3 Benefits of Competitive Analysis Market Research
1. Keeping a pulse on your competition.
Many of our clients who utilize our competitive analysis market research firm do so regularly. This allows them to keep the pulse on their critical competitors and keep tabs on how changes are made with products, services, prices, and other forms of marketing.
This competitive intelligence (CI) allows them to better anticipate and react to competitive threats more quickly rather than hearing the new information passed down weeks or even months later.
2. Understand differentiators.
The old textbook term of unique selling proposition (USP) applies here.
What do you offer in terms of products or services your competition does not?
When someone calls your organization to do business, what can you offer than your competitors cannot?
A product or service audit takes a full inventory of products and services offered by your competitors to provide you with the specific areas where you can differentiate your portfolio (i.e., “Here is a service we offer than none of our key competitors do.”)
3. What’s in a message?
Competitive analysis on competitive brands will tell you a lot about the story they are trying to sell to your customers. Whether it is high quality, low cost, great customer service, or high-tech capabilities, the messaging from one competitor to another can vary greatly.
Knowing how each of your competitors’ markets itself can help you better react to and get more tactical in your sales approach.
If you know Competitor ABC focuses on high-quality products in its sales outreach and marketing, you can then train your sales team to educate prospects on your quality control and audit process to showcase how your quality is actually better than competitors such as Competitor ABC.
4 Components of Competitive Analysis Market Research
1. Website Audit
As part of the website audit, Drive Research reviews your competitors’ websites to help your organization understand how they compare. The website audit analyzes key behind-the-scenes SEO structure such as page titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, H2 tags, and page load times.
As part of the competitive analysis for the website audit, the team also reviews each site for best-practice user experience (UX) principles to examine how your site compares in terms of navigation and usability.
2. Product or Service Audit
The service audit portion of the competitive analysis market research completed by our company profiles the product or service offerings of your competition.
This analyzes the suite of services offered by you and your competition to identify gaps (products or services offered by your competition but not by you) or differentiators (products or serviced offered by you but not your competition).
This is compiled into a matrix to help you visually understand where those gaps and differentiators exist based on each product or service.
3. Rate and Pricing Audit
This could be the most useful competitive of the competitive analysis of market research. Our team takes a deep dive into the pricing of the products and services offered by your competition and logs these into a spreadsheet.
This helps you understand the pricing of each product or service and becomes more valuable if this is done periodically (every 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, etc.) Through this pricing trending, you can analyze how your competition fluctuates their prices for specific products or services, and how you compare.
These prices are pulled from e-commerce sites or the website. If this information is not attainable online, Drive Research can scope out additional hours to mystery shop competitors for pricing via phone or email.
4. Marketing Audit
The marketing audit reviews all of the marketing messaging and outreach being used by your competitors. This might include items such as sales collateral, social media advertisements, whitepapers, blogs, presentations, webinars, etc.
The competitive analysis market research company logs all of the marketing activities into a matrix and attaches all marketing files to the project folder for your review. After reviewing all of the different types of marketing, Drive Research outlines the key messages and brand values the competitors consistently use in the outreach to generate sales.
The marketing audit also reviews social media platforms your competitors use and logs which has a presence on including type(s) of content shared and frequency.
This could include an inventory of platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and others. The social media portion of the competitive analysis will also review any ads being run on platforms.
Why you should use a third-party for your competitive analysis market research?
Researching, logging, and inventorying all of this information can take a lot of time for an organization. It involves many hours of visiting competitor websites and including the information into a template that can be easily understood and repurposed with the sales team and management.
A third-party expert typically has a systematic process to make the data collection period more efficient.
No one will argue competitive research is extremely valuable. But what often happens is it gets pushed to the back-burner at an organization because it is time-consuming.
So, while you are tackling your other priorities at your organization, let a competitive analysis market research firm work in tandem with you to collect this information.
Contact Our Competitive Analysis Market Research Company
Need help analyzing your competition using market research. Lean on Drive Research to review your competition and give you a portfolio of information including service offerings, rates, marketing messaging and much more.
Need a proposal for competitive analysis or want a quick quote? Contact us through email, phone, or text below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040