A competitive landscape analysis is a valuable tool that can help you better understand your competitors. It can also provide insights on the market they operate in, and their strengths and weaknesses.
A competitive landscape analysis helps you identify your competitors’ products and services, their pricing strategies, and how they differentiate themselves from the competition. It also helps you identify any gaps in your knowledge of the industry and areas where you could improve your product or service offering.
A competitive landscape analysis should be conducted regularly by all businesses to ensure they stay up to date with their competitors’ innovations and progress.
In this blog, we’re going to talk about what competitive landscape analysis is, how to do it, and why it’s important for your business.
Competitive Landscape Analysis- Explained
The process of discovering, studying, and assessing your competitors to get the knowledge that can be used to shape your company strategy is called a competitive landscape analysis. It is an ongoing process. It allows you to assess the current and future strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, as well as track their development through time. Just as crucial as obtaining a glimpse of your competition’s present situation is keeping tabs on how they’ve grown in the market. It’s the key to understanding the pivotal choices and turning points that shaped the course of their success.
A competitive landscape analysis is a good way to gain a better understanding of your industry. It’s also a useful tool for making strategic decisions about your business.
If you’re looking to start a new business or expand an existing one, you’ll need to know more about your competition so that you can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.
By performing a competitive landscape analysis, you can get an idea of who your competitors are, what they offer, and what makes them different from you. This will help you determine where there’s room for improvement and where there may be opportunities that are not currently being exploited by other companies.
The Importance Of Analyzing The Competitive Landscape For Your Business
A competitive landscape analysis is a crucial part of your business’ marketing and sales strategy. By reviewing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of where you fit into the market and what your customers are looking for in their products or services.
The benefits of conducting a competitive landscape analysis include:
· Gaining Insight Into What Makes Your Competitors Successful
This will help you identify how you can improve your own business and make it more competitive with other companies in your industry.
· Determine Future Direction
Conducting a competitive landscape study can help you chart a course for your company’s future success. It outlines the necessary measures to be taken in the near future. Conducting a rigorous analysis of your rivals’ strategies might help you better understand your target audience and develop strategies to approach them.
· Identifying Opportunities For Growth
A competitive landscape analysis can tell you which areas of business are performing well and which ones need improvement. You can then focus on improving these segments while working on other aspects of your business that need work.
· Creating A Plan For Future Growth
If one part of your company is doing well while another isn’t performing as well as expected, an analysis can help determine why this is happening so that you can take steps to correct it before it becomes too late.
· Creating A Competitive Benchmark
It allows you to benchmark your performance against other companies in the industry. This in turn helps you to identify opportunities for growth and expansion.
· Identifying Gaps
Performing a competitive landscape analysis will help you identify areas in which your company is lacking or performing poorly compared with other businesses in your industry. This information can be used to decide what changes should be made to improve performance. Or whether it would be best to exit or expand into new areas of business altogether.
· Establish Your Company’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Researching the competition also assists in developing a more distinct image of the unique value proposition (UVP) that your firm offers. Identifying your unique value proposition (UVP) helps you to hone in on the specific aspects of your company that truly set you apart from the competition.
How To Perform A Competitive Landscape Analysis?
Successful companies understand the need of doing a competitive landscape study. Competitive analysis is used by around 90 percent of organizations in the Fortune 500 (1). Approximately two-thirds (69%) of businesses that have outsourced their competitive intelligence activities have found that doing so has been a net gain for their company. Any company may start enjoying the benefits of this helpful practice with a well-thought-out plan and the appropriate tools.
Now let’s look at the steps on how to perform an effective competitive landscape analysis:
1. Identify Your Competitors
First, you need to know who your competitors are. Do this by performing an online search for companies similar to yours. Look at their websites and read their blogs. If you have any questions about them (e.g., whether they are offering coupons or special offers), contact them directly via email or telephone call. So, that you can get answers from someone who knows what’s going on with the company.
2. Perform Market Research
Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s time to carry out some market research on them. To do this, you need to look at what they’re doing well and what they could be doing better. Whether this relates to content marketing or SEO specifically. For example, if one of your competitors is producing high-quality product reviews but not getting any traffic from them, then this might be something worth replicating to get more organic traffic from search engines and social platforms alike.
3. Analyze Competitors Marketing Strategies And Offers
Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s time to analyze their marketing strategies and offers. This will give you some insight into how they position themselves in the market and what they are offering customers.
4. Administer A Competitor Analysis Framework
After compiling your data, select a competitive landscape analysis methodology to help you conclude. One common option is the SWOT analysis, while another is Porter’s Five Forces study. The acronym SWOT stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” It’s a common framework for assessing the relative merits and drawbacks of a company’s internal and external environments. By analyzing your company’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the competition, you may better position yourself for success. The competitive threats of alternative products, new entrants, supplier power, buyer power, and the intensity of the competitive landscape are all taken into account by Porter’s Five Forces analysis. Which in turn analyzes the competitive character of an entire marketplace. To enter a new market, this tactic may be quite helpful for businesses.
5. Utilize The Findings
Apply what you’ve learned to a fresh examination of your company’s approach to business. Pay attention to the applications that might help your business out. If you want your company to develop and adapt, you need to set fresh goals in light of current market conditions.
6. Maintain A Keen Eye On The Competitors
At the very least once a year, if not twice, it is advisable to do a competitive landscape study. Make sure to update your competitive analysis worksheet as necessary. Use a competitive analysis as a roadmap to success if you have a time-sensitive objective.
Wrapping Up
Well, if you’re like most people in business, you’ll use it to make decisions about how to improve your product or service. But before deciding what changes need to be made, you have to know where your company stands relative to the competition. That’s where competitive landscape analysis comes in.
While there are many different ways to perform a competitive landscape analysis, we’re going to focus on one of the easiest methods: using Speak Ai. Speak Ai is a data analysis tool that helps you collect and analyze data from multiple sources and then provides recommendations based on what it finds.
That is why we recommend using Speak Ai to examine and analyze data like 7,000 satisfied customers are already doing. Request a demo or start a trial if you need assistance with scraping, analyzing, and understanding the data of your competition.