You think you know your competitors. You believe your product has an edge. But without competitive intelligence to provide a clear, objective view of how you stack up, you’re operating on instinct, not facts.
Assumptions are the enemy in marketing. That’s why a competitive matrix is so powerful. It gives you a clear, side-by-side comparison of you vs. your competitors and where your best opportunities lie.
Here’s how to build a competitive matrix that moves the needle and why it’s a must-have in your marketing toolkit.
Contents:
Understanding the Competitive Matrix
Benefits of Using a Competitive Matrix
How to Build a Competitive Matrix
Examples of Competitive Matrices
Competitive Matrix vs. SWOT Analysis
Tools to Create Competitive Matrices
FAQs
Understanding the Competitive Matrix
Competitive matrix definition: A visual tool that compares a company’s product, service, or brand against key competitors across various criteria, such as pricing, features, customer experience, marketing channels, or brand perception.
A competitive matrix usually takes the form of a grid or table. It gives marketers and other stakeholders a side-by-side look at how each entity stacks up in certain areas.
This tool helps you more easily spot strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the market that you could fill. It’s also incredibly effective at communicating competitive insights across departments, especially when product, sales, and marketing teams need to align on strategy.
Competitive matrices provide value across all stages of growth:
- Startups for finding a niche in a crowded market.
- Growing brands for sharpening their differentiation.
- Mature businesses for monitoring shifts in competitive positioning or guiding a rebrand.
Any time you're launching a product, entering a new market, or reassessing strategy, this tool belongs on your desk.
TIP: Don't miss our blog on the best competitive intelligence tools on the market, along with helpful tips on how to use them!
Benefits of Using a Competitive Matrix
Competitive matrices look like neat little spreadsheets, but they’re much more powerful. Here’s how they bring clarity to chaos and empower marketing teams.
Visualizing the competitive landscape
A competitive matrix helps you see where every player stands at a glance, including you.
Rather than reviewing vague impressions or word-of-mouth claims, you get a hard look at how brands compare based on measurable factors like price, features, reach, or customer reviews. The visual layout makes it easy to see who’s dominating certain areas, who’s falling behind, and who’s occupying the same strategic space as you.
This kind of visibility is especially useful in industries where differentiation is tricky, like SaaS or eCommerce. It lets you cut through distractions and ask targeted questions: Who’s going overboard on marketing spend? Who’s quietly building loyalty? Who’s competing on value vs. innovation?
Identifying market gaps and opportunities
Laying out a competitive analysis in a matrix reveals valuable white space — the unmet customer needs or underserved segments your competitors have overlooked.
It might be a feature no one else is offering, a price tier that’s missing, or a messaging angle that hasn’t been claimed. A matrix comparison shines a light on where your brand can break away from the pack.
You can also more easily identify saturation in your market. For example, if every competitor is playing in the same lane, you have a chance to zag while everyone else zigs. This might mean targeting a different persona, shifting positioning, or introducing a new value prop.
Supporting strategic planning
Marketers are constantly realizing the need to prove themselves to other stakeholders and decision makers. A competitive matrix is a great tool to support your vision and show you’re making smart, strategic decisions.
Presenting a well-made matrix to leadership shows you’ve done your homework and helps you justify your marketing plan. It illustrates ideas rooted in evidence, not hunches, and other stakeholders can more easily follow along when your ideas are visually laid out.
How to Build a Competitive Matrix
Creating a competitive matrix involves deep research, an understanding of your market and competitors, and maybe a pinch of design skills. Once you have all the pieces, creating your matrix is a pretty straightforward process.
Here’s how to build your own competitive matrix.
Step 1: Identify competitors
Start by narrowing down who you’re actually competing with. This might be a mix of direct competitors (those offering similar products to the same customers) and indirect competitors (those solving the same problem in a different way).
You don’t need to pick every company in your niche. Focus on your true competitive rivalry (3-5 players) that are relevant to your current goals (e.g., brand positioning, product differentiation).
Pro tip: If you’re not sure who to include, look at who your customers mention during sales calls, who’s bidding on your paid keywords, or who dominates the SERPs for your top search terms.
Step 2: Select comparison criteria
Next, decide which factors you want to compare. Examples include:
- Pricing
- Keywords
- Product features and benefits
- Tone of voice and messaging
- User experience
- Customer support
- Market share or presence
- Brand perception
- Customer ratings and reviews
Stick with 5-10 criteria to keep your matrix focused and actionable.
Step 3: Gather data
Collect data from trusted sources, such as:
- Competitor websites
- Pricing pages
- Product demos
- Customer reviews
- Analyst reports
- Review sites like G2 and Capterra
- Tools like SEMrush or Similarweb
- Internal sources like your CRM and sales transcripts
Keep it honest and objective. It’s tempting to skew results in your favor, but a biased matrix only leads to flawed strategy.
Step 4: Design the Matrix
With data in hand, start visualizing your findings in a matrix. You can keep it simple with a comparison table or go more visual with quadrant charts, bubble graphs, or color-coded scorecards.
Tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Canva, or even PowerPoint are great starting points. They have plug-and-play templates that you can customize to your needs.
The key is clarity. Make it easy to spot who’s leading in what areas and where your brand stands out (or falls short).
Step 5: Analyze and Act
Take your finished matrix and zoom out: Who’s dominating? Who’s failing to deliver? Where’s the white space?
Use your analysis to inform messaging, product development, go-to-market strategy, or pricing updates.
Then, rinse and repeat on a regular basis. Competitive analyses can become outdated. Revising it regularly helps you stay relevant and strategic.
TIP: Check out our free webinar featuring tips and strategies from a competitive intelligence analyst!
Examples of Competitive Matrices
Competitive matrices can take different forms and styles. Some are more complex than others. Others are geared to specific use cases.
Use these competitive matrix examples to jumpstart your own.
Basic table example
Most competitive matrices will take the form of a table, where competitors are displayed as rows and features or other criteria in columns (or vice-versa).
Source: Pipedrive
In this example, we see numerical scores assigned to each competitor and criterion. Color-coding the scores makes it easy to see top performers in each category.
Feature matrix
One way to align features and pricing is to build a Feature matrix. This quadrant-style matrix evaluates what your platform offers and how those features stack up in terms of relevance and uniqueness.
Source: T2D3
The horizontal (X) axis measures differentiation (how unique a feature is). On the left are features everyone offers (commodities) and on the right are features only you offer (unique).
The vertical (Y) axis tracks popularity or usage, from features used by a handful of users (bottom) to those relied on by nearly all your customers (top).
When you plot your product’s capabilities along these axes, you begin to see which features are common, which are niche, and which are your most compelling selling points.
- The upper right quadrant—highly used and highly differentiated—is where your strongest value proposition lives. These are the features that drive purchase decisions and justify premium pricing.
- The lower right contains more specialized features, less frequently used but still uniquely yours, ideal as add-ons or enterprise-level upgrades.
- The upper left includes popular but common features—useful, but not market-moving.
- The lower left is the noise—features that few customers use and that most competitors offer, which may be cluttering your messaging or product focus.
The key is to know what matters to your audience and where your product shines. From there, you can build your pricing and positioning around that insight.
2x2 market positioning matrix
The 2x2 matrix is one of the most widely used competitive analysis tools. It evaluates a company’s competitive position based on two essential factors.
Source: Management Consulted
These two axes typically represent variables like price vs. quality, innovation vs. usability, or market share vs. growth potential. Each company or product is plotted in one of the four resulting quadrants, offering a quick snapshot of how different players are positioned.
For example, a brand offering high quality at a low price would fall into one quadrant, while a premium, high-price/high-quality competitor would land in another.
It's especially useful for competitive analysis because it forces you to focus on what truly drives customer decisions.
Competitive Matrix vs. SWOT Analysis
When you think competitive matrix, a SWOT analysis might come to mind. You might consider this a type of competitive matrix, but it’s mostly skewed for internal needs rather than competitor monitoring.
A SWOT analysis is a 2x2 grid that shows strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Rather than focusing on direct competitors, it zooms out to assess your business’s own capabilities and positioning.
By comparison, a typical competitive matrix offers a side-by-side, feature-level comparison of your product or service against key competitors. It’s highly visual and tactical, helping you evaluate specific attributes like pricing, features, UX, customer support, and brand positioning.
| Competitive Matrix | SWOT Analysis | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Compare your product directly with competitors across specific attributes | Evaluate internal and external factors that affect business performance |
| Primary Focus | External | Internal + external |
| Format | Visual grid or chart | Quadrant-based list |
| Common Use Cases |
|
|
| Key Benefits | Clarifies competitive differentiation; supports marketing and product decisions | Holistic view of company health |
| Limitations | May overlook broader internal challenges or macro-level risks | Does not provide direct comparison with competitors |
Use a competitive matrix when you're launching a new product, repositioning your brand, planning pricing tiers, or crafting a go-to-market strategy. It’s especially valuable when you're dealing with feature-rich products or crowded markets.
Use a SWOT analysis when you're developing a business plan, evaluating long-term strategy, or preparing for major organizational changes. It's a great tool for finding hidden barriers or new growth opportunities.
TIP: Social listening solutions like Meltwater can play a vital role in your competitive intelligence initiatives. Download our free Ultimate Guide to Social Listening for Benchmarking to learn more!
Tools to Create Competitive Matrices
You don’t need expert design skills to create a competitive matrix. These tools can help you organize your data and create compelling visuals in minutes.
Google Sheets/Excel
Popular spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets or Excel typically include templates that get you most of the way there. You can make your matrices as simple or complex as you like.
Canva/Lucidchart
Drag-and-drop tools like Canva and Lucid Chart use AI to help you create just about any visual. Find a template or tell AI what you want to create, then add your data.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s competitor analysis tools help you gather data on your competitors and turn them into visual narratives. AI technology analyzes millions of data points in real time on your brand and competitors.
From social media competitor analysis to media monitoring, AI surfaces insights and connections you might not be looking for (but matter to your competitive strategy).
From there, it transforms analyses into matrices or other visuals to help you quickly grasp key ideas. It also spells out what the insights mean to help you connect the dots faster with a high degree of confidence.
Final Thoughts
Knowing where you stand against your competitors is the only way to gain an edge. Meltwater helps you put the pieces together by collecting competitive intelligence across social media, blogs, podcasts, forums, websites, and other sources. AI analyzes these data points to find what makes you different, your competitive advantages, and where you might improve.
Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below!
FAQs
What should be included in a competitive matrix?
A competitive matrix should include your product and key competitors, along with comparison criteria like pricing, features, customer support, user experience, brand perception, and other attributes relevant to your target audience.
How often should a competitive matrix be updated?
Update your competitive matrix quarterly or whenever there are significant changes in your market, like a new competitor entering, a product launch, or a shift in customer expectations.
Can a competitive matrix help with product development?
Yes. A competitive matrix highlights feature gaps and unmet customer needs, helping product teams prioritize development efforts based on what competitors lack and what customers value most.
