How to Research Business Competition

Knowing who your business competitors are and understanding their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses can help you to improve your own strategies, products, and services. So it is important to know how to research your competition and what to look for. In this article, we go over some tips.

Conducting Research on Your Competitors

Analyze their Presence

Find your top five to ten competitors. For some niches, there may not be much competition, for others, there may be a lot.

A good place to start when researching your competition is to analyze their online presence, starting with their website. What products or services are they promoting and what strategies and offers are they using?

There are also many different types of content that you can compare to yours, such as their blog, videos, case studies, images, and more. If they have a newsletter, you can sign up for it and see the types of messages that they are sending out to their audience on a regular basis.

Using Tools to Track Competition

There are some great tools that you can use for finding and analyzing the competitors in your market to research business competition. For example, you can use SEM Rush to analyze the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. Another similar tool is SpyFu. Google Trends and Google Alerts are also great tools for keeping up with your competition and the trends in your industry.

Purchase from Your Competition

Being a customer and purchasing from your competition will allow you to experience what your competitor’s customers actually experience. This also helps you to view your own products and services from a new angle. Ask yourself what you liked and disliked about your competitor’s products or service and what you would improve about them.

Look at Online Comments about Your Competitors

Researching and looking at online comments about your competition from their customers can tell you a lot about what customers loved or thought could have been better about their experiences. Some of the places where you can look for comments include Google reviews, social media, and Yelp reviews. 

Analyze their Advertising

Analyzing the advertising of your competition can give you insights on how to best target your audience with offers, copy, and images. It can also give you ideas for what products or services to advertise, and whether your pricing is high, low, or average compared to competitors in the market.

One way of examining your competitor’s advertising to research business competition is by looking at the advertising section of their Facebook page to see if they are currently running any ads on Facebook. You may also find your competitor in Facebook Audience Insights, which can allow you to see demographic information about their target audience.

Another way that you can analyze the offers of your competition is by looking at deal sites such as Groupon, which can allow you to see what offers in a particular niche were most popular with customers.

At Mission Web Marketing, we can help you to analyze the competitors in your market to optimize your marketing plan. Get in touch today!