Competitor Analysis

When trying to find out how well you’re doing in your industry, the first thing you absolutely need to know is how well your competitors are doing. You may have reached 10 more customers in a few days and think you’re doing great, but when you analyze your competitors and see that they’re reaching 50 more customers each day, you know you still have a long way to go.

This article will go through how to do a competitor analysis so that you can make sure you make a great mobile app.

What is a Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis includes conducting market research where you go through a competitor’s marketing strategies, their products or services, and how they are doing in terms of sales. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact ways you can do this, because every company and every industry is different, but the great thing about having most business ventures online now is that you can find your competitors easily and understand how they do what they do.

Benefits of Conducting a Competitor Analysis

So you know how your competitors conduct their business. So what? You may not think it matters because you want to distinguish what you do and you have a lot of your own ideas.

This may be true, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to find out what your competitors are doing. These are several benefits you can derive from doing a competitor analysis:

  • You can improve your own product, growth, and marketing strategies
  • You can understand how they are creating their products or brands, and find ways to distinguish yourself even more by creating a unique selling proposition
  • You can develop your own unique sales angle by finding out which part of the market your competitors haven’t been able to access, and by targeting more of your sales strategies in that area
  • You know what success looks like in the industry and can use this as a standard or as a goal to exceed
  • Discover just how much your competitors can threaten you, and find ways to ensure this doesn’t happen
  • You can better understand market trends and make sure that you are catering to this

How to Do a Competitor Analysis

Now that we’ve covered the reasons why undergoing a competitor analysis is vital in improving your own business, you have to know how to do a competitor analysis. These are some steps that you can take to ensure you are accessing the right information.

1. Know Where to Conduct Your Competitor Analysis

The first thing you need to know is where you should be carrying out your competitor analysis. Most of the time, this will include Google, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, job sites, and product review sites.

2. Identify Your Competitors

How can you analyze your competitors if you don’t know who they are? This is why one of the first steps in conducting a useful competitor analysis is by identifying your competitors.

There are two types of competitors, which are direct competitors and indirect competitors. Direct competitors sell the same types of products as you, whereas indirect competitors compete with your business in terms of reaching people or reaching customers online.

You can find your customers by:

  • Going through industry reports to see who holds the major market shares in your industry
  • See which companies rank highest on Google when you search relevant keywords
  • Read product review sites
  • Finding out who some of your competitors consider as their competitors
  • Go through social listening, where you analyze social platforms and find out who your potential customers talk about
  • Talk and network more within your industry
  • Hire a firm to conduct the market research on your behalf

Once you have an understanding of who you’re competing against, narrow this down to the most direct competitors or to the most important ones. You simply don’t have the time or the resources to go through every single competitor, so make sure you focus on the relevant firms.

2. Research What Your Competitors Offer

Once you find out who you are competing against, find out what they’re offering in terms of products and services. Ask why their products are so popular, and apply this in how you will think about creating your own product brands.

This can be done by going through their online presence and evaluating how they are improving their reach, and which product features of theirs are unique or stand out from everyone else’s. To ensure you know what you’re doing, you can always access more sales and marketing resources. You can also order samples from your competitors to assess their products and services on a more personal level.

3. Find Out Their Marketing and Sales Strategies

Not only is it important to know what people are selling, but it’s also vital to pinpoint how they made these products become so successful. Sometimes, the products themselves have nothing that’s too special, but the way your competitor markets and creates a brand out of their product makes their sales skyrocket.

Consider the social platforms your competitors use, and how they engage with their audience. Maybe they upload memes or provide videos of the way their mobile apps function. Maybe they succeed by commenting on people’s posts and somehow leading more people to go through their sites.

Discovering how they reach their customers is important because that’s likely what you’ll have to do to reach your customers, too. If they increase their reach by producing regular content on their blog, be assured that you will most likely have to do the same.

4. Go Through Customer Feedback

The customer is always king. If you have a competitor that is highly successful, this can be because they know how to reach out to customers and how to ensure their customers have a positive experience.

Competitor analysis is incomplete without knowing how they treat their customers, and how they set up their customer service platform. This can occur by again trying out their services for yourself, or by going through their social media and seeing how they engage with negative reviews.

At the same time, you can go through product review sites and see how customers feel about their products. This can help you understand even more what customers are looking for in general, while also noting the kinds of weaknesses that you can make sure you don’t repeat.

5. Evaluate Your Competitor’s Prices

Perhaps one of the most important comparisons to make is between your prices and that of your competitors’. If there is a huge difference in price that isn’t compensated by a significant difference in quality or brand image, you may have difficulty in remaining competitive or in reaching the customers who have already bought from your competitors’.

If you find out that your competitors are selling products at a cheaper price, try to find out how. Do they use a different production company? At the same time, find alternatives to your own suppliers so you can reduce the price gap.

If their products are instead more expensive, try to see if this means that their products are higher quality. If you find that customers are still willing to purchase their goods because they are well-produced, you may want to find a better supplier for yourself, too.

6. Evaluate the Information and Do a SWOT Analysis

Once you’ve gathered all the necessary information about your competitors, apply them in your own strategies and evaluate how your business compares with them. You can do this easily by going through a SWOT analysis:

  • Strengths: qualities that your business has an edge on, such as having a product with a good brand
  • Weaknesses: qualities that your business is not as competitive in, such as having a smaller social media presence or a less established website
  • Opportunities: how you can expand your customer base, perhaps by improving your mobile app’s visuals or by targeting a specific gap in the market
  • Threats: what can jeopardize your path to growing your business, such as if a competing firm releases a new product

Why You Need Competitor Analysis

The best way to find out how competitive you will be in the mobile app industry is by knowing how to do a competitor analysis. In this way, you can know so much about your competitors that you will no longer need to feel intimidated by them. Instead, you can use this knowledge to stand out in the industry.

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Akash Shakya

Coming from distributed computing background, Akash manages the Sydney operations. He is highly technical yet very business focused and is always driven to create successful business products for our clients.

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