Regardless of your business focus or industry, it’s without question that the activities of your competitors play a vital role in decisions large and small for your business. Whether it be account managers researching a vendor they’re up against in a deal, product managers assessing other offerings to guide feature priorities, or marketers reverse-engineering an industry leader’s content strategy, competitive landscape analysis is paramount for defending and expanding your market presence. With levels of competition on the rise across most industries, this research method is poised to only become more important in the time ahead.
The benefits of competitive landscape analysis.
With so many data inputs, analysis methods, and possibilities of application across your business, it can be challenging to know if your approach to competitive landscape analysis is generating the right results. When managed strategically, this type of analysis can:
- Bolster revenue by allowing you to close more deals
- Mitigate risks of getting caught off-guard by new competitive forces or strategies
- Reveal new opportunities for go-to-market differentiation
- Guide your pace for product roadmap execution
- Provide a benchmark for industry best practices
How effective is your approach to competitive landscape analysis?
Due to a lack of expertise and in-house resources, the majority of companies today are operating with large blind spots on the reality of their competitive landscapes. Consult this list to determine where you can improve your understanding of your competitive context, or identify your biggest opportunities to bring in an expert perspective.
Mistake #1: Too narrowly defining your competition.
While it’s easy to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of competitors you most commonly come into contact with at the deal level, this strategy is nearsighted in its failure to account for emerging forces, such as startups with disruptive models for doing business in your industry.
And your competition shouldn’t just be thought about in direct contexts, either. It’s important to address indirect competitors that could just as easily encroach on your target customers. For example, in January 2019, Netflix reported in a letter to shareholders that it competes with and loses to Fortnite more than it does to HBO. In commenting on its view of video game producers as a new priority competitor, CEO Reed Hastings stated that by delivering quality content and strong user experiences, Netflix hopes to “win time away” from these alternative sources of entertainment.
Expanding your view of the competition allows you to anticipate all vendors bidding for your customers’ attention, quickly respond, and execute on a plan of defense.
Mistake #2: Relying on past knowledge to assess your current position.
Especially when completing SWOT analyses, most companies’ first tendency is to focus on what they’ve learned from past attempts to develop mission statements or understand what customers love most about doing business with them. But how avidly do you reassess these understandings in your market environment today? What truths have you held on to and passed down year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter? Is the feedback you’ve heard from long-standing customers also relevant for your new target markets?
A truly effective competitive landscape analysis abandons all assumptions about who your company is–regardless of what you’ve aspired to be or what you may have heard in the field in the past. By adopting a blank slate approach, you’re able to objectively assess your competitors’ strategies to determine your true niche in the market as it stands today.
Mistake #3: Not taking a holistic view of each competitor.
Even if you are a marketer whose purview is focused on creating a differentiated content campaign, it’s important to develop a view of your competitors beyond their keyword rankings or social media posts. In order for your competitive landscape analysis to be truly 360°, it needs to account for competitors’ technology investments, pricing tactics, distribution models, finances, and even hiring strategies.
Regardless of your strategic focus, having a holistic view of your competitors will not only allow you to connect the dots of their tactics to their broader strategies–it will allow you to better anticipate opportunities for out-positioning them. For instance, if you are a software company and one of your top rivals shares that it is ending support for a competitive product in its documentation, you’re given an immediate head start to develop messaging that can target that customer base and convert them to your product.
Mistake #4: Only analyzing the competitive landscape in support of existing strategies.
One of the biggest mistakes made with competitive landscape analysis is only using it for due diligence when planning a new strategy. But this static application misses a number of major opportunities. With a one-time market snapshot, you’re left with just that: a helpful guide for the current moment, but nothing more. This fails to account for how your competitors are releasing a wealth of new information every single day. Without a mechanism for capturing this data consistently, your blind spots are just as big as the amount of time that passes between analyses: acquisitions, product launches, leadership shifts, and partnership formations can all take place without you realizing–or responding–in a timely fashion.
Instead, treating competitive landscape analysis as a consistent activity opens up an entirely new world of proactive strategies that can advance your market differentiation. By monitoring your competitors’ movements, you’re better able to mitigate risks, identify new opportunities that you can capitalize on, and deploy defensive strategies ahead of the market curve.
Proactive competitive landscape analyses offer a number of benefits, like Mention’s Brittany Berger describes in her blog 5 Reasons to Go Sherlock and Start Monitoring Competitors:
- If competitor A starts rocking at a strategy you’re struggling with, you can observe the differences between to see what you could do better.
- Every time competitor B gets written about in the trade press, you have one more journalist to add to your own list of targets.
- If customers of competitor C are raving like crazy about a certain feature, you can let your product team know it’s a well-liked and popular option.
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can adopt a more proactive approach to competitive research, check out our Competitive Brand Monitoring Service.
Mistake #5: Mistaking strengths as competitive advantages.
Another leading challenge in competitive landscape analysis takes place when companies confuse their strengths (what you excel at) with their competitive advantages (things your customers want from you that separate you from the competition). Without accounting for the customer’s perspective, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two.
For instance, a study of trending themes in your competitors’ messaging might lead you to believe that you need to emphasize the strengths of your innovative product design. If everyone else is talking about it, and you truly have a cutting edge product, it might seem like a no-brainer to make innovation a central pillar of your content strategy. However, it’s vital to ensure this decision is grounded in customers’ feedback: is innovation a key attribute they’re seeking in a supplier? Or do your top-notch support and account management carry more weight with them?
While it’s great to message around what you’re good at, your competitive landscape analysis should account for broader market perspectives to understand your true advantages. Talking with sales or even direct customers will ground your assumptions in the reality of what it is that you actually do best in the market. From there, you can ensure that your value propositions are truly unique when compared to the competition–allowing you to stand out from the cookie cutter appeals that are only too common.
Mistake #6: Not applying competitive analysis in an actionable way.
As Crayon shared in its 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence report, 47% of professionals that conduct competitive landscape analyses struggle in measuring the results of their research efforts, and 45% report issues in driving action across the business with their findings.
In considering the resources required to gather competitive data, separate signal from noise, summarize key findings’ significance, and create impactful analysis reports, a lot of energy is put to waste when competitive research is not effectively applied to strategy. There are a number of methods we recommend to ensure direct applicability of research findings, but the most fundamental measures include:
- Aligning research with your largest knowledge gaps: While this may seem intuitive, your competitive landscape analyses should always be prioritized to align with the strategy decisions for which you’re flying the most blind.
- Establishing a consistent schedule by which other individuals in the company can expect competitive research: This allows them to plan decision-making processes to take place after receiving your insights.
- Staying organized: A successful competitive analysis requires wrangling data from a large quantity of dynamic sources. Tools like Feedly can help you stay on top of things by tracking key data sources and allowing you to flag them in a repository for future access.
Establishing a clear vision for the role of competitive research in your company allows you to maintain an accurate view of the market in your decision-making, and drives your ability to assess and out-perform other vendors’ strategies with ease.
Advance your brand’s differentiation with competitive landscape analysis.
When managed strategically, competitive landscape analysis allows you to mitigate market risks, identify new opportunities for growth, develop market-aligned strategies, and drive more revenue for your business.
