4 Benefits of Conducting Market Research on Your Competitors
“Learn why conducting market research on your competitors is essential for any successful business. Benefits include gaining insights into their strategies, identifying market gaps, staying ahead of industry trends, and improving your own business decisions. Competitive analysis helps you make informed decisions to grow and stay competitive in your industry.“
What is Competitor Analysis?
A competitor analysis is like a treasure hunt, except you’re trying to find out more about your competitors – activities such as market share, business intelligence, where they have offices, what exactly their product range consists of etc. are all pieces of information you can use to try and uncover their weaknesses and strengths which help you compare your company’s performance against theirs.
Conducting a competitive analysis, is like writing a book report. On the first day of school your teacher might tell you to choose any story in the class library and summarize it in an essay. As you write, you’ll learn what’s required so that on subsequent days when your teacher asks you to write another essay, you will be able to repeat the process more efficiently. Conducting a competitive analysis is no different from writing that Grade 5 book report – introducing your audience with whom you’re competing; discussing how or why your company should be considered instead of them (and highlighting the strengths of your argument); and concluding with a call-to-action for prospects seeking work in this area.
Benefits of Conducting Competitor Analysis
It’s important that you are well informed about your competitors. Conducting a competitive analysis allows you to uncover information such as what your competition is doing well, what could be improved upon and where improvements may come from. This can help you make decisions about how you can improve your products to better satisfy consumers’ needs. Understanding more about the competition is also useful because it gives us insight into how we can help them better meet customers’ demands themselves. For example, if through our competitive analysis we find out that there’s not enough information on [competitor name]’s website, we could help them think of ways they could add this to their site or create specific content filled with tips for using their products in an informative way
1. Enhancing your messaging
There’s one crucial question to ask yourself when you’re launching a brand-new business venture: Why should people choose your business over any other competitors? It’s essential that you find and understand what unique selling point(s) (USPs) determine your company from others. You aren’t just selling products and services anymore- now, you’re selling benefits, value, and positive experiences! As an entrepreneur, there are many opportunities to stand out between analysing mission statements, researching partnerships, and reviewing product descriptions.
2. Positively using negative customer feedbacks
Competitor market research will be diligent in creating a meticulous profile on how to best defeat their competition. A well-written competitor market research’s report claims that 89% of customers are looking for better service and above average products!
Competitive analysis is a powerful way of seeking out a company’s rivals’ weaknesses, providing you with the chance to promote your own company in their place! If you find that the competitor is weak in an area that your brand also offers and happens to be active in, then why not try and focus on this aspect of how you can help your visitors succeed? After all, competition like this shouldn’t go to waste!
3. Establishing a Brand Benchmark
It is important to remember that when it comes to scaling up any given project people have so many tools in their pockets nowadays – apps and smartphones, just to name a few. Once you know what your customers’ habits its plain sailing is from here on out. But how do you make sure that one can keep an eye on all the developments in the industry? There’s no magic pill for that, but we’ve found that competitive analyses can be truly beneficial – not only in terms of investments with ROI being measured over time, but also because they allow one to analyse data concerning customer behaviour and preferences towards other companies (who seem to be doing a better job at meeting those expectations than one does).
4. Uncovering Product Improvement or Development
If there’s one thing, we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that customers’ needs change drastically and quickly. The one way to understand what your next steps are as a business is to read through your own and other businesses’ customer reviews. Seeing how another party responds to customer feedback not only helps you understand what direction your business should take next in terms of product development, but it can also help you rest easy knowing that you’re competing fairly.
The Top 3 Mistakes to Avoid
When conducting competitor analysis, analyse how the competition conducts their marketing. Most businesses do not actively focus on customer experience, yet customer experience is key to business success. What does your top competitor do that you don’t? What could your company improve upon from a customer’s perspective? Are your products and services easily accessible unlike that of the competition? Remember always to ensure you are considering what’s best for the customer when conducting competitive analysis, because at the end of the day its they who will keep you in business by contributing more profits than money spent attracting them.
Update your insights
One mistake that businesses tend to make is that they forget to or blatantly don’t revisit their original insights. This is detrimental as companies are always evolving. Competitive analyses are ongoing, and not reviewing your original insights can negatively affect your data.
Use your data
Competitive analyses are time-consuming. If you’re taking the time to complete one, you must be sure to use the data to your benefit. When you have the findings, develop a strategic plan and execute the unique angles you’ve discovered during the process, whether through marketing or product development.
Have a plan
It’s essential to set your objective when putting together an analysis. Otherwise, the undertaking will be much harder, and you’ll create more work than you need to. Define your goal and decide what you want to learn about your competition before beginning research.
We hope you enjoyed our article about benefits of conducting market research on your competitors. With this knowledge, we know that you can find ways to better your business and help you branch out in areas to make the most of your company’s resources. So, what are you waiting for? Get started with your own competitor research today by visiting www.philomathresearch.com