How To Perform A Competitor Analysis (Free Template)

Keeping a close watch on your competitors is necessary in order to identify new trends and tactics in a timely manner, predict market shifts, gain market share, and ultimately continue to grow competitive advantage. Competitive analysis in marketing is one of the tools that can help achieve this.

Conducting a competitor analysis can be a unique challenge. While the concept is simple, the process is a bit more complicated. In this article, we provide a framework for how to conduct such an analysis in order to develop a competitive strategy, as well as a direct template that you can use to get started today.

Looking for an easy way to put together your competitive intelligence strategy? Use this free competitor analysis template.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Competitive Analysis?

• Why Is a Competitor Analysis Important?

• What Are Competitive Analysis Methods?

• When to Perform a Competitor Analysis

• Competitor Analysis Framework

• Real-World Competitive Analysis Examples

• Competitor Analysis Summary

• Competitor Analysis Template

What Is a Competitive Analysis?

With a competitive analysis report, you can establish what makes your company unique compared to the competition. You can evaluate competitors by placing them into strategic categories and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own.

Competitive analysis can cover a wide range of areas, key metrics and more. Depending on your industry, some of these will be more crucial than others. Regardless, the more thorough the analysis, the more effective it will be in determining both direct and indirect competitors.

Here are some key steps in the process:

• Establish the purpose of constructing the competitive analysis framework
• Define who your competitors are
• Consider the buyer's journey
• Understand your competitors' hiring strategies
• Browse your competitors’ websites
• Analyze your competitor's media coverage
• Analyze your competitor's social media channels
• Encourage knowledge sharing (perhaps through an internal newsletter)
• Implement your findings

Want help putting together a competitor mapping strategy? Get in touch to receive a demo of the Meltwater platform.

Tip: Learn why you should create a centralized competitive intelligence database and read our customer story with the technology brand "realme" which uses Meltwater to keep abreast of competitor activity and innovations all over the world to see the Meltwater Suite in action.

Why is a Competitor Analysis Important?

Competitor analysis helps you better understand the space your business operates in. It’s a crucial step if you want to remain relevant in your industry. Watching what your competitors are doing gives you a more accurate starting point when considering your marketing strategy, social media strategy, and overall business strategy. 

Is a competitor planning a pivot? Why? Should you also look at this option? Perhaps it points to a wider consumer shift you need to pay attention to.

Doing regular competitor analysis exercises will help you answer these questions, and more, to move ahead with confidence and gain a larger share of consumer attention. 

What Are Competitive Analysis Methods? 

There are several ways you can undergo competitive analysis, each with their own benefits. Make sure you know what you want to figure out, and any hypotheses you have, before determining which method to use. It is likely you will end up using more than one, but you want to make sure they’ll help you find out what you want to know.

Here are a few top methods to get you started:

• 1. SWOT analysis

• 2. Strategic group analysis

• 3. Porter's five forces

• 4. Perceptual mapping

• 5. BCG Matrix (also called Growth Share matrix)

• 6. Use social listening

1. SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Use this framework to understand external and internal factors affecting your company, and can also be applied to analyzing your competitors. 

2. Strategic group analysis

Organize yourself and your competitors based on the differences or similarities between your marketing strategies. When you see who you’re most closely aligned with you can find an edge, and more accurately move forward in your business plan.

3. Porter's five forces

This framework is particularly useful for analyzing an industry's makeup. By understanding the structure that makes your industry (or a competing industry) thrive you can find opportunities to surge ahead. The “Five Forces” refers to five key elements you should base your competitive analysis on:

1. The threat of new entrants
2. The buyer's bargaining power
3. The supplier's bargaining power
4. The threat of substitutes
5. The intensity of competitive rivalry

4. Perceptual mapping

This is an analysis of how your product or service is received by the consumer, compared to your competitors. Especially useful for helping determine new marketing strategies and product development roadmaps, as you’ll gain an understanding of what products consumers respond most favorably to.

Tip: Gathering consumer insights and executing on a consumer intelligence strategy using consumer insights tools will help you with this process.

5. BCG Matrix (also called Growth Share matrix)

Developed in 1970 by Boston Consulting Group, this framework helps businesses understand which products to invest in based on others in the industry. You separate products or opportunities into four categories: high growth, low growth, high market share, low market share.

6. Use social listening

Another way to learn important information about who your competitors are is through social listening and media monitoring. You can track brand-name mentions, product names, and other industry-specific terms to get a full picture of the competitive landscape. These insights can then be compiled into dashboards for easy sharing with various stakeholders.

Additionally, setting up alerts for competitor mentions gives you real time insight into their activity, which allows you to pivot your strategy if necessary.

When to Perform a Competitor Analysis

While you should be monitoring your competitors on a regular basis, there are a few key moments when performing an in-depth competitor analysis is recommended:

1. Starting a business

Whether you’re seeking out Etsy shop ideas or dreaming about launching a tech startup, analyzing the competition should be one of the very first steps before you press “Go”.

It will give you a deep understanding of the industry you plan to enter or disrupt, and know who else is trying to edge into the space.

Investors will want to know this too, so it’s important to be airtight and clear about who your direct competitors are, who the big players are, and any potential industry-adjacent competitors. 

2. Launching a new product or service

If you have plans to launch a new product or service, be sure to check if your competitors have done something similar.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go forward with your launch, but you'll want to track how successful their product has been so you can have a competitive advantage and do it better.

It will also help you craft the messaging and marketing strategy around your product to differentiate them from others already on the market.

3. If you’re considering a pivot

Pivots are a natural part of the evolution for many businesses, and while they are nerve-wracking, they can be super successful if executed carefully.

Part of that careful execution includes analyzing competitors who have either done the same thing, or any potential new competitors you’ll have after pivoting.

Depending on how dramatic your pivot is, you could consider conducting your competitive analysis as though you were starting a new business.

4. A stagnating business

Your business could be humming along nicely, but not growing. This is another good time to perform a competitive analysis, especially if you notice your competitors gaining traction and market share. Understand any new tactics they might be using, any wider industry trends that you may have missed and thus are losing customers.

5. Drop in organic traffic 

Over half (53%) of all website traffic comes from organic search, according to a study by BrightEdge. This means you need to be doing serious competitive keyword analysis all the time, but especially if you notice a drop in traffic from organic search.

This likely means your competitors have done a few tweaks on their meta information, which is impacting the relevance of your search results, decreasing clicks, and pushing your relevant content further down the front page of search engines.

Competitor Analysis Framework

So now it's time to move forward with gathering competitive intelligence.

Here is a framework to use to help you conduct a successful analysis and stay aligned with your goals:

1. Agree on the purpose of your competitive analysis

First, identify why you are performing a competitive analysis? Is it to improve the customer experience? Benchmark your marketing efforts or review your business as a whole? Keep in mind the purpose of your competitive analysis as it will influence the type of activity you look at when researching competitors.

2. Define who your competitors are

Next, you need to select which competitors to analyze. Create a list of any company that sells a product or service similar to yours, targeted to a similar audience.

Once this list is complete, we recommend dividing it into 3 categories:

1. Direct competitors: These are the companies that target the same audience and offer a product or service similar to yours.
2. Indirect competitors: These companies offer a different product or service, but in general, they still meet the same needs that your company's solutions offer.
3. Tertiary (or substitution) competitors: These companies sell products or services that are different from yours but target the same audience. Their usefulness is limited to the fact that they can potentially become either partners or threats.

Here you can see an example from the travel industry of how you may group your perceived competition into the different categories.

Top Tip: Speak to your sales teams about who they’re frequently coming up against and losing to when trying to bring on a new client.

3. Consider the buyer's journey

How do your competitors sell their products? How do they shape their customer journeys? To find out, you will have to put yourself in the shoes of one of their clients.

A good place to start is by analyzing each stage of the marketing funnel.

If you primarily operate online, visit your competitors’ websites to better understand their marketing strategy. Use competitor analysis tools like SEMRush and Moz to discover their traffic sources and the keywords on which they are positioned. These tools can also offer insights into their SEO strategy.

Also be sure to analyze their content, their incentives, and their pricing policies. Analyzing the content types that they are pushing can give an idea of which funnel stage they are prioritizing.

Are they pushing blog posts more frequently that are targeting long-tail keywords? This may indicate that they are targeting more top-of-funnel searches.

Are they pushing more optimizations to their core product pages, and making updates to their contact pages? This may be a hint that they are prioritizing bottom-of-the-funnel searchers that they are looking to convert.

Tip: Check out our free competitive analysis template to begin putting together your strategy.

4. Understand your competitors' hiring strategy

It is difficult to obtain information on the personnel of a competing company, but when you find it, it can prove very useful. Knowing how many employees, their education level, and how many offices they have can be quite informative.

Whilst, not an accurate art, LinkedIn can be a good indication of the number of employees a brand has, and their role and education level, and where their hiring priorities currently are.

Tip: You can also use a sales intelligence tool to gather some of this information.

You should also keep an eye on job ads. Using our reports we compared our hiring strategy with that of other players in our market. To do this, we analyzed job offers published on LinkedIn according to various criteria such as the type of job, location, and level of experience required.

This analysis helps to identify the players experiencing strong growth. We can also predict their next actions. For example, the recruitment of a large number of engineers suggests new products under development. Whereas, hiring salespeople in a new country means that the company is setting up to break into new markets.

5. Comparison of financial services

Monitoring the financial health of a competing company is an excellent method of competitive benchmarking. Examples include gross, operating, and net profit margins, wages, sales, and profitability of competing companies. Note the key differences and try to assess why those discrepancies exist.

If a company is public, financial data is easier to find. This can also help provide more insight into a company's general business model and operations. A few resources to get you started: Companies House, CompanyCheck, and Endole.

6. Browse your competitors’ website

Viewing your competitors’ websites is an effective and quick way to find out what their offerings are, and how they communicate to potential customers.

Here are some questions you should try to answer during this exercise:

• Is it well-designed and easy to navigate?
• Where are the main CTAs placed?
• Are they running any significant promotions?
• Do they have new products or services that they are showcasing?
• Is it user-friendly?

You can also evaluate the kind of content they’re publishing. Do they have a blog? How often do they post and what kind of content is it?

Want help putting together a competitor mapping strategy? Get in touch to receive a demo of the Meltwater suite.

7. Analyze the media coverage of your competitors

One of the most interesting sources for competitive analysis is measuring media coverage. 

In our webinar with client Wildwood PR, they explained how they use media monitoring to create competitive intelligence reports:

“One of the things we track and find to be important to clients is the number of mentions. How often do they appear in the media? How does that compare to their competitors?”

Once they have a comparison chart drawn up, they dig into the sentiment of those mentions.

“We then look at the actual content of the coverage…it’s all very well looking at it from a quantity perspective, but it may be that the most mentioned brand has had lots of negative coverage.”

Blending lots of different metrics within one tool can provide a better overall picture of how your competitors are performing.

Another important element of competitive intelligence that is worth paying close attention to, is the themes being covered in the media. Keyword clouds can show you how the conversation has changed over different periods of times.

Media coverage can also reveal the latest actions of your competitors such as product launches, partnerships, acquisitions, and even PR crises. This can offer a wealth of information for your internal competitive strategy.

We have been working with Meltwater for a number of years and have found the benchmarking reports we can generate extremely useful not only to understand how our clients are performing against their competition but also as a way to set objectives and meet KPIs. 

– Tanya Houston, Managing Director, Wildwood PR

8. Analyze your competitors on social media

You can learn a lot about your competition in business and industry from conducting a competitor analysis as part of a social media audit. Rather than only looking at how many followers each brand has, you can also analyze engagement, sentiment, common complaints, and more.

If you are working with influencers, consider conducting an influencer marketing competitor audit using our free influencer marketing competitor audit template.

The easiest way to do this is by using social listening tools, which will allow you to analyze all the mentions of your competition in marketing and follow the opinions on forums and blogs. You will then have an overview of their reputation, engagement, and what their audience likes and dislike about their products.

Top tip: You can set up a boolean search with your competitor’s names, and specific positive or negative keywords. For example “[Brand Name]” AND “acquisition” OR “scandal”. You can then set up instant alerts, to be notified to big news or crises around a particular competitor. 

Understand your indirect and direct competitors by performing a competitor analysis with Meltwater. Get a demo of the Meltwater platform.

9. Encourage knowledge sharing within your teams

Chances are your customers and prospects have knowledge and experience with your competitors. Depending on your business, perhaps they’ve been pitched to or bought their products in the past. It can be useful to speak to these people and learn everything you can about your competitors. Why did they choose you (or not choose you) over your competitors?

It is essential to encourage the sharing of information. The story of a customer who has had a bad experience with a competitor will undoubtedly interest your sales and customer experience managers.

To encourage the sharing of this knowledge, you can create either an internal discussion group, where testimonials and ‘battle cards’ are shared. Creating a specific forum for this information ensures that everyone receives the information (as opposed to ad hoc information sharing). 

Share competitive intelligence through:

• Email alerts
• Internal newsletters
• On your intranet

10. Implement your findings

The most important part of our competitive intelligence is to learn and improve. Consider how each part of your competitive intelligence and competitor analysis can be used to improve your social media marketing strategy, events, webinars, ebooks, and other marketing activities.

Almost every aspect of your strategy can be improved with competitive intelligence. Check out our competitor analysis template for a comprehensive view of a competitor analysis example, and to get started on developing a competitive analysis today. Simply make a copy to start evaluating how your business stacks up against others in your industry.

Real-World Competitive Analysis Examples

Curious how real-world companies have use competitive analysis? Here are some examples:

1. H&M Mexico

H&M Mexico was seeking a way to gather comprehensive, valuable, and up-to-date competitor information, to make their campaign strategy more targeted and relevant to the fashion space. The easy-to-interpret visualization from competitor reports made it straightforward for them to distinguish the important information from the noise. 

"I like to arrive in the morning, log into Meltwater, and get insight into everything that's happening instantly."

Javier Ruiz, Digital Marketing Strategist, H&M Mexico

2. Google

Knowing the competitive landscape is important for all tech companies, whether early-stage startups, to keep up with other players trying to disrupt the market, or giants like Google, helping them remain competitive in an environment when there’s always a hot new idea right around the corner. 

"First, it gives us the reach, engagement and sentiment data that we're looking for above and beyond our own channels. We're not just interested in understanding how our own posts perform, we want to know what the larger conversation looks like. Second, with the automation we are able to automatically pull data into our own internal dashboards, which is incredibly valuable from a time perspective."

Katie Miller, Program Manager, The Cloud Developer Relations Team (Google)

Competitor Analysis Summary

1. Be clear about what you want to benchmark
2. Remember that benchmarking should be an on-going process
3. Use the right competitor analysis tools
4. Have the right tracking and analytics in place
5. Make it actionable

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Competitor Analysis Template

Don't forget to access this free template for conducting a strategic competitive analysis!