Unless you offer a one-of-a-kind product to a one-of-a-kind audience, you have competitors. And you should be analyzing them.
Understanding your competition and where you fit within the industry is key to developing and nurturing a successful growth strategy. Research your competitors, assess their activities, and compare it to your brand performance to understand the market that surrounds your company.
A competitive analysis helps you understand the wider market, improve your product-market fit, and make informed decisions that strengthen your industry standing.
What is a competitive analysis?
A competitive (or competitor) analysis is the strategic assessment of your business’s rivals. It involves identifying your competitors and then researching and evaluating their performance across various metrics.
You can run a high-level competitive analysis that covers all bases, or dive into a specific area in more detail. If, for example, you were interested in improving your social media efforts, you might choose to do a social media-focused competitor analysis.
Once you’ve run your competitive analysis, you can use it to understand the market landscape and spot any opportunities or threats that may impact your business strategy and performance.
In this article, I’ll walk you through how to run a competitor analysis. I’ll also share a free template you can use to analyze your competitors’ business, product, and marketing strategies efficiently.
Components of a competitive analysis
A strong competitor analysis will dive deep into each business’s product, audience, and marketing strategies. It should also offer actionable outcomes based on the insights collected. But, before you get too carried away with the nitty-gritty details, I recommend starting with the most basic information.
P.S. I’ve created a competitive analysis template to capture all of the information we’ll go over below in one convenient place for easy reference.
Company overview
Begin your competitive analysis by creating a clear overview of their business, noting details such as:
- Company mission
- Key products/services
- Company size
- Revenue
- Any relevant URLs (e.g., their website or social media pages)
This section is helpful for gaining a high-level understanding of your competitors.
Audience analysis
Next, I recommend analyzing the audience they target. I’ve spoken a lot about the importance of developing ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and customer personas in the past — understanding your audience is critical for creating standout customer experiences. So, make sure you work that audience analysis into your competitor analysis document.
Familiarizing yourself with your competitors’ target audiences will enable you to determine your product fit and how it aligns with the wider market. It’ll also help you identify the audience needs and pain points your competitors address. Finally, you can use it to understand customer behaviors and how to capitalize on these.
Depending on whether you target business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) customers, the exact metrics you measure may differ.
Product and pricing analysis
When running a competitive analysis, you’ll likely encounter a mix of direct and indirect competitors, each with unique approaches and positioning. While your competitors may offer the same products or services as your brand, how they position those offerings may vary.
A product and pricing analysis gives you clarity into how your offerings compare, helping you better understand your market standing so you can identify ways to improve your positioning.
Marketing analysis
Once you’ve clearly defined their business overview and analyzed their audience and product offerings, you can move into a more in-depth marketing analysis.
Start with an overview of each competitor’s marketing strategy by noting which advertising channels and traffic sources they use. From there, you can delve deeper with activities like an overview of their SEO performance and a SWOT analysis of their marketing strategy.
Social media analysis
Analyzing your competitors’ social media strategy can reveal valuable insights into their public perception, who they engage with, and the type of messaging and content they use to connect with their target audience.
As part of this analysis, be curious about your competitors’ social media strategies, the various tactics they use, and which platforms they’re active on. Be sure to track their follower count and observe the types of people they engage with too. This follower analysis serves to boost your audience analysis efforts.
Then, you can take a more detailed look at their social media activity, observing how often they post, their engagement rate, and example posts for each of their channels. Finish up with a social media SWOT analysis to consolidate your findings.
This social media evaluation will help you compare your competitors’ online presence by digging into their user interactions, behaviors, and positioning.
SWOT analysis
By this point, you’ve gathered a lot of data. That puts you in a great position to transform that information into a useful SWOT analysis.
In a SWOT analysis, you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (hence the acronym) of your business and competitors. It’s a simple but effective way to find holes in your strategy, uncover untapped opportunities, and clarify your strengths.
Outcomes
A competitive analysis without action is useless. Include outcomes to ensure your competitor analysis isn’t left to gather virtual dust. These outcomes should outline clear next steps to put your competitive analysis learnings into action.
Why is competitive analysis important?
By now, you hopefully see the benefits of running a competitive analysis. It’s a far more accurate way of learning how you can improve your product, sales, and marketing than just hazarding a guess and hoping it works out. Being inquisitive and carrying out research is how you determine what moves the needle in your business.
Competitor research helps you deepen your understanding of the wider market and industry. You’ll be able to pinpoint how your products and services compare to competitors in your field, recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. It’ll also allow you to identify potential gaps or opportunities in your strategy based on where competitors perform well or position themselves differently.
Learnings gleaned from competitive analysis don’t just benefit your marketing strategy — they can also inform product development to improve your product-market fit and make sure you create offerings your audience actually wants. In line with this, competitive analysis can improve your value proposition and positioning, as well as help you stay at the forefront of market changes.
How do you write a competitive analysis?
The exact steps you take to carry out a competitive analysis will depend on your business type, products and services, and goals. Every business has unique needs, and every market has varying levels of competition. So, for best results, you need to tailor your competitive analysis to your unique circumstances.
To carry out comprehensive research, consider running an in-depth competitive analysis. This type of examination will explore all aspects of your competitors’ business and marketing operations, offering an extensive understanding of the competitive landscape.
Get a copy of my competitive analysis template here so you can start carrying out detailed research without having to create a document from scratch.
Alternatively, you might consider crafting individual templates that focus on specific areas. This targeted approach will let you zero in on crucial aspects of your competitors, such as social media activity, pricing, or product features.
Whatever option you choose, tailor the analysis to your specific needs so you can gather insights that directly support your goals and needs. As a general rule, I recommend following the below steps when creating any kind of competitive analysis.
1) Choose three to five competitors
Start by choosing a handful of competitors similar in size, offering, market share, and target audience. This will give you a realistic and relevant comparison for your business.
If you’re not sure how to find competitors, you can search for your product or service in Google and see which companies appear on the first page of search results. If you serve a specific geographical area, you may want to narrow your search using Google Maps. Similarly, if you’re a start-up, you may need to dive deeper into the search results to find your exact competitors, or you may want to research market maps produced for your specific niche or industry.
2) Create a live document
Next, you’ll want to create a document where you can keep track of your analysis. It’s best to use a cloud-based document or spreadsheet that allows for real-time collaboration and continuous updates. It also lets your team access it easily.
You can use this competitive analysis template in Google Sheets. Feel free to make a copy and alter it to suit your needs.
3) Decide what you want to analyze
Figure out the specific areas of competition you want to focus on. You might want to run an in-depth analysis, or you may choose to focus on one key area such as content marketing, keyword performance, or customer reviews. Make your decision based on your priorities and goals. This will help you stay organized and focused.
4) Add your brand information
Set the baseline for your competitive analysis by adding your brand information to the document. Include a company overview, along with other information relevant to your chosen area of focus. This will help you create a clear comparison between your brand and competitors.
5) Research your competitors
Now, start to gather information on your competitors in line with the insights you’ve chosen to collect in your competitive analysis document. Pay close attention to their strategies, what they do well, and areas of improvement during your evaluation.
6) Use tools to collect data
There are many tools and platforms you can use to acquire a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, depending on your competitive analysis needs. Tools like SEMrush, Similarweb, and HootSuite are valuable for gathering competitor information.
7) Fill out your competitive analysis template
Keep track of your findings by capturing them in your competitive analysis template. Organizing everything in a well-structured format will make it much easier to compare and analyze your findings once you’ve completed your research.
8) Analyze the results
After you’ve collected all your research, analyze the data. Look for any notable patterns and conduct a careful SWOT analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
While reviewing the results, summarize your findings and develop key outcomes. Use these insights to inform future strategies and decisions.
9) Repeat frequently
Competitive analysis is an ongoing process. You can’t just do it once and hope everything will be okay from there on. The landscape changes constantly, with new competitors, strategies, audience behaviors, and market trends.
Regularly conduct competitive analyses to keep your insights up to date and ensure your brand stays in line with market fluctuations.
How to find your competitor information
Luckily, you don’t have to do everything manually; there are many tools available to speed up and improve your competitive analysis.
The competitor analysis tools you use will depend on the areas you’re interested in exploring. As has been a running theme throughout this article, consider your needs and goals when deciding which tools to use.
With that in mind, here are some of my favorite tools for finding competitor information, depending on what data I’m looking for.
Web metrics
Collect data on your competitors’ online performance by analyzing their web metrics.
If you want to know more about their digital marketing strategies and online performance, Similarweb is a great tool to have at your fingertips.
With Similarweb, you can see which channels drive the most traffic to your competitors’ websites, analyze user engagement, and dive deep into their marketing strategies. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of each competitors’ digital market share through this tool.
SEO
Glean information about your competitors’ SEO performance to understand more about their organic visibility. From backlinks to keywords and traffic share, there are a variety of tools you can use to collect SEO stats.
Two of the most well-known tools for SEO research are Semrush and Ahrefs. They both work similarly and have overlapping features, so which tool you prefer may come down to personal preference. Each offers a free trial to test them out before choosing the tool most suitable for your needs.
Use Semrush’s organic research tool to analyze your competitors’ website rankings in Google across keywords, traffic, and backlinks. See which keywords bring them the most traffic, gain insights on the keyword search volume, and analyze their SERP performance over time. You can also compare SEO performance for multiple domains, giving you a visual snapshot of competitor performance for keywords, traffic, and traffic cost.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool works similarly: You’re able to see what keywords competitors’ rank for and which pages bring the most organic traffic. Then, dive into their website structure, measure internal links, and analyze their backlink profile.
You can download reports for both tools to research deeper and further explore SEO metrics.
PPC
Semrush and Ahrefs are both capable of showing you competitors’ paid advertising traffic, keywords, and campaigns. So, if you want to keep your tool stack to a minimum, consider using one of these platforms to conduct SEO and PPC competitor analyses.
You can also adopt a tool like SpyFu to dig into a competitor’s PPC activity. See their Google Ad history, including every ad variation over the last 18 years. Explore the keywords they show up for in Google Ads and which keywords they buy that you don’t. You can also monitor their activity to catch real-time changes in your competitors’ PPC strategy.
Facebook Ads
Spy on your competitors’ Facebook Ads activity and see exactly what paid social media campaigns they’re running on Facebook and Instagram with the Meta Ads Library. This is a helpful tool for analyzing competitor marketing on Meta platforms. See the types of ads they run along with their chosen messaging, creatives, and calls to action (CTAs). If you want to run a competitive analysis focused on paid advertising methods, the Meta Ads Library will help you glean insightful information about your competitors.
You aren’t limited to searching by competitor though — you can also search according to exact phrase match by entering your desired search term between quotation marks (e.g., “cereal”). This can be a helpful way to find other competitors who may be taking up real estate in your area of interest.
Tip: TikTok has launched an Ads Library too. Search the TikTok Ads Library to find high-performing ad campaigns that your competitors are running on the platform or within your industry.
Traffic
If you’re keen to know where your competitors’ website traffic comes from, a tool like Majestic or Semrush may be just what you need in your competitor analysis kit.
When it comes to analyzing competitor backlinks, Majestic has a whole host of tools you can use: From their Site Explorer reports to their Backlink History, Comparator, and Clique Hunter tools, you can easily discover how competitors acquire traffic.
This image shows the Backlink History tool within Majestic. Source
The Comparator tool lets you review traffic metrics for up to five sites at once and see which competitor takes the lead. With the Backlink History tool, you can identify which competitor has the most backlinks and explore those domains on a topical level to see what topics they’re associated with most.
Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool lets you compare your competitors’ domain visits and view the average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic rank. You can track the main traffic sources for competitors across direct, referral, search, social, and paid traffic. These channel source insights allow you to pinpoint which marketing channels your competitors are most invested in.
Similar to Majestic, you can use Semrush to explore backlinks. Additionally, you can comb through their traffic journey to see the top traffic sources and the related destinations. This is helpful for spotting any partnerships, affiliate, and backlink providers your competitors have.
Content
Discover your competition’s content marketing strategies without having to crawl through their entire blog article history manually. Use BuzzSumo to study your competitors and track the types of content they publish, what works best, and who shares it (among other things).
This image shows Content Analyzer within BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis Tool. Source
In BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis report, you can input your competitors’ domains to analyze the content they’ve published. Discover which pieces drive the most engagement and wade into specific articles for more in-depth analytics.
When analyzing content in BuzzSumo, you can even drill down by content type, such as “How-to,” “What,” “Why,” or “List,” to see what forms of content they often publish and how well they perform.
Social media
Many social media scheduling tools will also provide some competitor analysis features, including the well-known Hootsuite. With it, you can analyze your competitors’ social media strategies by reviewing their post performance, types of posts, and hashtags. Add competitors to your watchlist in Hootsuite for real-time updates on their social media activity and performance.
Image of Hootsuite’s competitor analysis tool. Source
Hootsuite’s competitor analysis report will share an overview of competitor performance, along with revealing metrics such as:
- Number of posts published
- Posting frequency
- Average engagement
- Number of fans/followers
- Audience growth
- Estimated number of users engaged
Plus, you can explore performance by post and see the most-used hashtags for their top-performing posts.
Another tool to gather social media information on your competition is Social Blade. You can analyze competitors’ follower growth and posting frequency. This gives you a deeper understanding of their social media presence.
Email marketing
Email promotion is a lucrative digital marketing strategy. Adopt an email marketing tool such as Owletter to capture and analyze your competitors’ emails.
Owletter will automatically capture all emails sent from your competitors’ domains. It’ll screenshot, analyze, and keep a copy for your reference. This helps keep track of emails your competitors send without clogging your inbox.
You can then use Owletter’s collection of competitor emails to further analyze their topics, frequency, and various aspects of the communication itself, from the subject line to the CTA button.
Competitive analysis tools and templates
You have to collect a lot of data when running a competitive analysis. If you don’t keep it well organized, your analysis can quickly become a jumble of numbers and uncontextualized insights.
Thankfully, there are several platforms you can use to gather competitive data and keep it in one place for easier analysis. Some of these solutions also offer helpful templates and features for competitor analysis.
Among this list, you’ll find project management tools like Asana, Airtable, and Smartsheet, demonstrating how such tools provide a useful structure for streamlining competitive analysis.
Confluence
Confluence is a remote team workspace that essentially acts as a corporate wiki. This minimizes context-switching and lets you shift from scattered notes to having one single source of information.
As a central database, Confluence’s functionality is well suited to competitive analysis. Use the databases feature to organize all your competitive research. Better yet, you can set up a dedicated space to store all individual competitor research documents, content, and data, ensuring everything stays in one place.
Confluence even has a competitive analysis template you can customize. It’s formatted as a single-page document with sections for each aspect of your competitive research.
You can use Confluence for free as an individual user. If you want to add more users, collaborate with others, or enjoy more advanced features, you’ll need a paid account, which ranges from $4.89 to $8.97 per user per month.
Asana
Asana is primarily a project management tool used to create tasks, assign them to people, and track project progress. While it may be a project management tool, Asana’s capabilities lend themselves perfectly to competitive analysis.
With it, you can view projects in various formats, such as a list, board, timeline, or workflow. Personally, I prefer the list view, which is a table-style appearance that makes it easy to see all your research at a glance.
To track competitive research in Asana, assign a task name to each analysis activity (e.g., “Pricing”), then use the other columns for your brand and each competitor. Alternatively, get started with their free competitive analysis template.
The free version of Asana should suit your needs. But, if you do want access to more features like the timeline or Gantt chart view, project dashboards, or forms, paid plans start at $9.49 per month.
Miro
Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard that offers a visually engaging workspace for brainstorming, planning, and problem-solving. But did you know it can also be a useful competitive analysis tool?
With features such as sticky notes, flowcharts, diagrams, and integrations with other tools, you can collate all your competitive research notes and insights. For example, use sticky notes to capture SWOT analysis information for your competitors, create a mind map to document their various marketing strategies, or create charts and graphs to showcase competitor data.
Miro also has a competitor analysis template that provides a visual review of your competitors’ products and note how they compare to yours using their “unique, best, same, and poor” take on a SWOT analysis.
You can sign up for Miro for free, which gives you access to a single workplace with three editable boards. If you need more boards or features, paid plans start at $8 per user per month.
Airtable
Airtable is a cloud-based tool for organizing and managing data. Many people use it as a workspace or project management platform, but it can also be a nifty competitive analysis tool.
Airtable offers extensive features, so it can feel overwhelming at first. But, once you gain a handle on it, it’ll likely become a firm favorite in your marketing tool stack.
Similar to Asana, Airtable offers different viewing formats such as a grid, Kanban, or gallery. Plus, you can create analytical dashboards to display insights easily, putting charts, graphs, and key metrics side by side for easy visualization. The tool’s AI feature can even summarize and extract insights to help you uncover key information faster.
Give Airtable’s competitive analysis template a try. The dashboard includes two tabs: a feature analysis template where you can compare product features, and competitor information where you can document an overview analysis for each competitor. The company also offers a competitor tracking template for monitoring competitors’ pricing, marketing materials, and features.
The free version of Airtable has generous capabilities. However, if you need to record larger datasets or want to use the Gantt or timeline views, you can upgrade to a paid account, starting at $20 per user per month.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is another collaborative work management tool often used to manage projects. As the name suggests, it combines the familiar interface of a spreadsheet with smart project management features, making it ideal for real-time reporting, updates, and collaboration.
Smartsheet can be an effective competitive research tool thanks to its data organization capabilities, reporting features, and pre-built templates. Centralize all your competitive research notes, findings, and summaries with its sheets and dashboards.
You can get a 30-day free trial of Smartsheet, after which you can either upgrade or keep using the free plan with limited capabilities. Paid plans begin at $9 per user per month.
This article from Smartsheet shares various free competitive analysis templates in downloadable Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Docs formats.
Wrike
Wrike is a project management tool that offers all the usual features you’d expect to see from a cloud-based project management platform. Centralize all your competitor research data and turn it into visual dashboards with instant insights. You can also segment competitors by creating distinct subfolders grouped based on competitor type, such as direct or indirect.
Wrike also offers a comprehensive competitor analysis template. It’s designed to let you group competitors, compare features in a table view, and create a competitive intel repository for monitoring the competitive landscape over time.
Start with Wrike’s free plan. Then, if you need access to more features, storage size, or integrations, upgrade to a paid plan starting at $9.80 per user per month.
Competitive analysis template
If you just want something easy and ready to go, you can copy my simple competitor analysis template that you’re free to edit and adjust depending on what’s best for your situation.
It’s a comprehensive document that covers almost everything you need to know about your competitors. Remember to tailor it according to what you want to focus on, and repeat the analysis regularly to stay on top of market changes.
Completing this template is just the start though — make sure you also use the insights to take data-driven action. That will help you refine your brand, sales, and marketing strategies to maintain an advantage in your industry.
Get a free copy of my competitive analysis template here.
Competitive analysis best practices
If you’re going to put time and effort into running competitive analyses (and trust me, it really does take a lot of time and effort), you should put your best foot forward to get the most reliable and impactful insights possible.
First, remember that competitive analysis is neither static nor a one-and-done task; it’s something you should continuously update and refine. The market landscape always changes, so frequently maintain your competitor reports.
Second, take your time with the process. Sifting through large amounts of data is time-consuming, and it’s easy to go blind to the information in front of you when you spend so long looking at it. Taking your time, being attentive, and taking breaks from the screen are all essential to avoid mistakes that might skew your insights.
Obviously, you’ll be biased towards your brand, but it’s important to stay as objective as possible during competitor research. Don’t let your personal opinions or expectations cloud your judgment, as they could lead to biased conclusions. Instead, stick to the facts and report on what the data in front of you says.
I’ve shared lots of useful tools throughout this guide. From data collection solutions to project management platforms for organizing information, test a few and find the ones that work best for you. In that regard, automate what you can. Automating repetitive tasks or data collection will help you focus more on analyzing the data and summarizing the key actions.
It’s also important to stay on top of marketing conditions and trends, as external factors can impact how companies perform. So, keep an eye on the broader market and incorporate that context into your analysis to produce a well-rounded perspective.
Finally, go beyond the data. Don’t just collect information and present it; leverage those insights to take informed action. Analyze the data and use it to refine your strategies, find growth opportunities, and remain ahead of the competition.
Competitive analysis should be a dynamic element of your broader marketing strategy, one that drives continuous improvement and growth.
Wrapping up — Stay sharp with competitive analyses
Conducting a thorough competitor analysis is crucial to stay at the top of your industry. The more you know about your competition, their strategies, and performance, the more capable you’ll be of identifying opportunities for your business.
Use competitive analysis to make data-driven decisions and strategically position your business for success. Don’t forget to download my competitive analysis template so you can get started with a tried-and-tested framework.
Alternatively, read my competitor research guide, which comes with its own handy research guide.