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.
Contents
What Is a Competitive Analysis?
When You Should Perform a Competitor Analysis
What Methods Should You Use for Competitor Analysis?
How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis (Step-by-Step)
How Meltwater Supports Competitor Analysis
Start Analyzing Your Competitors to Gain a Competitive Edge
FAQs: Performing a Competitor Analysis
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
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 it’s important to analyze your competitors
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 to include in a competitive analysis
To be useful, a strong competitive analysis will focus on understanding how and why they succeed (or fall short) in the market. To get a complete picture, your analysis should include:
- Direct, indirect, and emerging competitors
- Products or services, with a focus on features, pricing, and value propositions
- Brand positioning and messaging across websites, content, and campaigns
- Marketing and distribution channels, such as social, paid media, and partnerships
- Target audiences and market segments each competitor serves
- Customer sentiment, drawn from reviews, testimonials, and social conversations
- Market share and growth trends to assess competitive momentum
- Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to highlight gaps and risks
- LLM positioning to get the full picture of their presence where a large portion of consumer searches are now happening
Together, these components help you identify where competitors are winning, where they fall short, and where your brand can differentiate and capture unmet demand.
When Should You Perform a Competitor Analysis?
While you should be monitoring your competitors on a regular basis, there are a few pivitol moments when performing a more in-depth competitor analysis is recommended:
1. Starting a business
2. Launching a new product or service
3. Business pivot
4. Growth stagnation
5. Drop in traffic
1. Starting a business
Whether you’re seeking out ideas for a new Etsy shop or dreaming about launching a tech startup, analyzing the competition should be one of the very first steps before you press “Go”.
The exercise will give you a deep, multi-faceted understanding of the industry you plan to enter or disrupt, including other players who may be trying to edge into the space. Using Crowdspring to create distinctive branding and design can give you a competitive advantage by helping your business stand out visually in a crowded market.
From this information you can devise a strategic marketing plan to differentiate yourself, your products, and your vision.
2. Launching a new product or service
If you have plans to launch a new product or service, it's important to check if your competitors have done something similar, and follow that up with some social listening to assess customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the results.
Depending on the results, it certainly doesn’t mean you should or shouldn’t go forward with your launch, but armed with competitive insights you can hone your messaging, better prepare for customer response, and iterate on your competitors shortfalls.
Use competitor analysis to differentiate yourself and highlight why consumers should choose your product or service over others in the market.
3. Business pivot
Pivots are a natural part of the evolution for many businesses, and while they are nerve-wracking, they can be extremely successful if executed well.
Part of that careful execution comes from analyzing competitors who have either done the same thing, as well as identifying any potential new competitors you’ll have after a successful pivot. (Depending on how dramatic your pivot is, you could consider conducting your competitive analysis as though you were starting a new business).
Use a competitive matrix to understand the major players in the market.
4. Growth stagnation
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. If you've started losing customers, you need to understand any new tactics they might be using and any wider industry trends that you may have missed.
Identify market trends and market gaps that you can use to attract new customers or win back prior customers.
5. Drop in traffic
If you've noticed a dip in organic traffic it could be due to something different one of your competitors is doing in their SEO strategy, or it could have to do with the move away from traditional search and toward LLMs for brand discovery. You should be doing competitive keyword analysis on a regular basis, but especially if you notice a drop in traffic.
Gain an understanding of how major LLM models are representing your brand against your competitors. If there are inaccuracies, you can take steps to address them.
Goals of competitive analysis
Competitive analysis turns market research into actionable strategy. Rather than guessing what will work, it helps teams make informed decisions based on how the market is already behaving.
Key goals of a competitive analysis include:
- Identifying market gaps by uncovering unmet needs, underserved audiences, and competitor blind spots
- Informing product and service development through insights into features, pricing, and customer expectations
- Uncovering market and industry trends to anticipate changes before they become standard
- Refining messaging and positioning by understanding how competitors communicate value—and where you can differentiate
- Strengthening strategic decision-making across marketing, sales, and go-to-market planning
By clearly defining these goals upfront, competitive analysis becomes a practical tool for growth, differentiation, and long-term market relevance—not just a one-off research exercise.
What Methods Should You Use for Competitor Analysis?
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.
Types of competitor analysis
There are a few different key types of competitor analysis you can consider focusing on when compiling your competitor list.
- Market research: focuses on understanding the broader landscape, including customer needs, market size, trends, and emerging demand that influence competitive dynamics.
- Product analysis: compares competitor offerings based on features, pricing, usability, and value to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the market.
- Sales analysis: examines how competitors sell, including target segments, sales motions, distribution channels, and buying cycles.
- Marketing analysis: evaluates competitor messaging, positioning, campaigns, channels, and audience engagement to understand how they attract and influence customers.
- Financial analysis: reviews publicly available financial data and growth signals to assess competitor performance, stability, and investment priorities.
Traditional analysis methods
Tried and true methods for competitive analysis are still used in conjunction with more "new fangled" approaches. These more traditional techinques may feel old fashioned but they are reliable ways of identifying competitors and action points based on your findings.
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.
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.
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:
- The threat of new entrants
- The buyer's bargaining power
- The supplier's bargaining power
- The threat of substitutes
- The intensity of competitive rivalry
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.
BCG 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.
Digital signal methods
In order to get the fullest picture and the deepest, most relevant insights teams need to also employ digital methods alongside more traditional methods of competitor analysis.
Social listening
Another way to learn important information about who your competitors are is through social listening and media intelligence. 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.
SEO & GEO benchmarking
The newest frontier in competitor benchmarking is monitoring for LLM visibility. Understanding how your competitors are appearing in various LLM results is crucial for getting the full picture because it will show you how various LLM models like ChatGPT are representing your brand vs your competitors. If there are inaccuracies or inconsistencies it means the LLMs have less, more disparate, or more negative information available to draw upon for surfacing their results. Upon discovering this you can work to correct the information and make sure you're mentioned positively alongside other major players in your space.
How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis (Step-by-Step)
So now it's time to move forward with the actual process of gathering competitive intelligence.
Whatever the goal of your competitive analysis, the process is most effective when it follows clear steps. Without a structure like the one we've outlined below, it’s easy to collect too much data, focus on the wrong competitors, or come away with insights that aren't really actionable.
Each of these steps forms a framework to help you move from research to results, focusing on specific inputs and outputs.
Tools like Meltwater’s media intelligence, social listening, and AI-powered insights can help streamline data collection, surface patterns faster, and keep your analysis grounded in real-time market signals rather than assumptions.
1. Define objectives and scope
2. Identify competitors
3. Collect data
4. Analyze & compare
5. Translate insights into action
1. Define objectives and scope
Before you begin gathering competitor data, you need to be crystal clear on why you’re doing this analysis. Are you testing assumptions about product demand? Looking to refine your messaging? Or trying to benchmark share of voice against rivals?
Setting your objectives determines which competitors matter most and what types of data you need. This will inform and structure your approach so you don't end up in irrelevant rabbit holes.
Using Meltwater’s customizable unified dashboards and reporting tools to define KPIs up front, you can measure progress consistently across channels as you move through the analysis.
2. Identify competitors
Once you have your goals laid out, the next step is to identify specific competitors. Start with direct competitors before looking beyond those brands that offer the same product or service as you. Direct competitors are who you compete with the most frequently when it comes to market share and customer base, but they aren't the only area to keep your eye on.
Indirect competitors are those companies that may solve the same problem you do, but from a different angle. Their business models may differ but they are occupying a similar enough space.
Aspirational competitors may not currently compete with you but they present strong brand positioning, innovation, or market leadership within or adjacent to your space.
For example, here's how a travel company may group perceived competition into different categories:
| Competitor | Direct Competitor | Indirect Competitor | Tertiary Competitor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kayak | ✓ | ||
| Skyscanner | ✓ | ||
| Cheapflights | ✓ | ||
| Expedia | ✓ | ||
| Booking.com | ✓ | ||
| TripAdvisor | ✓ |
Meltwater’s media intelligence and social listening help surface insights on all three types by analyzing news coverage, industry publications, and social conversations. This competitive research you spot emerging players, alternative solutions, and category leaders influencing buyer expectations and decisions. Real time alerts ensure you stay aware of new entrants and shifting competitive dynamics as they happen.
3. Collect data
After identifying the competitors you wand to focus on, it’s time to gather data. Track media coverage to see who’s being mentioned most and in what context, monitor social platforms to understand audience conversations and sentiment, and pull in signals from broader online sources. This is also the step where you would identify any recent hires they've made, and publicly available financial information such as gross, operating, and net profit margins, wages, sales, and profitability of competing companies.
With Meltwater’s social listening and media monitoring tools, you can capture mentions, sentiment trends, and topic spikes across millions of sources. For even deeper context, you can integrate AI visibility insights from GenAI Lens to see how competitors are being portrayed across major LLM models, revealing narrative gaps and perception risks.
4. Analyze & compare
With data in hand, benchmark your competitors on key dimensions: product positioning, messaging clarity, media footprint, share of voice, sentiment trends, and emerging topics. Layer in social sentiment and AI-powered narrative tracking to uncover deeper opportunity gaps that might not show up in traditional metrics.
Meltwater’s comparative reporting and analytics surfaces patterns and outliers, letting you contrast performance side-by-side and highlight areas where competitors are strong — and where they’re leaving room for innovation.
Tip: Check out our free competitive analysis template to begin putting together your strategy.
5. Translate insights into action
Insights are only valuable when they fuel concrete strategic moves. Use your analysis to refine positioning, evolve messaging, prioritize product enhancements, or plan targeted competitive responses. With automated reports and customizable alerts, you can keep your strategy agile, responding in real-time to shifts in competitor activity and emerging narratives.
Meltwater allows you to export insights into shareable briefs and media lists to align cross-functional teams — from product and marketing to executive leadership.
How Meltwater Supports Competitor Analysis
By combining real-time monitoring with customizable dashboards and reporting, Meltwater makes it easier to track competitors, spot shifts in the landscape, and share insights across all relevant teams.
Real-time media & social monitoring
Effective competitor analysis starts with timely visibility into what’s happening in the market. Meltwater’s platform allows you to continuously monitors news, blogs, broadcast, and major social channels so you can track competitor mentions, campaign launches, sentiment shifts, and emerging trends as they unfold.
With unlimited keyword tracking, customizable real-time alerts, and AI-powered sentiment analysis built into our social listening and media intelligence tools, you can surface relevant signals across thousands of posts, and a wide range of channels, without the manual searching and potential for human error. This real-time perspective helps you respond to competitor moves, detect narrative shifts, and capture opportunities before they become mainstream.
Competitive intelligence dashboards & alerting
With Meltwater’s custom dashboards you can transform raw data into organized, visual insights that you and key stakeholders can interpret at a glance. Customizable views let you benchmark competitors’ presence, share of voice, sentiment trends, and topic trajectories side-by-side with your own performance.
Built-in alerting notifies you of spikes in coverage, emerging discussions, and changes in competitor activity so you never miss a signal. These real-time dashboards and alerts mean you can move from data collection to insight quickly, empowering smarter decisions and strategic pivots.
Integrating insights into team workflows and reporting
Identifying patterns from social listening and competitor analysis is only valuable when those insights are shared with the teams that act on them. Meltwater makes it easy to integrate intelligence into your organization’s workflows and reporting rhythms.
Automated reporting lets you export daily, weekly, or monthly summaries, while custom reports and templates help you build shareable decks that highlight key competitor movements. Cross-team collaboration features ensure insights flow seamlessly from PR and marketing to product and leadership — ensuring everyone has the context they need to make aligned decisions.
If you’d like to learn more about how Meltwater can help you perform a competitive website analysis, !
Start Analyzing Your Competitors to Gain a Competitive Edge
Ready to get started? Let's sum up the key elements of a successful competitive analysis:
For the most effective analysis, remember to:
- Be clear about what you want to benchmark
- Remember that benchmarking should be an on-going process
- Use the right competitor analysis tools
- Have the right tracking and analytics in place
- Make it actionable
Competitor analysis template
Access this free template for conducting a strategic competitive analysis!
FAQs: Performing a Competitor Analysis
How does competitor research help businesses improve their product positioning?
Competitor research helps businesses improve their product positioning through providing essential context for how their product is perceived relative to alternatives in the market. By analyzing competitors’ features, pricing, messaging, and customer sentiment, companies can identify where their offering is truly differentiated — and where it blends in. From these insights brand can refine value propositions, clarify positioning statements, and adjust messaging to better address unmet consumer needs or pain points.
Can local businesses benefit from conducting a competitive market analysis specific to their region?
Yes, local and regional businesses often benefit the most from competitive market analysis. Focusing on a specific geography helps uncover regional competitors, local customer preferences, and location-specific trends that can be missed in national data. Analyzing local media coverage, reviews, and social conversations can reveal how competitors engage their communities and where gaps exist. This enables local businesses to tailor offerings, messaging, and marketing strategies to stand out in their specific market rather than relying on broad, less relevant insights.
What are the most important metrics for businesses to track when creating a competitive analysis report?
The most valuable competitive analysis metrics depend on your goals, but strong reports typically include a mix of visibility, perception, and performance indicators. Common metrics include share of voice, sentiment, messaging themes, audience engagement, media reach, and channel presence. Businesses may also track pricing, feature comparisons, customer reviews, and growth signals over time. Together, these metrics help teams understand not just who is winning attention, but why — and where opportunities exist to compete more effectively.
