How to Beat Your Competitors in Business Using Marketing Analysis

Today's business environment is highly competitive, and simply offering a great product or service might not be enough to succeed, especially when your specific market niche is very crowded. Competitor marketing analysis, on the other hand, can help you gain the insights needed to outmaneuver your rivals, identify opportunities, and refine your strategies. Read further to discover its benefits and how it’s conducted to be better than your competitors in business. 

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How marketing research can help you become better than competitors in business

Marketing research allows you to gain that competitive edge by helping you understand your market, customers, and competitors better. Its efficiency is proven by numbers: in 2023, the global market research industry hit a record-high market size of around $84.3 billion, and this year this number is expected to reach $87.68 billion.

Here's how market research can make your business more successful:

1. It helps identify unmet customer needs and preferences for further personalization.

2. It helps benchmark and find your unique selling points.

3. It keeps you ahead of market changes and innovation opportunities.

4. It allows you to target the right audience with effective communication.

5. It helps you gather feedback and use it to ensure that the products meet customer expectations.

6. It offers you the necessary data to develop successful marketing strategies and get ahead of the competition.

How to conduct brand competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is a part of the marketing research strategy. Its goal is to evaluate the performance of various business enterprises in a predefined market.

Here's how to conduct it efficiently.

1.  Identify your foreign and local competitors

To answer the question of "Who are my competitors?", consider focusing on:

• Direct competition. These are brands that offer similar products or services and target the same customer base.

• Indirect competition. These are brands that offer different products but satisfy the same customer needs or solve similar problems.

• Potential competition. These are emerging brands that could become your future competitors.

2. Gather competitor information

Start with analyzing their online presence. To do this, explore competitors' websites, social media channels, and content marketing efforts. Look at their website design, user experience, content types, and messaging. Then, observe their advertising campaigns, promotions, email marketing, and influencer partnerships. At this step, you can also analyze their paid search and SEO strategies using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Ads.

Next, focus on what they have to offer and how they do it. Compare product features, quality, pricing, and unique selling points. Look at customer reviews to measure satisfaction and identify areas of concern. Study how competitors position themselves in the market, including their brand values, tone, and key messaging.

3. Perform a SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This type of analysis can help you convert your observations into actionable insights.

You can create a table with quadrants titled Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and then fill in each quadrant with insights from your competitive analysis. By doing this for both your brand and your competitors, you can directly compare their strengths and weaknesses. This process helps you identify where your brand excels and where there's room for improvement.

4. Focus on KPIs and best practices

If your brand already performs well on the market, compare its performance against competitors using KPIs: market share, sales revenue, customer acquisition cost, and engagement metrics. You can also analyze strategies that work well for competitors and consider how you might adopt or improve upon them.

5. Identify ways to stand out

Once you've gathered and analyzed all the data, you can use it to identify your differentiation opportunities. One of the most important things to focus on at this step is your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), also known as Unique Selling Proposition (USP). While UVP/USP is based on research and strategy, it can be summarized as—what sets your brand apart from competitors.

Then, reevaluate your brand messaging and positioning to ensure it resonates more effectively with your target audience than your competitors' messaging does.

6. Monitor and update regularly 

Run an analysis of your brand competitors at least every quarter and, ideally, every month. This is important because digital marketing is always evolving, and you need to keep up with what your competitors are doing.

However, in some cases, you might also want to analyze your competition even more often to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly. Usually this is necessary when something major happens in your industry or you plan on doing something new, like launching a new product, entering a new market, facing a new competitor, losing market share, changing pricing, or updating your branding. Whatever schedule you choose, stick to it. Regular competitor analysis helps you stay ahead and maintain a competitive edge.

To sum up 

To be better than competitors in business, it might not be enough to have a strong marketing strategy, create great content for your business using engaging photos of people, and utilize high-quality text. You need a deep understanding of the landscape in which you operate. Marketing research, and especially competitor research, is the key to gaining this understanding. Conducting it systematically allows you to develop strategies that set your brand apart.