How Competitive Analysis Will Benefit Your Company
What is a Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis assists business owners and marketing teams to understand their company’s target market by examining the strengths and weaknesses of competitors' business strategies.
Competitive analysis includes analyzing competitors' products, price points, and sales and marketing strategies using competitor research tools. A company's competitive landscape evolves all the time, so no market is without two or more competing companies selling similar products and services.
With Owler Max, you’ll be able to conduct thorough competitor research. Whether you work at a big corporation or a small startup, you’ll benefit from in-depth insight into competitors' business strategies and discover potential areas of improvement for your own company.
Below, we’ll discuss the importance of a competitive analysis, how to conduct one, and how Owler supports businesses with in-depth, data-backed competitive intelligence.
Competitive Analysis Importance Explained
Discover Your Competitor's Strengths and Weaknesses: A competitive analysis assesses what is and what isn't working for your competitors. You can gain vital information from a critical analysis of your target market.
Understand Your Own Company's Strengths and Weaknesses: Some problem areas are more challenging to identify than others. Competitive advantages and limitations may be assessed and improved following an analysis, enabling your company to capture more market share and stay ahead of competitors.
Learn How to Best Deploy Your Resources as a Company: In-depth market research pinpoints differentiators between you and your competitors' business strategies. By conducting an analysis, internal teams discover ways to utilize their resources better and outperform competitors.
Discover Growth Opportunities For Your Company: Competitive analysis also helps gauge the value proposition of your upcoming products and services. By conducting thorough research, your business can identify new areas for growth and plan practical actions.
How to Conduct Competitor Analysis
A comprehensive competitive assessment supports company goals by providing valuable information to help you hone in on your target market.
Let’s go in-depth about the process below:
IDENTIFY YOUR DIRECT COMPETITORS
A competitor analysis starts with defining your direct competitors using analysis tools.
Direct competitors are other businesses that market similar products or services at similar price points to your target audience. In addition to demographics and branding, direct competitors also sell to customers in the same geographic region as your target audience. To make sure you are keeping close tabs on your competitors, Owler allows you to find your competitors by looking up your company and checking the competitors’ tab.
By focusing your research efforts on direct competitors, you can better understand your market and lay the groundwork for a more accurate assessment of your competition. That said, you shouldn’t entirely neglect indirect competitors.
Looking at indirect competitors, those businesses that don't provide similar products or services but could fulfill the same role as your company may lead to ideas for future business opportunities, such as new product launches or new market strategies.
PERFORM A COMPETITOR SWOT ANALYSIS
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
As the name implies, businesses use SWOTs to analyze every relevant facet of their competitor’s position against their own and identify competitive advantages.
SWOTs are a simple but powerful tool. In addition to building a more robust marketing strategy, a SWOT analysis helps define broader growth benchmarks, sales and marketing metrics, and value propositions.
To help you get started, here are a few areas you can cover with a SWOT analysis:
Brand positioning
Marketing strategy
Content strategy
Shipping and pricing
Customer support
SEO strategy
To better define your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses during a SWOT analysis, craft a list of questions:
What are some areas of improvement?
How does their product or service compare to yours?
Why would a consumer find it more appealing?
In what areas do they stand out? Where are they weakest?
Use the information you’ve gathered on your competition to assess threats and create lucrative business opportunities. Pay attention to what your shared audience responds to and what specific changes you can make that will benefit your product or service. Use your marketing efforts to take advantage of these discoveries and address your customers' pain points.
COMPARE SOCIAL MEDIA PERFORMANCE
Another area to use your competitor analysis for is to analyze your competitor’s social media presence.
Your competitors will utilize their social media presence to interact with their target audience in different ways across different platforms. If they're reaching a user base you are not, consider how different platforms may better serve customer needs than your current methods.
For example, if they partner with influencers on Instagram, it’s important to understand if users are engaging with the sponsorship and if it’s generating customer referrals. Use this information to consider how to make adjustments to your social media strategy. While looking at company profiles on Owler, you’ll be able to see that company’s social media profiles, which allows you to quickly assess their presence and performance on social media.
USE COMPETITOR ANALYSIS TOOLS LIKE OWLER FOR TRACKING OTHER COMPANIES
As you carry out your competitor analysis, be sure to utilize powerful sales tools such as Owler Max to streamline information gathering.
Though you’re unlikely to gain access to company trade secrets, you will have access to employee-generated insights on revenue, major company changes, product launches, and more to aid your marketing efforts and support your analysis with accurate data.
Owler Max’s research tools support competitive research by supplying a comprehensive list of competitors’ key facts and exclusive insights to millions of business professionals.
Join Owler Max and personalize your feed with the companies you want to follow and stay up-to-date with all major players in your market.
Analyze Your Competitors, Strengthen Your Business. Join Owler Today!
Competitor research provides vital intelligence on key players in your market and effective marketing strategies your target audience connects with.
Thanks to Owler Max's comprehensive company profiles, businesses can streamline their competitive analysis process by using rich data and actionable insights about top competitors.
As the most extensive business database globally, we help millions of private and public companies research with easy-to-use sales intelligence tools.
Cultivate new customers, generate more substantial leads, and learn everything you need about your target audience with Owler Max.
Track the companies you’re interested in today. Sign up for free or contact us and let us know how we can best support your business.
How Competitive Analysis Will Benefit Your Company
Competitive intelligence is the practice of gathering, analyzing, and acting on information about your market, industry activity and disruptions, competitors, and their products/services.
It is a combination of:
Market intelligence
Strategic planning
The competitive landscape
Development metrics
The Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) consider competitive intelligence the key to organizations being able to handle risk while increasing their revenue opportunities. An organization does this by having a firm understanding of what’s happening in its given environment.
Competitive intelligence research answers questions such as:
What are my competitors’ strengths and weaknesses?
How much do competitors charge for their product or service offerings?
What advantages do they have that I don't have?
What are the challenges that I can address with my offerings?
How many clients do they have compared to me?
What are their annual sales and revenue figures?
Who are their clients? What are their similarities and differences to my own?
Where are they getting most of their business from these days?
How can I increase my share of this market?
What key market trends and competitive insights can I leverage to grow my business?
Business information and insights platforms can make competitive intelligence research much easier for you.
This article will talk about how competitive intelligence can pave the way to powerful insights that inform crucial business decisions.
Market Intelligence vs. Business Intelligence
Market intelligence and business intelligence are often used interchangeably, but there’s a nuanced difference between the two.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence or BI focuses on company-related information and competitive insights rather than market-specific ones. They are linked to a business's key performance indicators (KPIs), informing strategic business decisions.
Business intelligence includes data on the following:
The sales process
Revenue figures
Production and operations
Financials
Company size
Competitive strategy
Financial services
This information is often tricky to obtain as they are typically accessible within the company and are seldom published publicly.
If you want to stay informed and receive daily updates on over 14 million companies, consider a plan from Owler. We can help you prospect for new business, keep tabs on your competitors, and track new updates happening in your industry.
Market Intelligence
Market research deals specifically with your company, marketing strategy, and product line. Market intelligence is information about the market itself, not your specific positioning.
Market intelligence covers information on the industry and market movements, customers, and competitors, including (but not limited to) the following:
Market share
Industry benchmarks and metrics
Market trends
Consumer demographics and behavior
Market size
Key stakeholders
Business regulations
Client relationship management trends and tools
Marketing channels
Industry white papers
How to Engage in Market Research
Engaging in effective market research involves three steps:
Creating a competitive landscape analysis
Prioritizing data collection
Using benchmarking
CREATE A COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS
Map out your competitive environment by identifying your top competitors. Expand your competitive landscape by considering related industries and determining potential competitors from lateral sectors.
Competitive analysis involves pulling together and culling actionable insights from information about your competitors, such as:
Sales and revenue figures
Company size
Products or services
Price points
Sales and marketing strategies
Competitive edge
Financial services
Stakeholders
Owler Max provides comprehensive company profiles by giving your sales team company information such as revenue, employee count, leadership, funding, top competitors, and recent news.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media. As, when analyzed alongside a competitive analysis, social media allows you to:
Observe your customers’ posts and responses to other customers
Know what their messaging, tone of voice, and branding styles are
Look into their followers' comments and what they say about products or services
Observe their marketing strategies (are they tapping influencers, running ads, rolling out campaigns, promos, and activations)
Owler lets you see a company’s social media profiles, enabling you to quickly assess its presence and performance on social media.
PRIORITIZE DATA COLLECTION
Focus on data collection every step of the way. Having access to a substantial amount of information can give your business unprecedented data about your customers and their competitors—quantitative and qualitative alike.
Quantitative data may include their financial information, sales or revenue, employee count, and many more. Qualitative data may consist of branding and messaging, social media posts and comments, and customer testimonials.
Having sufficient data available in your arsenal allows you to define industry standards, benchmarks, trends, movements, and performance. It also helps you analyze competitor products and how you can position your offerings against theirs.
Data empowers companies to understand, assess, forecast, respond to market movements, and watch for trends. You need big data sets for competitive analysis and a platform that can handle massive amounts of information.
Owler is the leading source of dynamic competitive information, with a massive network of businesses worldwide—14 million small businesses and multinationals alike. This leads to a faster, more intelligent primary research and solid competitive strategy.
As the most comprehensive company registry, Owler empowers your business by providing you with real-time data on the companies you care about.
USE BENCHMARKING
Information about the market and your top competitors enables you to set industry benchmarks and KPIs for your company. It helps you understand the big picture beyond your company, detecting patterns and trends in the market.
For instance, having a competitive landscape analysis makes it easier to determine your competitors' market share.
Using benchmarking also lets you know your competitive advantage—how to position your company, brand, and offerings when you have knowledge and insights on what other companies are doing.
You need a deep understanding of your industry or market segment to choose a suitable benchmark. Owler lets you explore your company's entire competitive landscape, analyze the sector, and look at micro-clusters between companies to explore how they compete on multiple levels.
Improving Your Competitive Intelligence Research
Competitive intelligence empowers strategic planning, sales, marketing, finance, and operations decision-making. It also provides more quantitative and qualitative data, minimizing risk and uncertainties about external factors.
With the benefits competitive intelligence brings, it’s essential to improve and strengthen your systems and processes for research. Here’s how:
Record a competitor analysis
Be active on social media
Do pricing research
Record a Competitor Analysis
Be on the lookout for competitors’ news on management, products and services, and business strategies. Stay up–to–date on new product launches and company efforts on hiring, marketing, partnerships with companies and influencers, new clients, and many more.
Keep your competitor analysis updated by getting access to real-time news updates on the companies you care about.
Thanks to the Daily Snapshot, Owler Max sends you daily alerts about the companies you care about. Enable notifications and save time on outreach with a personalized feed exclusive to Owler Pro and Owler Max.
Owler helps millions of competitive intelligence professionals, intelligence companies, and sales teams research with its easy-to-use competitive intelligence tool.
Be Active on Social Media
Social media is a treasure trove of data. Social media influences the purchasing choices of almost 85% of decision-makers and executives.
Establish a solid presence on social media with regular, consistent posts. Engage in conversations with your followers and see what customers say about your products.
Check your competitors’ channels and take note of their social media activities, such as the following:
Ad campaigns
Influencers and thought leaders
Online activations, collaborations, and promos
Key messages and tonality of their posts
What their followers are saying about their offerings, i.e., comments
How they engage their followers
Customer support strategies
Owler lets you see a company’s digital profiles, giving you an idea of its presence and performance on social networks.
Follow decision-makers and thought-leaders relevant to your sector and build relationships with them. You can do this by joining business communities online via sites like LinkedIn, where you can exchange strategic intelligence on the biggest names in your industry.
Owler also lets you have better conversations by tracking the companies you are targeting (or interested in learning about) and sending suggestions for timely introduction topics to build empathy and help you close more business.
Always Do Pricing Research
Don’t forget to perform business intelligence on your competitors through regular pricing research.
Having information on competitors’ pricing structures, profitability, and shareholders solidifies your competitive research, empowering you to decide on crucial aspects of your business operations.
Owler’s competitive intelligence capabilities can give you such information and more.
Improve Your Competitive Intelligence Research with Owler
Competitor intelligence research empowers your company’s decision-making by providing vital intelligence on your competitors and minimizing risk brought by market uncertainties.
Owler Max's comprehensive company profiles streamline your competitive analysis process using rich data and actionable insights about top competitors.
Track the companies you’re interested in today. Sign up for free or contact us to learn how we can best support your business.
If you want to stay informed and receive daily updates on over 14 million companies, consider a plan from Owler. We can help you prospect for new business, keep tabs on your competitors, and track new updates happening in your industry.