Competitor analysis

Why Bother?

Similar to setting goals and objectives and understanding your audience, completing some early research into your competitors can drastically help your digital marketing strategy further down the line. Identifying what they do differently to you, what makes them better or worse allows you to play up to your strengths and negate any possible competitive edge they have over you.

Where to start?

Firstly, many businesses think they know who their competitors are but haven't recently searched online to see who comes up on the first page of a search engine results. This is likely the route that a huge percentage of your potential (non-referral) new business will come from.

Once you have your list of competitors, gather up their marketing material and websites and do a mini SWOT analysis on each of them. This will help outline what they are doing better than you, what you do better than them, how much of a risk they are to your business and what steps need to be taken within your marketing approach to give yourself the competitive edge.

Useful tips:

• Getting external views from those outside your company will give you more unbiased and useful information.
• You'll likely have at least a handful of competitors, so as you progress through each SWOT pull out the common themes that show up frequently, as these are often your first priority to address. Don't neglect the smaller less frequent items though.