How to perform competitor research

Once you have done audience research, it will be easier to define who your competitors are. You can think of competitors as others that are in the same niche or offering the same services. 

But do not forget to think out of the box when thinking who your competitors might be. You might be a brand designer and only compare yourself with other brand designers. But you will likely lose business to logo designers who only charge a fraction of what you do. Or a family member that is good with canva. It might not be the same service, but there is an overlap in the target audience.

It could also be others who are aiming for the same positioning or who have a similar messaging. 

The main messages I came across were:

• You have a message to share / you want to make an impact in the world
• Create a brand that stands out and books out
• Get clear. Get Confident. Get clients
• It is time to come home to who you really are
• Teaching female entrepreneurs who struggle with building a revenue-generating business, how to brand and market their mission & message online to make more money and impact

And this is what I mean by thinking outside of the box. As you might compare just on services but if you are brand 2 or 3, your message will attract a different audience then brand 1 and 4. While if your message is similar to brand 4, but your services are not directly comparable, you could still compete with brand 4. Because it is not about who we see as a competitor but who our audience sees as our competitors, and this might be completely different. 

Why do you need a competitor analysis?

We all have competitors that we can lose business too. So you need to know who you are competing within the market and know what else is out there being offered to your audience so that you can make an educated decision about how you can stand out.

There is a big chance you already have done the work when you spend the time to work on your vision, mission, values and believes and defined what you are good at and what your knowledge and experience is. As combining this, will automatically help you stand out. But when you can find out where there is a gap in the market that you can fill, your positioning will be even stronger.

Because that is what it is all about; your brand positioning. This is where you are in the heads of your audience vs your competitors.

And the better you steer your audience in the right direction with your messaging, visuals and marketing, the bigger the chance you get that desired positioning.

What is a competitor analysis?

It is not enough to follow your competitors on social media, which we probably all do. You need to go much deeper than this and use data. You need to take a step back from their pretty social feed (and stop comparing yours with it) and dive much deeper. 

What services do they offer? What are their price points, what messages do they often use to connect with their audience (this goes back to that angle that I talked about earlier), which pain points are they focusing on, how strong are the client testimonials, what is their social presence? 

And I can name a few more, but I will go more in-depth in the next step. But I hope this short overview shows you that a competitor analysis if done right, can give you so many insights in the market that you can use to your advantage and make your position even stronger - the strategic way. And not by chance. 

Just a quick example to illustrate this; if you have been a designer for a couple of years, there is a big chance you do not have a specific market like copywriters or coaches that your target but you have developed a certain design style. But as this is a huge market, the chance other designers are targeting this market and have a similar style (remember here that it is not about who you define as a competitor within this style, but your audience) is quite big. 

From your competitor research, you have found that they all have a strong social media following, the grids with a lot of designs all look quite similar, and the type of brand messaging (the angle) they are using is more or less the same. They all focus on selling brands that attract the right clients. Now you know, that if you use a different angle to sell your design services, your message will stand out from theirs. You can pick another benefit of strong brand design, or you can use your mission as your overarching message. 

What is included in a competitor analysis?

So, what exactly do you need to do when doing this competitor analysis? Well, this kind of depends on your business. Its size and the size of your competitors as well as how much information is available. 

There are off course tools that you can use that can give you more insights like the competitor analysis tool of Semrush, but a lot of these tools are just too expensive for how often we would use them. So I am going to assume here that it will be a DIY competitor research and you will use free accessible tools to perform the research. 

Firstly define which competitors you are going to look into. This can be competitors that are more aspirational because they have the business model you would like to have or because they have been in business longer and have to build a strong position in this period. 

But this can also be competitors that you are directly competing with, and this might be a guess. But if you send a proposal to a prospective client and it gets declined, it could not hurt to ask them who they choose to work with and why. Not everyone will answer this question, but if you put it in such a way that you are just using this as feedback that you can learn from, you might get some valuable input.

Before diving into the more elaborate research, ask yourself these questions for each competitor:

• What do you like about this company?
• What do you not like about what this company is doing?
• If you can take one thing away from what this company is doing, what is it?

This will already give you some insights, and you know which areas to focus on. But let us get into more detail of what to focus on.