The only way to sustain your business successfully is to keep ahead of your competition. People in the same industry as you will impact the success or lack of it of your own business. Therefore, identifying and simplifying your most aggressive competitor, analyzing their systems, and prices will help you stay ahead of the competition. Practical competition analysis is critical for the continued success of your business.

Thus, it would help if you devised ways of analyzing your competition so that you remain one step ahead. Strategic and selected research and analysis of your rival business will help you to beef your business plan patterns. The study will also point you in the direction of how to handle any potential threats that your opponent might pose.

This strategy will distinguish between a great business and a mediocre one.

Identify Your Competition

Competition analysis helps identify who your actual challenger is. Once you have pinpointed them, whether they are based locally or globally, you know who and what you are dealing with accurately.

Identifying your rival will also give you a realistic approach to making better business pitches than you are. Moreover, by placing your competitors, you get to know your customer base and target audience too.  You get an idea about which potential pocket your competitors are getting clients. Then, you can dip in too.

This strategy is vital to growing your business as you now know where to look for customers. More so, if you are keen on increasing your customer base to improve revenue and grow your business.

Competitor Analyses

As a company, you must understand your competitors’ relationship with their customers. This way, you can identify and address gaps in your management processes. Then you can incorporate your competitor’s best practices into your own company.

The analysis will also provide your company with benchmarks against which you can measure your company’s relationship with customers. On top of that, your company should analyze the way your rival businesses build relationships with their customers by exploring the following areas;

Price Monitoring

Price monitoring, also called Price intelligence, is the competitive price monitoring and analysis of your competition’s prices so that you can get a clearer view of the market strategy and optimize your pricing strategy.  Price monitoring will help you arrive at the best pricing strategy to maximize profit and be ahead of your competition.

Competitive price monitoring will allow you to obtain your competitors’ price list and balance it against your own to the advantage of your company.

People review and compare products and services online before they come down to making a purchase. Although user experience is vital in maintaining existing customers, price is the ultimate driving factor, especially for buyers vising for the first time. Therefore, price monitoring is a must for you to stay ahead.

Here are some price monitoring tools that you can use to help you track your competitor through price monitoring. They include Mozenda, Octoparse, Import.io, Data crops, Omnia Dynamic Pricing, and Prisync. You can access these tools at a cost.

SEO Monitoring

SEO monitoring is crucial on your competitors’ sites, and your site to ensure that it’s competitive and healthy. While the basic Search Engine Optimization principles are mandatory in designing your web page, the critical part is to beat your competitor!

The web provides you with tools for monitoring your competition that is invaluable for competitor assessment programs. The web gives you a leeway into your competitors’ financial, business, and operational information and, by its very nature, allows you to compare and contrast with your own company’s marketing strategy.

If your web page were to rank better than your competitors’ page for a given keyword, then you have outrun them in the race to be at an advantage. You do not need your page to be the best, just better than your competitors.

In Search Engine Optimization, you need to beat your competitor for the top slot on the search engines to become a success. Suitable software for SEO optimization is like your pair of running shoes if you have to beat your competitor to the top slot.

Good SEO software will allow you to do all the following in monitoring your competition;

  • View your competitor’s backlinks and use them to guide you to your link-building
  • Assess the wording on the competition page to get ideas about what is missing from your webpage.
  • Evaluate the keyword frequencies, keyword location, and the page structure of your competitor’s pages.
  • Compare your keywords and key phrases to those of your competitor
  • Assess the submissions directory from the competition site and their selected category.
  • Identify newcomers that you may not have been aware of but have to contend with the market.
  • Track, monitor, and compare your ranking progress against your competitor whenever you make changes or enhancements to your site.

SEO monitoring will give you an advantage over your competition and get you the coveted top slot on the search engines. Continually monitoring your competition for your market space will help you stay on top.

Third-Party Analytic Data from Competitor Websites

Some websites can provide you with this information either for free or at a cost. The information on relationship-related metrics will help you identify what works well for your target audience.

There is a wide range of metrics to choose from, and your company can take its pick. However, here are some of the most critical metrics that will help you in your quest to stay ahead of your competition.

 

Time Spent on the Site

This metric will give you the amount of time spent by customers on a particular website. If the customers are spending a reasonable amount of time on a website, this indicates that the site is optimized. Check your company’s website and update your so that customers want to spend more time on it.

Bounce Rate

This metric refers to the percentage of customers who will exit a website after just- page visit. If the bounce rate very is high, then the site cannot keep the customers engaged.

 Compare the bounce rate from your site with that o your competition. Then, you can make the necessary adjustments so that visitors to your site have something interesting to keep them there instead of bouncing off.

Number of Pages Visited

This metric will indicate the number of pages on average that a visiting customer on the website viewed. If the number of viewed pages is high, then it means that the content is engaging and keeps customers actively engaged.

Nevertheless, a high number of pages visited could also mean that the information is split among multiple pages to ensure that customers browse more pages to find what they need. This splitting could be a negative indication, so you should try to get a feel of the customer experience to understand what is represented by the data.

Marketing Messages on Competing Sites

Marketing messages will target the benefits of competing products, any special offers or promotions. The messages can also include product trials and demonstration videos.

These messages help build a good relationship between the business and its customers so that they will keep coming back and bringing more customers.

Marketing Messages and Promotions on Other Sites Directed to Competitor Sites

It is paramount for your business to observe whether competitors communicate via SMS, email, or more traditional communication methods of print channels. Check whether they use another channel of communication to promote their services and products and attract customers to their website.

They could be using offers and promotions too. These could include updates or invitations and reminders of loyalty programs and special customer events. To get ahead of your competition, the monitor uses these channels so that you can adjust your systems to be one step forward from your competition.

Improving Your Product or Service

Practical competitor analysis gives you a chance to identify the market needs regarding your product or service and how your peers are addressing these requirements. By comparing the product or service that you offer with that of your competition, you get to understand any potential loopholes that exist with the product or service and, consequently, ways of bettering your product.

With the help of competition analysis, you can have more innovative strategies and solutions that will expand and drive your business past that of your competition.

Customer Support and Service

Monitor how your competition supports its customers. If they have a wide range of options for their customers to choose from, that will indicate a high level of focus and commitment in building a good and stable relationship with the customers.

Standardize your support against that of your competitor or raise your customer service a bar higher.

Final Thoughts

Analyzing your competition will scale up your business and help you create a pool of adequate information that will help grow your business significantly by improving your service or product.

Competitor analysis helps you increase the rate of return for your business by offers the direction to improve your business sustainably. Finally, it enables you to enhance your social engagement activities to the productivity of your business.