Competitor Research- Your Ticket to Bringing Your A-Game

Picture this: you’re a track athlete getting ready to compete in the 100 meter dash against your top rival. You’ve been training for the past three months with your team and are ready to show what you’ve got! The whistle blows and you take off running… only to get crushed by your rival. 😩

How could this have happened?! You trained and worked so hard for this exact thing not to happen! 

Well, had you done a little digging, you would’ve known your rival starts the race slower to save their sprint for the middle and end of the race. Having this knowledge, you could’ve trained based on this to ensure you knew your competitor’s next move because knowledge is power!

The same thing can happen in your business! If you’re not keeping up with the latest trends or taking note of what your competitors are doing, you can quickly lag behind.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! Competitor research is here to save the day. 🤩

Why competitor research?

Okay, competitor research doesn’t sound like your typical superhero, but it can be game-changing for your biz!

Image from Pixabay

Reason #1: It Helps You Find Your Biz & Brand’s Sweet Spot

As a business owner, you want your biz & brand to stand out from the crowd, but not so much that it’s unclear what space you operate in.

Here are a few ways your competitor research can ensure you’re right where you want to be in your industry:

• Locate what part of the market your rivals occupy. Are you in direct competition for this part of the market?
• Examples: Are you both targeting millennials? Do they target entrepreneurs as a whole while you focus on female entrepreneurs?  
• Do your rivals often fight off their rivals (you included) by using competitive pricing? Can you spot a pattern when they do this?
• Ex. Is a sale accompanied by the launch of a new product?
• What is your competitor’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? Is this too similar to your USP?
• Are they stealing your customers? If so, why?
• Take a deeper look at what they offer compared to what you offer!

Conducting competitor research is all about knowing where you and your rivals stand in relation to one another. This way, you have a clear picture of where you are, where you want to be, and do’s and don’ts to get yourself there!

Reason #2: Competitor Research Informs Your Marketing Initiatives

Having all this competitor research helps inform your marketing initiatives so much! You can see what’s working for your competitors and what’s not in terms of their marketing initiatives and use this data to adjust your marketing plan as you see fit.

For example, SEO Marketing is vital for your business as it allows your customers to easily find you in the digital space. If your competitors are getting a ton of traffic from using specific keywords, it might help for you to latch onto these keywords in your own biz and ride the wave of success. 

Furthermore, if you notice certain competitors aren’t seeing SEO success, you may have an opportunity to rank at the top of the search page by investing in your SEO strategy, either through further research into SEO or by using a company that specializes in SEO, like Cardinal SEO Company, to skyrocket your search engine rankings. 🚀

Reason #3: It Helps You Ensure Your Product is Unique

Finally, one of the best reasons to carry out competitor research is to make sure you’ve got a unique, sellable product on your hands. 

While you and your competitors can be similar (that is why they’re your competition 😉), you don’t want to have the exact same product nor do you want your entire pricing model to be the exact same. 

This product overlap can cause confusion amongst customers and lead to your customers purchasing from the competitors either accidentally or because they don’t see a difference in the products, rendering your USP useless. 😰

Don’t worry! This is completely avoidable through a competitor analysis- especially when designing a new product. 

By doing your competitor research, you allow yourself to position yourself in the market compared to your competitors, use your marketing initiatives to further your biz & brand in the market, and become clear on your USP. Having this knowledge under your belt and using it in your daily operations is vital to ensuring your biz & brand are the best they can be! 

How are you using competitor research in your biz & brand? 🤔