What is competitor analysis?
Why competitor analysis matters
- It keeps you a step ahead by showing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
- It helps you forecast your marketing plan accurately.
- It shows overall industry trends, so you can plan around them.
- It helps you update your company’s marketing mix.
A good digital marketing agency does a deep analysis first. Then it recommends what is right for the company that hired it.
Questions to answer in a competitor analysis
- Who are your competitors? Where do they mainly operate, and how do they price their products or services?
- What is their market share, and is it rising or falling?
- What is their USP (unique selling point)?
- What is their sales volume for a given period?
- What marketing strategies are they using?
- Which keywords do they rank for organically, and what are their main PPC (pay-per-click) keywords?
- What do their customers say in reviews, how do they engage, and why do people prefer their products?
Steps to do a competitor analysis
Identify your top competitors
Consider competitors you come up against regularly. Say you are a fairly new start-up. The largest company in your industry will not be your top competitor. You and your competitor should be of similar strength.
Compare your market positioning with theirs
Look at product features, product quality, pricing and customer segments. This shows a competitor’s market positioning. A popular method is SWOT analysis. You sort your competitor into Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Compare traffic and website performance
This shows how many visits they get on average. It also shows their monthly unique visitors and engagement rate. It shows traffic sources, time spent on site and pageviews.
Compare keywords, backlinks and SEO effectiveness
Digital marketing agencies do this well. They find keywords that are popular with the target audience. They also find pay-per-click opportunities and content topics the audience searches for. They check the number of backlinks and ways to get more of them. They check traffic from organic and paid sources, page speed and other key metrics.
Compare audience engagement
Understanding who their audience is shows you who your potential audience can be. It also helps you spot the differences between your audiences. Look at their social media presence and engagement too.
Draw your conclusion
Check that you have gathered enough data to base your future plans on.
Most companies do not know how often to repeat a competitor analysis. An analysis done in one year will not hold after 2 years. Like all your plans, your analysis must be kept up to date.
Most businesses do a competitor analysis once. They file the report and forget it. But your competitors are not standing still, and neither should you. Staying ahead takes steady effort and fresh eyes.
PromotEdge, an integrated marketing agency in India (headquartered in Kolkata), can help you understand your market and build a strategy that holds up.














































