How To Do A Competitor Analysis

1. Competitor Analysis: Hi Adrian Hall, work here from, AH, marketing. And in this video training we're going to cover how to do a competitor analysis. So we're going to cover why run a competitor analysis and the benefits you get by doing so. Three types of competitors and how to run a successful, competitive or competitor analysis. So if you want to learn those key strategies, then click through to the next video and we'll get started. 2. How To Do Competitor Analysis: Hey, welcome to competitive analysis. In a nutshell, everything you need to know about running a competitive analysis at your fingertips. So let's dive right in. What we're going to cover is why run a competitive analysis and how it's strategically helps your business. Whoops, sorry about that. Three types of competitors. How to run a competitive analysis. So my name is Adrian Heiberg. I'm savvy growth wizard. I helped drilling company do $1.5 million in 2021 from marking generated revenue and they never do more than $80 thousand a year back in 2018 before we started marketing, I did that with a 91 ROI for every dollar of theirs I spent, I'd make them $9. And a part of that was implementing all sorts of marketing tools and tactics including SEO, paid ads, website landing pages funnels the whole digital marketing engine, starting at small, building it up. So a good part of any strategy is competitive analysis. Let's just dive right into part one. Why run a competitive analysis? In business? Competitive, sorry, competition is a fact of life. New competitors sprout up constantly. And if you aren't careful, one of them just might move in and start taking away your customers. So you just want to be aware of them at the very least. So a competitive analysis is a multi-faceted approach to looking at the direct and indirect competitors in your market and analyzing ways you can improve your own business to set yourself apart from competitors. Or if you identify winning strategies, you can ethically adopt some of those as well. So a strategic analysis of your competitors gives you a deeper insight into the single most important part of your business, customers. So you can learn a lot about how they're marketing to their customers and learn from them. Alright, so let me move my little circle over here. So benefits of a competitive analysis include all alternative solutions that you might not have been aware of. What other products or services or your customers using to solve their problems, which solutions do they like and dislike? And why customer segments? Which segments of your market or your competitors targeting, what types of customers gravitate toward each of those different competitors and why as well? Competitive strategies, what are your competitors doing to try to stand out and appeal to your customers? What value proposition are they face focusing on? And which features and benefits are they highlighting on their website. So customer views and preferences, which product features do customers care about? So you can learn a lot about what they care about and use that for your marketing. How do they feel about competitors and why? And do they have needs or expectations that aren't being met? So you can learn so much. And this just helps you with your marketing and sales and creating new products and services, or making updates or changes to your current products or services that will just strengthen your business. Alright, so part 23 types of competitors. So direct and indirect. Well, sorry, Let's take a look at direct competitors for, so these are companies that solve the same problem for the same people and they're usually around the same size as the business as well. For example, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And indirect competitors. Competitors that offer a similar solution but not exact to yours and they target the same customers. Or similarly, they can even offer the same solution but to different customers if they're more industry specific. So it could be Coca-Cola and Rockstar energy drinks. I for all I know, Coca-Cola owns Rockstar energy, right. But before they bought them, even though they both have caffeine, Coca-Cola probably has some energy drinks, but rockstars, I just energy drinks. So they're a little bit of a different solution to the caffeine fixed. So same customers, but it can also be maybe there's a rockstar only sells to sports people or something they geared towards maybe sports enthusiasts or is Coca-Cola is the general public's similar solutions, different audience. So alternative solutions, competitors to yours that consist of straightforward replacements or stitching together multiple tools are solutions. So it might be like Coca-Cola and kombucha. So they're not exactly the same, they're in the same space but different. Pretty different. Alright, so yeah, we already did that. We're going to skip that part. So how to run a competitive analysis part three, and let's get right into some best practices, tips, strategies to actually do it. So steps to a successful competitive analysis start with customer surveys. This is huge. The biggest thing businesses miss out on is just asking customers or prospects and your e-mail list. Was there single greatest challenge you can learn so much just by asking that one question. So start with the customer survey. Review the competitors website and research your competitor reviews. What are people saying about the company? And this is all online, so very easily anyone can do it. Alright, so create customer surveys. The most valuable thing you can do when it comes to competitive research, to get out there and find out what real customers think about your competitors. Surveys can give a baseline idea of which competitors to dig into more and help you identify which topics and questions that focus on during the interview phase. So you can start by just asking, Hey, what's your make a list of questions. What with this solution? What competitors are out of these companies listed amount like which one would you choose and why? So you'd list out competitors. And if a lot of people are talking about one, then you know that when you want to pay attention to customer surveys is start with a general customer survey asking customers about their different brands. They solve their problems related to your offer and why they use those brands that I just covered that based on your customer survey response, build out an interview guide to with topics and questions related to those different brands that you want to know more about an interview a few customers using that guide, listening to brands and questions you want to find out more about them. Great survey questions to include what products and alternatives are they currently using? How did they use different products together? What do customers think of the tools they use? How are they using them? Are they using many tools to solve the problem or just one? And have they ever switch tools or processes and y, so you identify brands, throwing these questions to that survey. Alright, so review your competitors website. Having a persuasive website that speaks to your customers wants fears, desires, solves their problem, their needs, things like that. This is essential to great marketing. So by analyzing the copy images, messaging, the story of your competitor, you can learn how they're appealing to those potential customers and you can learn maybe ways you can include those as well. So review the homepage and landing pages. What different or what benefits are transformations are they promising? What types of customers are they focusing on? Are they targeting the same market segment? Or are they targeting one that's slightly different? What types of imagery are they using to showcase the transformation, if any, and how effective is it? What types of copy styles are they using? Long-form landing pages are short-form video pages. So review the features and benefits. What are the features? Facts about the product and service. What are the benefits? How those features can help improve or transformed the lives of the customers. What is the tone of the language being used, fun, playful, serious, et cetera? And does the voice match the company's brand image? So review the pricing and the packaging. Is the pricing higher or lower than yours? Are they offering different packages, kits, or memberships? Which options seem to be the most popular? And are they offering discounts? Rebates are free trials. Alright, wound me over here on the right. Look at the reviews online, Google, Facebook, the local restaurant reviews and things like that. Studying review sites deeper, what people like and dislike about them. You'll want to focus on researching what customers are saying about your competitors online. Yelp, Angie's List, trust radius, more than just Google review, google, Amazon depending on the business. Alright, so three steps for reviewing reviews. Read every review you can find on your competitors. Copy that text into a spreadsheet. Give each review a category or label a top challenges, favorite features, what's missing? Customer service, common complaints and you build out what everyone is saying into these buckets on a spreadsheet. And then you can organize the thoughts and understand all of these five categories based off of the reviews. So remember, it's not about copying everything. A competitive analysis should help you determine where you fit in the market and how you can differentiate yourself. But it can also help you learn some valuable marketing techniques or tools and tactics you can apply for your business as well. So keep that in mind. So that wraps up our competitor analysis training. Thank you so much for participating. I have a lot more trainings if you want to check those out to learn about an assortment of marketing tools and tactics. Sco, paid advertising, social media content marketing, landing pages, how to build a funnel, things like that. So thanks again and I hope to see you in another training. 3. Productivity Tip For Success: Alright, so before I leave you with the strategies and methods, tactics that we just went over, I just want to share this productivity strategy with you to help you get the most out of your marketing journey as you continue to learn other things. So, yeah, let's just get right into it. Alright, so I have this illustration here, and this is U on the left. You have your business goals or learning goals. Maybe you want to learn a valuable in-demand skill like marketing, or you're trying to learn how to market your business, or maybe a business you work for, whatever the scenario is. This is you and you have your goal on the other side of the canyon here, this pot of gold. And what happens is, this is a scenario we can all identify with. And we start, we hear about some new tour tactic or a shiny object syndrome. And we start to do something. Maybe it's building a marketing funnel or social media, or developing a good website or social media ads, paid advertising on Google or Facebook or something like that. Or maybe it's chatbox. You know, there's all these things that we can do to market and promote a business. And then we start to do one of these things. Then we could get that shiny object syndrome and we learned about something else or are introduced to another idea that we think is really cool. So we start that and then we started that. And what we're left with is all these half build bridges that actually don't really get anywhere, right? So what I want to recommend is that you pick just one tactic, one tour tactic, one strategy. Excuse me, one thing that will be the most valuable to helping market and promote a business. And you just stick with that one thing and finish it, complete that bridge, and then you can move to the second most valuable, the second most impactful thing. And then you can just go on and on. Then it will take you to the other side, get to where you wanna be and you'll see a big improvement in traction in the growth of whatever business you're working on. So I've identified 73 plus different tools and tactics, different bridges that will help businesses grow. The question is, which one is the most impactful for your business? That I cannot. I don't know. If you need help, you can if you need help figuring out what that one impactful tactic is, the one bridge will have the biggest impact on the growth of your business. Then you can just head over to my website, AH, marketing, dot biz and connect with me and then we can, I can help you figure that out. So that's the strategy I wanted to share with you to help you be productive. I hope that helps and really just focus on that one bridge at a time and go from there. Alright, so that concludes this course. This was an intro course to give you ideas and strategies to and the mindset to help you be successful. I hope you learned some valuable methods and strategies to help you be improve your marketing and develop that skill set no matter what your circumstances are, maybe you're learning to market a business you work for or to help improve and grow your own business. Or you're just trying to learn an in-demand skill. But as long as you keep on learning and practicing these things we've talked about and continue to learn and develop those skills. You'll be better equipped with an in-demand skill. You just need to keep on practicing, learning and doing things like actually hands-on in practice as well. If you enjoyed this course, please leave a positive root, positive review below. I'd really appreciate it. And there are lot of other courses on my Skillshare profile. If you want to learn about some other strategies and tools and tactics related to Digital Marketing. My name is Adrian Hall Berg. You can learn more about finding the one bridge and impactful strategy to help grow a business from my website. Ah, marketing, dot biz. Thanks for participating in this course and good luck with your marketing journey wherever it may be. I'll see you next time in another training.