Do you remember the last time you conducted a brand competitive analysis? And more importantly, do you know how to perform one quickly and effectively?
Your brand may be losing out on crucial information that may help it expand if you aren’t sure or if the last analysis you did was a brief look at a competitor’s website and social media presence.
You must distinguish yourself from the crowd if you want to succeed in business. This necessitates familiarity with the products and services offered by your rivals.
Let’s explore five basic competition analysis methods.
Five Best Competitive Analyses for a Business
You can do a competitive analysis to determine what your rivals are good and bad at. It’s essential to look at how other firms in your industry are doing to understand how well yours will perform in the market.
Become familiar with the most common blunders and uncover new trends to include in your practice.
This comprehensive guide covers how to perform a competitive study that gives your business an edge in the marketplace.
1. Run SWOT Analysis of the Competition
SWOT analysis is a well-known economic method that examines a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). It allows you to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your primary competitors once you’ve recognized them.
Begin by using an online SWOT template that divides your analysis work area into four equal portions for each factor. Strengths and weaknesses are found in the first two quarters; opportunities and threats are found in the third and fourth quarters.
A business’s strengths and weaknesses are based on its existing assets and concrete variables. Compile a list of all of the company’s current assets and any potential future liabilities, such as investment, profitability, funding, and software systems.
Opportunities and threats relate to external variables that might favorably or adversely affect a firm, such as:
- New items entering the marketplace
- A change in technology or consumer demands
- Economic trends
- Population changes
- Government policy revisions
- Changes in the relationship between suppliers and partners
SWOT analysis gives you a clear view of how healthy your rivals are and where they may be weak. Perform a SWOT analysis on your own company once you’ve done one for your competitors.
2. Brainstorming
This group activity is also one of the most widely used business analysis procedures among analysts.
This is a very creative strategy that involves a group activity to develop ideas, analyze root causes, and propose solutions to issues.
Not to mention that brainstorming serves as a foundation for other business analysis methodologies such as SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, etc.
3. Use Case Modeling
The use case model is a visual depiction of the system that is being built. Stakeholders, actors, and use cases are all identified during the process.
Business analysts can use this strategy to determine a system’s needs from the end user’s perspective. It will also assist them in identifying holes that software development teams must fill.
Because it helps engineers understand how the product will be used and what it must accomplish at each point of its lifetime, use case modeling is an essential aspect of agile software development.
4. Process Design
Process designs are necessary for solving problems, seizing opportunities, and monitoring and measuring business effectiveness to ensure continuous customer value delivery. A future state of any commercial operation may also be represented as a process design.
A business process analyst examines the existing process architecture and, if necessary, makes adjustments. The business analyst is in charge of comprehending and maintaining a wide range of business processes.
5. PESTLE Analysis
When making business choices, business analysts utilize the PESTLE model (also known as PEST) to discover environmental issues that can influence their organization and how to best handle them. These are the influences:
- Political: Financial assistance and subsidies, government initiatives, and policies are all examples of political support.
- Economical: Labor and energy costs, inflation, and interest rates are all economic factors.
- Sociological: Education, culture, media, life, and population are all sociological factors.
- Technological: New information and communication systems technologies are technical factors.
- Legal: Government rules and employment standards at the local, state, and national levels.
- Environmental: Waste, recycling, pollution, and weather are all ecological concerns.
By looking over all these factors, analysts can better devise strategies for dealing with them.
Key Takeaways
Competitive analysis reveals what other companies are doing well, showing opportunities for your brand to stand apart.
A SWOT analysis is one of the easiest ways to know what strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats exist – helping you make the right decisions for your organization.