Many businesses that start off with a lot of promise make a similar mistake when it comes to growth and longevity. They get attached to a singular vision of their brand and forget to look out the window and see what’s happening outside. For instance, brands like Blockbuster, Toys “R” Us, and Borders failed to keep up with the digital and e-commerce revolutions. Instead of studying marketing trends, they clung to the idea of continuing to win with physical retail.
If these brands had taken a moment to study competitors like Netflix, Amazon, and even Barnes & Noble, they could’ve turned things around. They might’ve seen how many brands were moving online and followed suit instead of resisting. Now, with thousands more digital brands in the mix every year, it’s even more crucial to understand the water you swim in. Here’s how analyzing your competition can help you stay relevant and boost future growth.
- Fill in Content Gaps
The right content can drive new traffic to your site, build brand awareness, and establish your brand credibility. However, it won’t accomplish any of that if your blog posts are buried by competitor results on the SERP. To establish or improve your domain authority as a challenger brand, you need to be the first to answer pressing audience questions. You need to cover the topics and keywords top-performing brands haven’t already grabbed.
To do this properly, you need to run a competitive content analysis, in which you methodically dissect your competitors’ content strategy. You can do this manually, or with software tools that automatically analyze content for you. Either way, the idea is to look for opportunity gaps in competitors’ online coverage. What aren’t they talking about, and how can your brand be the one to step in and provide that content?
- Develop a Better Product Portfolio
Competitive insights aren’t just advantageous when it comes to generating web traffic. You can also use them to find new opportunities within your line of products or services. By carefully analyzing what your competitors are doing and what customers are saying about them, you stand to gain. You can use these insights to expand your product portfolio, adding new products that meet unexpected needs. You can also look for small ways to improve your existing products.
There are several ways to use competitive insights to improve your product portfolio. One of the easiest is to simply try competing products (mystery shopping), or at least study their specs and marketing materials. Another is to analyze product reviews and other customer feedback, or use social listening tools to find out what customers are saying. If you want to really stay ahead of the game, you can keep track of competitor patents to know what your rivals might do next.
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3. Set the Right Prices
One key way many businesses are using competitive intelligence is to set the right prices for their products. Many companies are using tools like AI-powered dynamic pricing software, which analyzes competitors and market trends to set the best possible prices for profit. With this type of software, prices are automatically adjusted in real-time, usually across multiple online channels. Dynamic pricing is especially popular with hotels, airlines, and rideshare services.
Dynamic pricing algorithms will often adjust product prices to be lower than competitors’ prices at any given time, within user-provided constraints. However, while it may bring in more sales, having the lowest prices isn’t always the best long-term strategy for your brand. Especially if you’re trying to market to an upscale audience, you never want to drop your prices too low. Customers can’t help associating low prices with low-quality products, and vice versa.
4. Track New Tools and Partnerships
Understanding who your competitors are partnering with — on technology, logistics, etc. — can be a huge boon to your operations. It can help to stay on top of industry news and other sources announcing purchases or partnerships. That might give you insight into what software or services your competitors could be implementing. That, in turn, can clue you into any expansion plans they might have, and position you to stay competitive moving forward.
For example, if your top competitor partners with a new 3PL, that could signal they’re planning to expand to new regions or countries. It could also mean they plan to win customers by getting a lot faster at delivering their products. Either way, as they make these updates, you don’t want to be left standing in the dust. You need to either streamline your operations at the same rate, or consider an alternative strategy to differentiate yourself.
5. Offer Better Customer Service
One way to best differentiate your brand from competitors is to offer outstanding customer service. However, you can’t figure out exactly what to do better until you know just what they’re getting wrong. As with other techniques mentioned above, this is a good place to use social listening tools and analyze customer reviews. Find out if your agents are putting clients on hold for too long, not being friendly enough, or not offering personalized service.
By analyzing and understanding your competitors’ issues, you can tweak your strategy for one-upping them. For example, if long waits or holds are a problem, you can focus on hiring more agents, outsourcing to a call center, or triaging calls with AI tools. If personalized service is a problem, you can implement a CRM or other service that tracks past client interactions. If it’s a friendliness issue, you can look at updating your scripts and retraining your staff.
Beat Them, Don’t Join Them
Knowing and strategizing around what your competitors are up to is a crucial component of outperforming them. However, you can’t afford to work so hard to keep up that you lose your core brand identity. No matter how much you strive to compete, don’t stray too far from your mission, values, or USP. You’ll get much further by doing what you already do best better, so don’t try to shapeshift into something you’re not.
