When you work in a team, you have to present your findings at some point, especially when conducting a competitive analysis.
A report is a straightforward way to compile and present data to your colleagues and superiors so you can formulate your next steps or understand your competitor landscape better.
A competitor analysis report provides valuable insights into the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of businesses in your industry.
More importantly, it forces you down a path of organized and structured competitor analysis – an incredibly smart way to know your blindspots, understand where you are currently, and more.
Further, it helps you make informed decisions, refine your marketing or branding strategies, and capture market opportunities.
In this article, we’ll take you through the steps to making a competitive analysis report, the sources of information to find, and the metrics to track when conducting your analysis.
What is a competitive analysis report?
A competitive analysis report is a document that evaluates your competitors' business strategies, market positioning, strengths, and weaknesses. You can use a competitor analysis report to uncover opportunities you might be missing out on.
Understand how your competitors operate, identify industry trends, and find new audiences with a well-prepared competitor analysis report.
By analyzing competitors, thanks to comprehensive competitor analysis reports, you can:
- Get inspired
- Learn fast
- Benchmark your own performance against your competitors
- Identify opportunities in the market
- Develop strategies to differentiate your business
- Sometimes, you’ll also learn what not to do while tracking competitors
At Panoramata, we live and breathe competitive analytics reports and we think you’ll benefit from these too.
Creating a Competitor Analysis Report: Steps and Tips
Creating an effective competitor analysis report involves systematic steps. Most of the effort goes into legwork, but it is easily achieved thanks to the information and tools available for you today:
Define your objectives
For competitor analysis, your objectives could vary. Depending on your objectives, what you emphasize while creating a competitor analysis report will also change correspondingly but the approach is similar.
Some of your objectives could include:
- Identifying all of the marketing strategies your competitors use
- Drill down on specific digital marketing channels (such as ads, email marketing, or content strategy) and learn from your competitors
- Identify new market opportunities: Are your competitors targeting new audiences, new geographic locations, etc.?
- Understand pricing strategies: What do they sell? What’s the average ticket size of their products?
- Brand and Positioning: You are selling similar products but is their branding stronger than yours? Are your competitors positioning products differently?
Segment your competitors
Then, take some time out to segment your competitors into:
- Direct competitors: Businesses targeting the same audience with similar products.
- Indirect competitors: Businesses solving the same problem with different products.
Panoramata has a “lists” feature that you can easily use to add competitors and track several different aspects of their marketing, branding, marketing assets, campaigns, and more.
Stay focused
Here’s something crucial (and we see several businesses drifting into Alice’s Wonderland). Starting with the objective defined above, only focus on data gathering that is relevant to your purpose.
A minute here and an hour there – looking for unimportant things – is time lost.
Allow us to explain (and we’ll take digital marketing strategies as an example):
If you are doing a competitor analysis report to learn marketing strategies your competitors use, stick to marketing strategies.
You don’t need to focus on the latest investor funding rounds, the flutter of activity around hiring, the number of employees, and so on.
Creating competitor analysis reports is a one-time task (it still needs updating and monitoring though) that pays off beautifully in the long run.
Choose your tools
With that out of the way, use a mix of primary and secondary sources and tools:
- Primary (public) data: Websites, social media profiles, reviews.
- Use tools like Panoramata, Semrush, Similarweb, or SpyFu to get the precise information you seek (e.g. SEO strategy, content strategy, social media presence, ads, email campaigns, offers, discounts, and other campaigns).
For the most part (unless you are looking for a major pivot, new product launches, and so on), don’t worry about time-consuming activities such as customer surveys, interviews, and first-hand research.
Start tracking and analyzing
Evaluate competitors in key areas such as:
- Web Properties: Websites, landing pages, start pages on social, interstitials, and others.
- Digital Marketing Channels: Blogs, SEO profiles, email marketing campaigns, advertisements on paid traffic networks, social media, and more.
- Branding: logos, colors, brand voice, and more.
- Market Positioning: The unique selling proposition (USP) of each competitor.
- Products/Services: Features, pricing, and differentiation.
- Customer Feedback: Reviews and testimonials highlighting strengths and weaknesses. Find these on forums, social media networks, Reddit, Quora, and others (if available). Also, look up Google and other reviews.
Here are the metrics and benchmarks you can track and compile when creating a competitor analysis report:
- Website traffic and engagement.
- Social media followers and activity.
- Revenue estimates (if publicly available).
- Product pricing and positioning.
Competitor analysis: a long-term view
Creating competitor analysis reports is a one-time task (it still needs updating and monitoring though) that pays off beautifully in the long run.
Knowing your competitors, understanding their marketing efforts, and staying updated on their campaigns helps you stay ahead of the game and avoid slow starts, false starts, or not starting at all.
Want to stay ahead of your competition?
Start building lists of your competitors and get immediate access to competitor profiles, ad campaigns, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, marketing tools used, and much more with Panoramata.
FAQs
1. How to make a competitor analysis report?
Start by identifying your key competitors and gathering data on their products, marketing strategies, and performance. Organize the insights into sections like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to present actionable findings.
2. What are the 5 parts of a competitive analysis?
The five key parts include identifying competitors, analyzing their products or services, reviewing marketing strategies, assessing strengths and weaknesses, and pinpointing opportunities for your business. This structure ensures a clear and thorough understanding of the competitive landscape.
3. How do you build competitive analysis?
Use tools like Panoramata, Similarweb, or Google Trends to collect data on competitors' performance, ads, and content. Then, analyze the findings to highlight gaps, opportunities, and areas where your business can outperform competitors.
