While doing competitor analysis, your information department holds the most significant responsibility. You must limit any direct or indirect threats your competitors can impose on your online business. If you look at successful marketing people, they always tend to do competitor analysis at the beginning of their business plan. If you own an eCommerce website, doing a competitor analysis should be your first step before you launch your product on the market. This approach will give you a glimpse of your product’s performance in the market and highlight all the potential risks.
What is Competitive Analysis?
You must understand competitive analysis to create a solid online presence for your business. It is the action plan in which you identify and monitor all the important players within your industry. Competitor analysis helps you understand the products your competitors sell, the number of sales they make per day, and the marketing tactics they deploy. Businesses that revolve around eCommerce tend to analyze competitors regularly.
Through competitive analysis, the marketing people can learn about the ins and outs of the market. Moreover, they can also learn about the potential opportunities that their competitors are offering. For example, if a new competitor has joined a huge eCommerce field, he can provide a healthy discount to their customers on their first purchase, which may derive massive traffic towards that website. As a result, they highlight all the areas where the competitors out-duel the other key players and stay on top of the marketing trends.
Strategies to Conduct Competitive Analysis
1) Market Gaps
When you perform competitive product analysis, you don’t just look into what competitors tend to offer through their websites. Most importantly, you can go through all the marketing gaps within your respective field. Through competitive analysis, aspiring entrepreneurs create matrices by checking out the unnecessary and unused marketing gaps in their field. You first introduce a competitor map, which helps you identify all the competitor businesses.
The competitor map helps you identify all the attributes of your competitors, such as pricing strategies, selling points, and product quality. Afterward, you place every competitor within the respective field and analyze the competitors that offer you the most significant threat. When you discover the most dangerous players in your area, you can create marketing strategies to get ahead. The analysis will help you identify the local prices within your company’s locality, the companies providing products with higher quality than you, and the underserved marketing segments. Numerous retail stores and restaurants tend to use this approach for better results.
2) Product Development
If you are running an online business, you must assume that your professional life is like a marathon race. You are racing with your competitors in terms of developing innovative products. By executing competitive analysis, you will understand what your competitors are doing. It is almost as if you are playing a game of chess with them in which you try to be two steps ahead of them. You can also learn about their mission statements to improve their eCommerce products' sales.
If you understand these strategies and directions, you will find it easy to execute the product development process. Competitor analysis will help in the generation of new approaches to get on the right track in terms of product development. As a website owner, you are responsible for looking into the product images, prices, functionality, customization, etc. Once you have all the data regarding your eCommerce products, your actions will be cost-effective.
3) Marketing Trends
If you conduct competitive analysis, you will be able to understand the market trends, which eventually helps in the evolution of your product development process. If your marketing policy revolves around the methods of 10 years ago, you will not be recognized by your target audience. Gone are the days when people used to promote their products or talk about their product launches through posters and banners. Even though those policies are still relevant, your marketing message will only be limited to your neighborhood or the colony in which you live.
By understanding the marketing trends, you will learn about the latest product line ideas. As a result, you will seek to improve product line extension, service quality, and trends regarding an entirely different business niche. Sometimes, you can create a small but loyal customer base by going entirely out of the box with your analytical approach.
4) Marketing Communication
Regardless of which business niche you prefer, you simply cannot ignore the factor of communication. The current period is more inclined to sell value and benefits rather than products and services. When customers buy a product, they feel that what they are getting out of it is more important than what the merchant offers. Therefore, if you do a competitive analysis, you gain an edge as you learn about the customers’ understanding while buying products from your competitors.
For example, if you are an eCommerce expert, you would already know what your competitors are selling. However, it would be beneficial to him if you conducted market research to identify that your competitors are promoting their products mainly for ease of use. As a result, you can use your marketing experience to create better strategies to counter your competitors and improve your software.
5) Traffic
If you conduct competitive analysis, you will understand why some of your customers, or the majority of them, have started prioritizing your competitor’s products over you. By comparing the products of both yourself and your competitors, you will identify all the deficiencies within your product. As a result, you can restructure your marketing message and channels so that the customers can start finding interest in your platform again.
A successful marketer never loses focus if they lose website traffic. Instead, these marketers find out ways to restore their credibility. If you want to know about the traffic status on your Strikingly website, you can check out the built-in analytics. These analytics will not just tell you about the number of visitors coming or leaving your website but also about the web sections they are using, which will tell you more about the customer behavior.
6) Benchmarking
Benchmarking is defined as a process in which you measure your entity's or product's performance or integrity. If we define it in marketing terms, it is defined as a procedure in which you establish the foundations with which an organization can draw a comparison of its products and services and analyze whether they have maintained the marketing standards.
Whether your company is old or new, it can benefit from competitive analysis. Competitor analysis helps you identify the historical data and trends about your competitors, which will make you understand customers’ behavior regarding your products and your competitors’ products. Moreover, it will give you a clear picture of your company’s potential and its capability for growth.
7) Latest Innovations and Tools:
If you do competitive analysis as part of your business plan, it helps you go through any innovative tools and technological advancements to carry out the business operations efficiently. For example, if you realize that one of your competitors has created a professional website through the help of a top-quality website building platform, you can do the same by relying on Strikingly. Strikingly provides you with innovative features that help you achieve your desired business website within a couple of clicks.
As we see through our collection, many business websites are established on Strikingly. Individuals register under their free plan, making them eligible to create a fully-functional business website with all the necessary features. However, if they want improvement in their website features, they are told to upgrade their subscription plans. Strikingly’s easy-to-use website editor helps you build your website independently and without hiring any professional web developer. You can achieve your professional dreams yourself, and Strikingly will be there for you whenever required.
Conclusion
To create a solid online presence for your brand, you must know how to conduct competitive analysis. Even if you are an experienced marketing person, you cannot always be right. There comes a time when some marketing people within your respective field get the better of you. However, a successful marketing person is the one that learns from this setback and gets up again to face their competitors.
By building a website on Strikingly, you will not just get a professional website but will also be able to save on your marketing budget. If you are experiencing trouble creating a high-quality business website on Strikingly, you can relate your queries with our Happiness Officers. So, make a top-drawer website on Strikingly and protect your brand from harm from your competitors.
