A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity. Hence, having competition and complete knowledge about your competitors is an absolute strategy that a firm should indulge in.
While evolving a strategic management for a firm, it’s an utmost task for managers to know the existing marketplace.Therefore, industry awareness is important but for a deeper understanding of markets, it is necessary to be aware of the competitor’s strategies, their target audiences, the commercialization plan, the setbacks faced in the businesses, etc.
This article deals with the top strategies adopted for competitive analysis and benefits of knowing the anticipated trends.
KNOW YOUR COMPETITOR:
Since we are a part of the social environment, working on your project is important but equivalent attention should be given to accessing competitor’s work.
- Google ads
- Facebook ads
- Their websites
- Hidden pages on website
- Hidden databases on sites
- SEO keywords
- SEO backlinks
- Job boards. see profiles and location
- Follow management team of those companies on professional networks likeLinkedInn
- Patents published
- Research papers by team members
- Glassdoor
- Alternativeto
- Follow their blog. see what they are blogging about.
- Follow social media accounts, see what they publishing
- Google news search, google image search
- See app downloads on appp and play stores
- See global website rank and Local(which country) website rank
- Google trends
- Google alerts
COMPETITIVE MONITORING TOOLS
Knowing your competition is important but it is absolutely necessary to use methods that save time and have specialised aid for formulating the competitor’s strategies: There are several tools available in the market for different parameters.
Startupflux aims to collate all data in one single place and save you hours running competitive analysis.
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS:
- To know about your competitors is important since it helps you to gain greater insights about the industrial operations.
- Understand the demography of targeted audience.
- For providing effective solution, see the past – by checking out on your competitor’s response on industrial problems.
- Prepare a succinct package of solutions based on feedbacks, queries and engagement.
THE COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Competitive analysis forms an important part of planning strategic policies for a company. The competitive environment of which we are a part of, requires you to have a complete knowledge of the market trends which can be accessed better with monitoring of competitors.
It enables you to identify gaps in the market for products, services or initiatives.
Assists you to price your goods and services both competitively and strategically.
And above all gives you new technology and methodology that could be applied within your organization.
To gain a broader insight of the market it is important to learn from the lessons our competitors learned.
But competitive analysis could be useful if we could save time and resources in searching the net and that can be solved by using tools available in market for pre designed analysis work engines.
P.S. We have also created a Google Sheet template for Competitive Analysis. Access here
P.S.S Sometimes you see the Mandela Effect with the competitors. You presume and believe what is not true and it deviates you from the path you’re supposed to take. So better believe in data and not just your intuition.