How do you think about competitive analysis? Is it your market share vs others, is it the feature list of what your product and service deliver compared to competitors, is it about your future product direction and how you fit with product trends and solution maturity? How do you think about who is your competitor? Do you only consider direct competitors or do you also consider secondary and tertiary competitors? And finally, how often do you need to do competitive analysis?
To help frame the question of how to manage understanding your competition, it is worth a quick review of hyper competition. Economist Jeremy Rifkin noted that competition is affected by four driving forces: customer change, technological change, falling industry boundaries, and deep pockets by competitors, if they occur together the result is hyper competition. His observations built on the work by Richard D’Aveni an academic who has written extensively on hyper competition. Hyper competition is a state where no action or advantage can be sustained for long and is a state of sustained instability.
How do you manage that? In my view, competitive analysis in a hyper competitive world needs both activities and habits. This article proposes a methodology for analyses and habits. Formal competitive analysis may be done once or twice a year while the habits you form need to be short and provide relatively easy access to changes occurring in your competitive landscape.
Where to start?
You need to start with a list of competitors which informs the primary search arguments to to identify keywords and themes which will be used to inform the analyses and the building of habits. It is worthwhile to start with a list of
- Direct competitors
- Companies offering the same products or services in the same geographical area targeting the same audience and needs.
- Indirect competitors
- Companies offering the same or similar services but who are serving a different need or targeting a different audience.
- Tertiary competitors
- Companies offering a product or service that is vaguely linked to yours but doesn’t directly compete today.
The next task is to simply enter those names into google search and note Googles knowledge panel (Googles search engine results page or SERP). Click on each page and open in a new tab.
The task now is to find keywords and themes from each of these pages. There are some great tools that allow you to do this. There are free tools you can add to your browser like SEO quake which do a great job identifying keywords and themes used by competitor websites. There are also other ways, which require a little more effort, and there is a good summary of these approaches here. For more sophisticated search that spans web properties and other digital communication channels, there are paid solutions like SEMRush and hubspot. And there are also content discovery tools like Buzzsumo that finds published social content from companies and industries you need to follow.
These tools allow you to gain some insights into the language (keywords) being used by your competitors to reach clients. Copy those keywords into a table and associate them to the competitors you want to analyse and follow.
Competitive analysis
Formal competitive analysis requires creating a template and researching competitors to find and fill the template attributes. A summary of the kind of approaches and categories for defining and measuring your product or service against competitors can be downloaded here.
The template you design informs the research strategy. Sources of information on your competitors obviously is dependent on your industry but generally information can be obtained from normal search, trade and industry magazines – events – associations, and social channels like linkedin and twitter. More detailed analysis can be supported by building influence maps, which will be discussed in another article.
Complementing analysis with habits.
A habit is a regular tendency or practice that is hard to give up. To build a habit for staying on top of the competition it needs to be regular and enjoyable. Fortunately with just a little effort, anyone can design a habit using readily available tools that deliver regular and enjoyable feedback on what your competition is doing.
With the keywords and themes you discovered with your initial research set up automated feeds using googles news discovery feature. That is easy to set up and will deliver important news around the keywords your competitors are using. You can find the link here.
Many of our media organisations also offer customised feeds that allow you to follow specific organisations. As an example, the Australian Financial Review has a great service called newsfeed.
There are also some tools in the market that use AI to curate and filter news around those keywords and competitors. As an example check out feedly.
Once you have set up your feeds it is worthwhile tracking a few key people that represent views and news from your competitors. For each competitor find key people like the current VP of sales and marketing. Follow those people on linked in and twitter. Look at the groups they follow and select a few groups to follow as well. It may be worthwhile setting up a new linkedin account and twitter account so you can follow people anonymously.
It may also be worthwhile to set up job alerts on linked in for your competitors so you can get visibility into what roles they are advertising for on linked in.
These are simple things to set up and deliver news back to you that is informative and interesting and supports your competitive intelligence. Importantly all these channels deliver information in small and frequent soundbites, which removes the effort that often stops habits from forming.
It is worth noting that there are some very sophisticated tools in the marketplace in a category of product solutions called competitive enablement. They are interesting solutions and may inspire you to think more creatively about how to position your organisation to compete in the market. A couple worth looking at
Summary
This article outlined a simple methodology for understanding and monitoring your competition in the marketplace. It proposes these steps:
- List your primary, secondary and tertiary competitors
- Find the keywords and themes they use in their digital communications
- Create a competitive analysis template that suits your business and for the competitors you selected for your keyword research, populate your template using good research protocols.
- Create competitive monitoring habits using readily available tools that can monitor the keywords and themes you discovered in your initial research.