There are many ways and factors that you can use to do a competitive research analysis. However, if you are new to research skills, you can follow these steps as a suggestion.

Step 1 – Determine who your competitors are

Divide your “competitors” into two groups: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors are businesses that offer a product or service that could pass as a similar substitute for yours, and that operate in your same geographic area.

On the other hand, an indirect competitor provides products that are different but could satisfy the same customer need or solve the same problem.

It seems simple enough on paper, but these two terms are often misused. However, you should only focus on your direct competitors.

Step 2 – Determine what products your competitors offer

Here are some questions to consider:

• Are they low-cost or high-cost providers? (Based on their price, you can determine this.)

• Are they working mainly on volume sales or one-off purchases?

• What is their market share?

• What are the characteristics and needs of their ideal customers?

• Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick purchases?

• How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?

• How do they distribute their products/ services?

Step 3 – Research your competitors’ sales tactics and results

Running a sales analysis of your competitors can be quite difficult; however, some questions below may help you:

• What does the sale process look like?

• What channels are they selling through?

• Do they have multiple locations, and how does this give them an advantage?

• Are they expanding? Scaling down?

• Do they have partner reselling programmes?

• What are their customers’ reasons for not buying? 

• What are their revenues each year? What about total sales volume?

• Do they regularly discount their products or services?

• How involved is a salesperson in the process?

These questions may give you some ideas of how competitive the sales process is, and what information you need to prepare.

Step 4 – Take a look at your competitors’ pricing, as well as any perks they offer

One of the most important elements affecting customers purchase decisions is price. You need to understand how much your competitors are charging for a similar product or service.

The cheapest price is not only the best. You need to consider the costs you have to pay for dropshipping suppliers, platforms, etc. That’s why you need to make a correct price for your product that feels reasonable to prospects.

Step 5 – Ensure you’re meeting competitive shipping costs

The main reason for cart abandonment is expensive shipping. Nowadays, free shipping is a major element that can attract consumers to choose your brand over another. 

You need to take a look at your competitors’ costs and ensure you’re meeting those prices. In case free shipping isn’t a good option for your business, you can try other ways, for example, loyalty programmes, holiday discounts, or giveaways on social media.

Step 6 – Analyse how your competitors market their products

Marketing is a way to introduce brands to more audiences. Analysing competitors’ marketing tactics is a good way to catch market trends.

• Do they have a blog?

• Are they creating whitepapers or ebooks?

• Do they post videos or webinars?

• Do they have a podcast?

• Do they use static visual content such as infographics and cartoons?

• What about slide decks?

• Do they have a FAQs section?

• Are there featured articles?

• Do you see press releases?

• Do they have a media kit?

• What about case studies?

• Do they publish buying guides and data sheets?

• What online and offline advertising campaigns are they running?

Step 7 – Take note of your competition’s content strategy

Take consideration of the following questions when analysing the content of your competitors:

• How accurate is their content?

• Are spelling or grammar errors present?

• How in-depth does their content go?

• What tone do they use?

• Is the content structured for readability?

• Is their content free and available to anyone, or do their readers need to opt in?

• Who is writing their content?

• Is there a visible byline or bio attached to their articles?

When you scan the content, you should pay attention to the photos and imagery your competitors are using. If they use stock photos, do they have overlays of text quotes or call-to-action (CTA) that are specific to their business? If their photos are custom, are they used by outside graphic professionals, or do they appear to be done in-house?

Step 8 – Learn what technology stack your competitors use

Understanding the tools that competitors use may be necessary for helping your own business reduce friction and boost momentum within the workplace.

For instance, you might have read favourable reviews about the customer service of a rival; yet, as you do your study, you discover that the client is using advanced customer service tools that you haven’t been using. With this knowledge, you should be better prepared to outperform the methods used by your competitors.

Enter the company’s URL into Built With, a useful tool for showing what technology your competitors’ site uses, along with third-party plugins ranging from analytics systems to CRMs, to find out the software your competitors are using.

As another option, you might think about browsing the job postings of your competition, especially for engineer or web developer positions. The job description will probably specify the tools a candidate must be knowledgeable with, which is a clever way to learn about the technology that your competitors employ.

Step 9 – Analyze the level of engagement on your competitors’ content

Check the average number of comments, shares, and likes on your competitor’s content, pay attention to these:

• Certain topics resonate better than others

• The comments are negative, positive, or a mix

• People are tweeting about specific topics more than others

• Readers respond better to Facebook updates about certain content

• Don’t forget to note if your competitor categorizes their content using tags, and if they have social media follow and share buttons attached to each piece of content.

Step 10 – Observe how they promote marketing content

To find out which content promotion strategy your competitors have used, you need to check keyword density in the copy itself, image alt text tags, and the use of internal linking.

The following questions can help you:

• Which keywords are your competitors focusing on that you still haven’t tapped into?

• What content of theirs is highly shared and linked to? How does your content compare?

• Which social media platforms are your target audience using?

• What other sites are linking back to your competitor’s site, but not yours?

• Who else is sharing what your competitors are publishing?

• Who is referring traffic to your competitor’s site?

• What is the difficulty level of keywords that you want to focus on?

Step 11 – Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to-platforms

Check the social media platforms that your competitors have used and take note of these data points:

• Number of fans/followers

• Posting frequency and consistency

• Content engagement (comments and shares of their audiences)

• Content virality (number of shares, repins, and retweets of their posts)

Step 12 – Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

SWOT is a kind of analysis report in which you can find and note your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. For a SWOT analysis, you need to start with these questions:

• What is your competitor doing well? 

• Where does your competitor have an advantage over your brand?

• What is the weakness of your competitor?

• Where does your brand have an advantage over your competitor?

• What could they do better?

• In what areas would you consider this competitor a threat?

• Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified?