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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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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