It has been a known fact since time immemorial that businesses, regardless of what sector they're in (B2C or B2B), compete with each other to succeed in their chosen path.
With the competition getting fiercer, it can be daunting to find your sweet spot in the market. And if you do, it can be equally challenging to maintain that competitiveness.
In this blog, we'll discover why it is important to identify your competitors, the products & services they offer, their pricing strategies, as well as their content mix - to discover what market gaps to fill and leverage on your competitive advantage.
Grab a pen & paper, and enjoy learning while making your way toward success!
Identify your competitors
To beat your competitors, you have to know them first – and know them well.
There goes a famous quote from Sun Tzu who was a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer - “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
Take this as a smart starting point when doing a competitive analysis.
Let's learn first the types of competitors so you can fully identify who should be on your radar.
Types of Competitors
Direct Competitors
Who comes to your mind first when you think about the competition? They might be your direct competitors. Direct competitors are the brands and companies that offer the same products and services and target the same audience as yours. For example: If you're a brand selling adult food supplements for gut health, then your direct competitors are the supplement brands also offering gut health solutions to adults.
Indirect Competitors
These are trickier to spot but are still worth tracking. Indirect competitors are businesses that address the same customer needs but in a different way. Your target audience might not be the exact match but they can overlap. For example: Netflix and Cable TV both offer video content. Netflix is a streaming service, while cable TV is a traditional broadcast service. Since they both offer entertainment options, they compete indirectly.
Substitute Competitors
Although they don't sell the same products, they're competing for customer spending. Examples are bars, cafés, restaurants, and supermarkets that compete for lunchtime trade on a main street.
New entrants
These are new competitors offering the same products or services. New entrants may find it hard to get established in the existing market and are still in the experimenting stage, therefore they're not a trusted source of marketing inspiration (just not yet).
Now that you've learned several types of competitors, you're heading on to a more crucial step – identifying your competitors.
Here are some of the best ways to know who your competitors really are.
Methods and tools to identify your competitors
Conduct a market research.
This can be as simple as asking your salespersons as they can be a great source of information. Send a survey or ask them directly, questions like which competing companies get the most mention in their customer conversation.
Additionally, you can ask your customers. Having tried and evaluated other brands before choosing you, they're a great source of information. Even potential customers can have a say on this too. Ask them who will be weighing your brand up against others.
Do Google and Amazon search.
Who wouldn't turn to Google when searching for something? Though the process is manual, it can be a good starting point to do a Google or even Amazon search to find your competitors. Search for the keywords you're most interested in. See who's on the first Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and what they offer.
Google Maps can also direct you to who your competitors are. Simply input a local search for a business in Maps. For example: home goods in Brooklyn, New York.
Scour the social media.
You could just do a good, old-fashioned social media stalk. Like Google or Amazon, you can look up keywords and hashtags that are relevant to your business.
Use marketing tools like Panoramata
The process alone of identifying your best competitors can be time-consuming and draining. After identifying, you even need to further segment these competitors based on how big of a threat they pose to your business.
Good thing, there are tools to help you automate this process – saves time, and energy, and provides you with accurate and straightforward results and data about your competitors.
Here's how:
What are the best things about Panoramata in terms of knowing the best competitors to track?
After searching for the best-matched companies, you can access their profile right away. Each brand/company page will show you a history of their marketing assets.
It allows you to examine their newsletters, ads, websites & landing pages, product catalogs, and SMS. Based on these data, you'll be able to know what their offers are and who their target audience and persona are.
Panoramata, therefore, gives you insightful data to choose who among your competitors is worth tracking.
Furthermore, you can request literally any competitor you want to track if it's not yet on the platform's list of more than 18k brands.
To even save more time in identifying your competitors, you can rely on the platform's Suggested brands.
Here's an example:
Analyze your competitors' product offerings (pricing)
How do you evaluate competitors' pricing and stand out?
Competitive pricing analysis is a crucial step for your business. It requires a good understanding of the market and your competitors' pricing strategies.
It is based on the fact that buyers compare pricing and offers of similar products by other brands before buying.
It involves gathering and analyzing data about your competitors' pricing strategies to gain insight into the market. The goal is to make sound decisions about your pricing strategy based on up-to-date information.
In a competitive pricing strategy, a business typically sets its prices lower than its competitors' prices to gain market share.
However, if your company has a unique selling proposition (USP), such as higher quality or better service, you can set your prices higher than your competitors without losing market share.
To conduct a competitive pricing analysis, you can typically start by identifying your direct and indirect competitors (as discussed previously). You can gather data on their pricing strategies by visiting their websites and physical stores or purchasing their products.
Better yet, you can use tools to provide real-time updates on products, prices, and price changes.
Then, analyze the data to identify patterns and trends in your competitors' pricing strategies. Look for pricing premiums, promotional discounts, and bundle pricing.
Understanding patterns in their pricing data will help you anticipate their next move.
Now it's time to use the information you've gathered to develop your pricing strategy.
Decide whether to price your products higher or lower than your competitors and at what price points to offer your products or services.
Also consider product differentiation, target market, cost of goods sold, and brand positioning when developing your pricing strategy.
To stay competitive, you have to keep an eye on your competitors' pricing strategies and adjust your prices as needed. Competitive pricing analysis is an ongoing process that requires knowing the fundamental steps to take and the tools to use.
Research your competitors' content strategy
Evaluating your competitor's content strategy is not an easy ride. But, it's the proven way to create unique content, your ticket to stand out from the crowd.
Creating unique content is extremely important because it can enhance search engine optimization (SEO). Quit playing on someone else’s battlefield and create your own ground.
Learn how to analyze your competitors to identify their strengths and weaknesses, not to copy them outright, but to carve out the unique direction for your own content marketing strategy.
How do you do that? Here are important things to consider.
Identify what they are doing well, what they are doing poorly, and how you can differentiate yourself from them. For instance, if your competitor's ads are speaking mostly to a general market, consider crafting hyper-targeted content to be more relevant to a specific audience.
Are your competitors answering customer pain points with in-depth blog posts, FAQs, ebooks, and webinars while your content resides on blog posts and long-form articles on your website? Consider the impact videos, photographs, and other graphics can bring for a high-performing content mix.
Look for opportunities to establish a presence on channels before your competitors do. If they aren’t on YouTube, get there first. If they’re not putting content on Instagram or making videos on TikTok, start building a following on those touchpoints. That doesn’t mean you should ignore your own blog. It just means that you need to expand faster to reach other audiences first.
Additionally, check their publishing frequency.
Discover market gaps
Find gaps that your business can fill.
Now that you've learned who your competitors are (and who among them are worth tracking), and what offerings exist, you can identify areas where your market is underserved.
Let's discuss how you can expand your own offerings to satisfy any unfulfilled customer needs.
Assess your competitors’ offerings to identify areas of opportunities. Assuming you've already spotted weaknesses in your competitors, you're now ready to take on the challenge of standing out in a crowded marketplace.
You may find gaps between what your competitors offer and what customers are searching for. Take that information and expand your own offerings to appease them with new solutions.
On the other hand, you can also identify gaps in your strategy that your competitors address.
For example, you are in the food supplements industry and are currently advertising your products to active and working individuals.
Upon viewing the Meta ads of one of your sought-after competitors, you know that they're also targeting stay-at-home moms with at least 2-3 toddlers. Why? Because these moms juggle their way out for household chores and taking care of the kids. So, they can be considered as active as those going to work (or sometimes even more active since they don't have weekend day-offs.)
As a result, you'll start targeting other personas as inspired by your competitor's ad strategy.
By evaluating your competitors' products and marketing assets, you'll discover gaps in the market. Filling these gaps can lead you to more effective marketing tactics.
Identify your competitive advantage
After doing the above processes, do you consider your company to have a competitive advantage?
If you have a unique selling proposition, it's easier to pinpoint your edge over the competition.
If unfortunately, you've unveiled that your competitors have the same products, and solutions, or are targeting the same audience, you can still work out what the competition has over you and how you can offer something better.
After all, that's the best reward you can get from evaluating your competitors – to find your sweet spot in the competitive landscape, no matter how crowded the sector you're in.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Who can be considered as ideal competitors to track for your competitive analysis?
Ideally, you should track competitors offering the same products, services, and solutions, and target the same audiences. Keep an eye out for competitors that are quickly growing as they can be good sources of inspiration. As much as possible, avoid monitoring new entrants in the market as they are still experimenting with their marketing approaches.
2. What are the best tools to use for identifying your competitors?
You can use Google’s search engine, Google Maps, or Panoramata to automate the process of finding your best competitors. With Panoramata, you can directly access the brand/company’s profile and marketing assets to gain insightful data about who among the competitors is worth tracking.
3. How can you discover market gaps?
You can discover market gaps by assessing your competitors’ product/service offerings to identify opportunities where your market is underserved.
