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How to Write Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan (w/ Examples)

The Competitive Analysis Kit

• Vinay Kevadia
• January 9, 2024

14 Min Read

Every business wants to outperform its competitors, but do you know the right approach to gather information and analyze your competitors?

That’s where competitive analysis steps in. It’s the tool that helps you know your competition’s pricing strategies, strengths, product details, marketing strategies, target audience, and more.

If you want to know more about competitor analysis, this guide is all you need. It spills all the details on how to conduct and write a competitor analysis in a business plan, with examples.

Let’s get started and first understand the meaning of competitive analysis.

What is Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis involves collecting information about what other businesses in your industry are doing with their products, sales, and marketing.

Businesses use this data to find out what they are good at, where they can do better, and what opportunities they might have. It is like checking out the competition to see how and where you can improve.

This kind of analysis helps you get a clear picture of the market, allowing you to make smart decisions to make your business stand out and do well in the industry.

Competitive analysis is a section of utmost value for your business plan. The analysis in this section will form the basis upon which you will frame your marketing, sales, and product-related strategies. So make sure it’s thorough, insightful, and in line with your strategic objectives.

Let’s now understand how you can conduct a competitive analysis for your own business and leverage all its varied benefits.

How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Let’s break down the process of conducting a competitive analysis for your business plan in these easy-to-follow steps.

It will help you prepare a solid competitor analysis section in your business plan that actually highlights your strengths and opens room for better discussions (and funding).

Let’s begin.

1. Identify Your Direct and Indirect Competitors

First things first — identify all your business competitors and list them down. You can have a final, detailed list later, but right now an elementary list that mentions your primary competitors (the ones you know and are actively competing with) can suffice.

As you conduct more research, you can keep adding to it.

Explore your competitors using Google, social media platforms, or local markets. Then differentiate them into direct or indirect competitors.

Direct competitors

Businesses offering the same products or services, and targeting a similar target market are your direct competitors.

These competitors operate in the same industry and are often competing for the same market share.

Indirect competitors

On the other hand, indirect competitors are businesses that offer different products or services but cater to the same target customers as yours.

While they may not offer identical solutions, they compete for the same customer budget or attention. Indirect competitors can pose a threat by providing alternatives that customers might consider instead of your offerings.

2. Study the Overall Market

Now that you know your business competitors, deep dive into market research. Market research should involve a combination of both primary and secondary research methods.

Primary research

Primary research involves collecting market information directly from the source or subjects.  Some examples of primary market research methods include:

• Purchasing competitors’ products or services
• Conducting interviews with their customers
• Administering online surveys to gather customer insights

Secondary research

Secondary research involves utilizing pre-existing gathered information from some relevant sources. Some of its examples include:

• Scrutinizing competitors’ websites
• Assessing the current economic landscape
• Referring to online market databases of the competitors.

Have a good understanding of the market at this point to write your market analysis section effectively.

3. Prepare a Competitive Framework

Now that you have a thorough understanding of your competitors’ market, it is time to create a competitive framework that enables comparison between two businesses.

Factors like market share, product offering, pricing, distribution channel, target markets, marketing strategies, and customer service offer essential metrics and information to chart your competitive framework .

These factors will form the basis of comparison for your competitive analysis. Depending on the type of your business, choose the factors that are relevant to you.

4. Take Note of Your Competitor’s Strategies

Now that you have an established framework, use that as a base to analyze your competitor’s strategies. Such analysis will help you understand what the customers like and dislike about your competitors.

Start by analyzing the marketing strategies, sales and marketing channels, promotional activities, and branding strategies of your competitors. Understand how they position themselves in the market and what USPs they emphasize.

Evaluate, analyze their pricing strategies and keep an eye on their distribution channel to understand your competitor’s business model in detail.

This information allows you to make informed decisions about your strategies, helping you identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement.

5. Perform a SWOT Analysis of Your Competitors

A SWOT analysis is a method of analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business in the competitive marketplace.

While strengths and weaknesses focus on internal aspects of your company, opportunities and threats examine the external factors related to the industry and market.

It’s an important tool that will help determine the company’s competitive edge quite efficiently.

It includes the positive features of your internal business operations. For example, a strong brand, skilled workforce, innovative products/services, or a loyal customer base.

It includes all the hindrances of your internal business operations. For example, limited resources, outdated technology, weak brand recognition, or inefficient processes.

Opportunities

It outlines several opportunities that will come your way in the near or far future. Opportunities can arise as the industry or market trend changes or by leveraging the weaknesses of your competitors.

For example, details about emerging markets, technological advancements, changing consumer trends, profitable partnerships in the future, etc.

Threats define any external factor that poses a challenge or any risk for your business in this section. For example, intense competition, economic downturns, regulatory changes, or any advanced technology disruption.

This section will form the basis for your business strategies and product offerings. So make sure it’s detailed and offers the right representation of your business.

And that is all you need to create a comprehensive competitive analysis for your business plan.

Want to Perform Competitive Analysis for your Business?

Discover your competition’s secrets effortlessly with our user-friendly and Free Competitor Analysis Generator!

How to Write Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan

The section on competitor analysis is the most crucial part of your business plan. Making this section informative and engaging gets easier when you have all the essential data to form this section.

Now, let’s learn an effective way of writing your competitive analysis.

1. Determine who your readers are

Know your audience first, because that will change the whole context of your competitor analysis business plan.

The competitive analysis section will vary depending on the intended audience is the team or investors.

Consider the following things about your audience before you start writing this section:

Internal competitor plan (employees or partners)

Objective: The internal competitor plan is to provide your team with an understanding of the competitive landscape.

Focus: The focus should be on the comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors to boost strategic discussions within your team.

Use: It is to leverage the above information to develop strategies that highlight your strengths and address your weaknesses.

Competitor plan for funding (bank or investors)

Objective: Here, the objective is to reassure the potential and viability of your business to investors or lenders.

Focus: This section should focus on awareness and deep understanding of the competitive landscape to persuade the readers about the future of your business.

Use: It is to showcase your market position and the opportunities that are on the way to your business.

This differentiation is solely to ensure that the competitive analysis serves its purpose effectively based on the specific needs and expectations of the respective audience.

2. Describe and Visualise Competitive Advantage

Remember how we determined our competitive advantage at the time of research. It is now time to present that advantage in your competitive analysis.

Highlight your edge over other market players in terms of innovation, product quality, features, pricing, or marketing strategy. Understanding your products’ competitive advantage will also help you write the products and services section effectively.

However, don’t limit the edge to your service and market segment. Highlight every area where you excel even if it is better customer service or enhanced brand reputation.

Now, you can explain your analysis through textual blocks. However, a more effective method would be using a positioning map or competitive matrix to offer a visual representation of your company’s competitive advantage.

3. Explain your strategies

Your competitor analysis section should not only highlight the opportunities or threats of your business. It should also mention the strategies you will implement to overcome those threats or capitalize on the opportunities.

Such strategies may include crafting top-notch quality for your products or services, exploring the unexplored market segment, or having creative marketing strategies.

Elaborate on these strategies later in their respective business plan sections.

4. Know the pricing strategy

To understand the pricing strategy of your competitors, there are various aspects you need to have information about. It involves knowing their pricing model, evaluating their price points, and considering the additional costs, if any.

One way to understand this in a better way is to compare features and value offered at different price points and identify the gaps in competitors’ offerings.

Once you know the pricing structure of your competitors, compare it with yours and get to know the competitive advantage of your business from a pricing point of view.

Let us now get a more practical insight by checking an example of competitive analysis.

Competitive Analysis Example in a Business Plan

Here’s a business plan example highlighting the barber shop’s competitive analysis.

1. List of competitors

Direct & indirect competitors.

The following retailers are located within a 5-mile radius of J&S, thus providing either direct or indirect competition for customers:

Joe’s Beauty Salon

Joe’s Beauty Salon is the town’s most popular beauty salon and has been in business for 32 years. Joe’s offers a wide array of services that you would expect from a beauty salon.

Besides offering haircuts, Joe’s also offers nail services such as manicures and pedicures. In fact, over 60% of Joe’s revenue comes from services targeted at women outside of hair services. In addition, Joe’s does not offer its customers premium salon products.

For example, they only offer 2 types of regular hair gels and 4 types of shampoos. This puts Joe’s in direct competition with the local pharmacy and grocery stores that also carry these mainstream products. J&S, on the other hand, offers numerous options for exclusive products that are not yet available in West Palm Beach, Florida.

LUX CUTS has been in business for 5 years. LUX CUTS offers an extremely high-end hair service, with introductory prices of $120 per haircut.

However, LUX CUTS will primarily be targeting a different customer segment from J&S, focusing on households with an income in the top 10% of the city.

Furthermore, J&S offers many of the services and products that LUX CUTS offers, but at a fraction of the price, such as:

• Hairstyle suggestions & hair care consultation
• Hair extensions & coloring
• Premium hair products from industry leaders

Freddie’s Fast Hair Salon

Freddie’s Fast Hair Salon is located four stores down the road from J&S. Freddy’s has been in business for the past 3 years and enjoys great success, primarily due to its prime location.

Freddy’s business offers inexpensive haircuts and focuses on volume over quality. It also has a large customer base comprised of children between the ages of 5 to 13.

J&S has several advantages over Freddy’s Fast Hair Salon including:

• An entertainment-focused waiting room, with TVs and board games to make the wait for service more pleasurable. Especially great for parents who bring their children.
• A focus on service quality rather than speed alone to ensure repeat visits. J&S will spend on average 20 more minutes with its clients than Freddy’s.

While we expect that Freddy’s Fast Hair Salon will continue to thrive based on its location and customer relationships, we expect that more and more customers will frequent J&S based on the high-quality service it provides.

2. Competitive Pricing

John and Sons Barbing Salon will work towards ensuring that all our services are offered at highly competitive prices compared to what is obtainable in The United States of America.

We know the importance of gaining entrance into the market by lowering our pricing to attract all and sundry that is why we have consulted with experts and they have given us the best insights on how to do this and effectively gain more clients soon.

Our pricing system is going to be based on what is obtainable in the industry, we don’t intend to charge more (except for premium and customized services) and we don’t intend to charge less than our competitors are offering in West Palm Beach – Florida.

3. Our pricing

• Payment by cash
• Payment via Point of Sale (POS) Machine
• Payment via online bank transfer (online payment portal)
• Payment via Mobile money
• Check (only from loyal customers)

Given the above, we have chosen banking platforms that will help us achieve our payment plans without any itches.

4. Competitive advantage

5. SWOT analysis

Why is a Competitive Environment helpful?

Somewhere we all think, “What if we had no competition?” “What if we were the monopoly?” It would be great, right? Well, this is not the reality, and have to accept the competition sooner or later.

However, competition is healthy for businesses to thrive and survive, let’s see how:

1. Competition validates your idea

When people are developing similar products like you, it is a sign that you are on the right path. Having healthy competition proves that your idea is valid and there is a potential target market for your product and service offerings.

2. Innovation and Efficiency

Businesses competing with each other are motivated to innovate consistently, thereby, increasing their scope and market of product offerings. Moreover, when you are operating in a cutthroat environment, you simply cannot afford to be inefficient.

Be it in terms of costs, production, pricing, or marketing—you will ensure efficiency in all aspects to attract more business.

3. Market Responsiveness

Companies in a competitive environment tend to stay relevant and longer in business since they are adaptive to the changing environment. In the absence of competition, you would start getting redundant which will throw you out of the market, sooner or later.

4. Eases Consumer Education

Since your target market is already aware of the problem and existing market solutions, it would be much easier to introduce your business to them. Rather than focusing on educating, you would be more focused on branding and positioning your brand as an ideal customer solution.

Being the first one in the market is exciting. However, having healthy competition has these proven advantages which are hard to ignore.

A way forward

Whether you are starting a new business or have an already established unit, having a practical and realistic understanding of your competitive landscape is essential to developing efficient business strategies.

While getting to know your competition is essential, don’t get too hung up in the research. Research your competitors to improve your business plan and strategies, not to copy their ideas.

Create your unique strategies, offer the best possible services, and add value to your offerings—that will make you stand out.

While it’s a long, tough road, a comprehensive business plan can be your guide. Using modern business planning software is probably the easiest way to draft your plan.

Use Upmetrics. Simply enter your business details, answer the strategic questions, and see your business plan come together in front of your eyes.

Build your Business Plan Faster

with step-by-step Guidance & AI Assistance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swot analysis a competitive analysis.

SWOT analysis is just a component of a competitive analysis and not the whole competitive analysis. It helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business and determine the emerging opportunities and threats faced by the external environment.

Competitive analysis in reality is a broad spectrum topic wherein you identify your competitors, analyze them on different metrics, and identify your competitive advantage to form competitive business strategies.

What tools can i use for competitor analysis?

For a thorough competitor analysis, you will require a range of tools that can help in collecting, analyzing, and presenting data. While SEMrush, Google Alerts, Google Trends, and Ahrefs can help in collecting adequate competitor data, Business planning tools like Upmetrics can help in writing the competitors section of your business plan quite efficiently.

What are the 5 parts of a competitive analysis?

The main five components to keep in mind while having a competitor analysis are:

• Identifying the competitors
• Analyzing competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
• Assessing market share and trends
• Examining competitors’ strategies and market positioning
• Performing SWOT analysis

What is the difference between market analysis and competitive analysis?

Market analysis involves a comprehensive examination of the overall market dynamics, industry trends, and factors influencing a business’s operating environment.

On the other hand, competitive analysis narrows the focus to specific competitors within the market, delving into their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.

About the Author

Vinay Kevadiya

Vinay Kevadiya is the founder and CEO of Upmetrics, the #1 business planning software. His ultimate goal with Upmetrics is to revolutionize how entrepreneurs create, manage, and execute their business plans. He enjoys sharing his insights on business planning and other relevant topics through his articles and blog posts. Read more

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How to create a competitive analysis (with examples)

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. In this guide, we’ll outline how to do a competitive analysis and explain how you can use this marketing strategy to improve your business.

Whether you’re running a business or playing in a football game, understanding your competition is crucial for success. While you may not be scoring touchdowns in the office, your goal is to score business deals with clients or win customers with your products. The method of preparation for athletes and business owners is similar—once you understand your strengths and weaknesses versus your competitors’, you can level up. 

What is a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. 

Direct competitors market the same product to the same audience as you, while indirect competitors market the same product to a different audience. After identifying your competitors, you can use the information you gather to see where you stand in the market landscape. 

What to include in a competitive analysis

The purpose of this type of analysis is to get a competitive advantage in the market and improve your business strategy. Without a competitive analysis, it’s difficult to know what others are doing to win clients or customers in your target market. A competitive analysis report may include:

A description of your company’s target market

Details about your product or service versus the competitors’

Current and projected market share, sales, and revenues

Pricing comparison

Marketing and social media strategy analysis

Differences in customer ratings

You’ll compare each detail of your product or service versus the competition to assess strategy efficacy. By comparing success metrics across companies, you can make data-driven decisions.

How to do a competitive analysis

Follow these five steps to create your competitive analysis report and get a broad view of where you fit in the market. This process can help you analyze a handful of competitors at one time and better approach your target customers.

1. Create a competitor overview

In step one, select between five and 10 competitors to compare against your company. The competitors you choose should have similar product or service offerings and a similar business model to you. You should also choose a mix of both direct and indirect competitors so you can see how new markets might affect your company. Choosing both startup and seasoned competitors will further diversify your analysis.

Tip: To find competitors in your industry, use Google or Amazon to search for your product or service. The top results that emerge are likely your competitors. If you’re a startup or you serve a niche market, you may need to dive deeper into the rankings to find your direct competitors.

2. Conduct market research

Once you know the competitors you want to analyze, you’ll begin in-depth market research. This will be a mixture of primary and secondary research. Primary research comes directly from customers or the product itself, while secondary research is information that’s already compiled. Then, keep track of the data you collect in a user research template .

Primary market research may include: 

Purchasing competitors’ products or services

Interviewing customers

Conducting online surveys of customers 

Holding in-person focus groups

Secondary market research may include:

Examining competitors’ websites

Assessing the current economic situation

Identifying technological developments 

Reading company records

Tip: Search engine analysis tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you examine competitors’ websites and obtain crucial SEO information such as the keywords they’re targeting, the number of backlinks they have, and the overall health of their website. 

3. Compare product features

The next step in your analysis involves a comparison of your product to your competitors’ products. This comparison should break down the products feature by feature. While every product has its own unique features, most products will likely include:

Service offered

Age of audience served

Number of features

Style and design

Ease of use

Type and number of warranties

Customer support offered

Product quality

Tip: If your features table gets too long, abbreviate this step by listing the features you believe are of most importance to your analysis. Important features may include cost, product benefits, and ease of use.

4. Compare product marketing

The next step in your analysis will look similar to the one before, except you’ll compare the marketing efforts of your competitors instead of the product features. Unlike the product features matrix you created, you’ll need to go deeper to unveil each company’s marketing plan . 

Areas you’ll want to analyze include:

Social media

Website copy

Press releases

Product copy

As you analyze the above, ask questions to dig deeper into each company’s marketing strategies. The questions you should ask will vary by industry, but may include:

What story are they trying to tell?

What value do they bring to their customers?

What’s their company mission?

What’s their brand voice?

Tip: You can identify your competitors’ target demographic in this step by referencing their customer base, either from their website or from testimonials. This information can help you build customer personas. When you can picture who your competitor actively targets, you can better understand their marketing tactics. 

5. Use a SWOT analysis

Competitive intelligence will make up a significant part of your competitor analysis framework, but once you’ve gathered your information, you can turn the focus back to your company. A SWOT analysis helps you identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. It also helps turn weaknesses into opportunities and assess threats you face based on your competition.

During a SWOT analysis, ask yourself:

What do we do well?

What could we improve?

Are there market gaps in our services?

What new market trends are on the horizon?

Tip: Your research from the previous steps in the competitive analysis will help you answer these questions and fill in your SWOT analysis. You can visually present your findings in a SWOT matrix, which is a four-box chart divided by category.

6. Identify your place in the market landscape

The last step in your competitive analysis is to understand where you stand in the market landscape. To do this, you’ll create a graph with an X and Y axis. The two axes should represent the most important factors for being competitive in your market. 

For example, the X-axis may represent customer satisfaction, while the Y-axis may represent presence in the market. You’ll then plot each competitor on the graph according to their (x,y) coordinates. You’ll also plot your company on this chart, which will give you an idea of where you stand in relation to your competitors. 

This graph is included for informational purposes and does not represent Asana’s market landscape or any specific industry’s market landscape. 

Tip: In this example, you’ll see three companies that have a greater market presence and greater customer satisfaction than yours, while two companies have a similar market presence but higher customer satisfaction. This data should jumpstart the problem-solving process because you now know which competitors are the biggest threats and you can see where you fall short. 

Competitive analysis example

Imagine you work at a marketing startup that provides SEO for dentists, which is a niche industry and only has a few competitors. You decide to conduct a market analysis for your business. To do so, you would:

Step 1: Use Google to compile a list of your competitors. 

Steps 2, 3, and 4: Use your competitors’ websites, as well as SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, to deep-dive into the service offerings and marketing strategies of each company. 

Step 5: Focusing back on your own company, you conduct a SWOT analysis to assess your own strategic goals and get a visual of your strengths and weaknesses. 

Step 6: Finally, you create a graph of the market landscape and conclude that there are two companies beating your company in customer satisfaction and market presence. 

After compiling this information into a table like the one below, you consider a unique strategy. To beat out your competitors, you can use localization. Instead of marketing to dentists nationwide like your competitors are doing, you decide to focus your marketing strategy on one region, state, or city. Once you’ve become the known SEO company for dentists in that city, you’ll branch out. 

You won’t know what conclusions you can draw from your competitive analysis until you do the work and see the results. Whether you decide on a new pricing strategy, a way to level up your marketing, or a revamp of your product, understanding your competition can provide significant insight.

Drawbacks of competitive analysis

There are some drawbacks to competitive analysis you should consider before moving forward with your report. While these drawbacks are minor, understanding them can make you an even better manager or business owner. 

Don’t forget to take action

You don’t just want to gather the information from your competitive analysis—you also want to take action on that information. The data itself will only show you where you fit into the market landscape. The key to competitive analysis is using it to problem solve and improve your company’s strategic plan .

Be wary of confirmation bias

Confirmation bias means interpreting information based on the beliefs you already hold. This is bad because it can cause you to hold on to false beliefs. To avoid bias, you should rely on all the data available to back up your decisions. In the example above, the business owner may believe they’re the best in the SEO dental market at social media. Because of this belief, when they do market research for social media, they may only collect enough information to confirm their own bias—even if their competitors are statistically better at social media. However, if they were to rely on all the data available, they could eliminate this bias.

Update your analysis regularly

A competitive analysis report represents a snapshot of the market landscape as it currently stands. This report can help you gain enough information to make changes to your company, but you shouldn’t refer to the document again unless you update the information regularly. Market trends are always changing, and although it’s tedious to update your report, doing so will ensure you get accurate insight into your competitors at all times. 

Boost your marketing strategy with competitive analysis

Learning your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses will make you a better marketer. If you don’t know the competition you’re up against, you can’t beat them. Using competitive analysis can boost your marketing strategy and allow you to capture your target audience faster.

Competitive analysis must lead to action, which means following up on your findings with clear business goals and a strong business plan. Once you do your competitive analysis, you can use the templates below to put your plan into action.

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How to Write the Competitor Analysis Section of the Business Plan

Writing The Business Plan: Section 4

Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.

The competitor analysis section can be the most difficult section to compile when writing a business plan because before you can analyze your competitors, you have to investigate them. Here's how to write the competitor analysis section of the business plan.

First, Find Out Who Your Competitors Are

If you're planning to start a small business that's going to operate locally, chances are you already know which businesses you're going to be competing with. But if not, you can easily find out by doing an internet search for local businesses, looking in the online or printed local phone book, or even driving around the target market area. 

Your local business may also have non-local competitors that you need to be aware of.

If you're selling office supplies, for instance, you may also have to compete with big-box retailers within a driving distance of several hours and companies that offer office supplies online. You want to make sure that you identify all your possible competitors at this stage.

Then Find Out About Them

You need to know:

• what markets or market segments your competitors serve;
• what benefits your competitors offer;
• why customers buy from them;
• as much as possible about their products and/or services, pricing, and promotion.

Gathering Information for Your Competitor Analysis

A visit is still the most obvious starting point - either to the brick and mortar store or to the company's website. Go there, once or several times, and look around. Watch how customers are treated. Check out the prices.

You can also learn a fair bit about your competitors from talking to their customers and/or clients - if you know who they are. Other good "live" sources of information about competitors include a company's vendors or suppliers and a company's employees. They may or may not be willing to talk to you, but it's worth seeking them out and asking.

And watch for trade shows that your competitors may be attending. Businesses are there to disseminate information about and sell their products or services; attending and visiting their booths can be an excellent way to find out about your competition.

You'll also want to search for the publicly available information about your competitors. Online publications, newspapers, and magazines may all have information about the company you're investigating for your competitive analysis. Press releases may be particularly useful. 

Once you've compiled the information about your competitors, you're ready to analyze it. 

Analyzing the Competition

Just listing a bunch of information about your competition in the competitor analysis section of the business plan misses the point. It's the analysis of the information that's important.

Study the information you've gathered about each of your competitors and ask yourself this question: How are you going to compete with that company?

For many small businesses, the key to competing successfully is to identify a market niche where they can capture a  specific target market  whose needs are not being met.

• Is there a particular segment of the market that your competition has overlooked?
• Is there a service that customers or clients want that your competitor does not supply? 

The goal of your competitor analysis is to identify and expand upon your competitive advantage - the benefits that your proposed business can offer the customer or client that your competition can't or won't supply.

Writing the Competitor Analysis Section

When you're writing the business plan, you'll write the competitor analysis section in the form of several paragraphs. 

The first paragraph will outline the competitive environment, telling your readers who your proposed business's competitors are, how much of the market they control and any other relevant details about the competition.

The second and following paragraphs will detail your competitive advantage, explaining why and how your company will be able to compete with these competitors and establish yourself as a successful business.

Remember; you don't have to go into exhaustive detail here, but you do need to persuade the reader of your business plan that you are knowledgeable about the competition and that you have a clear, definitive plan that will enable your new business to successfully compete.

How to Write a Competitive Analysis for Your Business Plan

11 min. read

Updated January 3, 2024

Do you know who your competitors are? If you do, have you taken the time to conduct a thorough competitor analysis?

Knowing your competitors, how they operate, and the necessary benchmarks you need to hit are crucial to positioning your business for success. Investors will also want to see an analysis of the competition in your business plan.

In this guide, we’ll explore the significance of competitive analysis and guide you through the essential steps to conduct and write your own. 

You’ll learn how to identify and evaluate competitors to better understand the opportunities and threats to your business. And you’ll be given a four-step process to describe and visualize how your business fits within the competitive landscape.

• What is a competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is the process of gathering information about your competitors and using it to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This information can then be used to develop strategies to improve your own business and gain a competitive advantage.

• How to conduct a competitive analysis

Before you start writing about the competition, you need to conduct your analysis. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Identify your competitors

The first step in conducting a comprehensive competitive analysis is to identify your competitors. 

Start by creating a list of both direct and indirect competitors within your industry or market segment. Direct competitors offer similar products or services, while indirect competitors solve the same problems your company does, but with different products or services.

Keep in mind that this list may change over time. It’s crucial to revisit it regularly to keep track of any new entrants or changes to your current competitors. For instance, a new competitor may enter the market, or an existing competitor may change their product offerings.

2. Analyze the market

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you need to study the overall market. 

This includes the market size , growth rate, trends, and customer preferences. Be sure that you understand the key drivers of demand, demographic and psychographic profiles of your target audience , and any potential market gaps or opportunities.

Conducting a market analysis can require a significant amount of research and data collection. Luckily, if you’re writing a business plan you’ll follow this process to complete the market analysis section . So, doing this research has value for multiple parts of your plan.

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3. Create a competitive framework

You’ll need to establish criteria for comparing your business with competitors. You want the metrics and information you choose to provide answers to specific questions. (“Do we have the same customers?” “What features are offered?” “How many customers are being served?”)

Here are some common factors to consider including: 

• Market share
• Product/service offerings or features
• Distribution channels
• Target markets
• Marketing strategies
• Customer service

4. Research your competitors

You can now begin gathering information about your competitors. Because you spent the time to explore the market and set up a comparison framework—your research will be far more focused and easier to complete.

There’s no perfect research process, so start by exploring sources such as competitor websites, social media, customer reviews, industry reports, press releases, and public financial statements. You may also want to conduct primary research by interviewing customers, suppliers, or industry experts.

You can check out our full guide on conducting market research for more specific steps.

5. Assess their strengths and weaknesses

Evaluate each competitor based on the criteria you’ve established in the competitive framework. Identify their key strengths (competitive advantages) and weaknesses (areas where they underperform).

6. Identify opportunities and threats

Based on the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, identify opportunities (areas where you can outperform them) and threats (areas where they may outperform you) for your business. 

You can check out our full guide to conducting a SWOT analysis for more specific questions that you should ask as part of each step. 

• How to write your competitive analysis

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to present your findings in your business plan. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Determine who your audience is

Who you are writing a business plan for (investors, partners, employees, etc.) may require you to format your competitive analysis differently. 

For an internal business plan you’ll use with your team, the competition section should help them better understand the competition. You and your team will use it to look at comparative strengths and weaknesses to help you develop strategies to gain a competitive advantage.

For fundraising, your plan will be shared with potential investors or as part of a bank loan. In this case, you’re describing the competition to reassure your target reader. You are showing awareness and a firm understanding of the competition, and are positioned to take advantage of opportunities while avoiding the pitfalls.

2. Describe your competitive position

You need to know how your business stacks up, based on the values it offers to your chosen target market. To run this comparison, you’ll be using the same criteria from the competitive framework you completed earlier. You need to identify your competitive advantages and weaknesses, and any areas where you can improve.

The goal is positioning (setting your business up against the background of other offerings), and making that position clear to the target market. Here are a few questions to ask yourself in order to define your competitive position:

• How are you going to take advantage of your distinctive differences, in your customers’ eyes? 
• What are you doing better? 
• How do you work toward strengths and away from weaknesses?
• What do you want the world to think and say about you and how you compare to others?

3. Visualize your competitive position

There are a few different ways to present your competitive framework in your business plan. The first is a “positioning map” and the second is a “competitive matrix”. Depending on your needs, you can use one or both of these to communicate the information that you gathered during your competitive analysis:

Positioning map

The positioning map plots two product or business benefits across a horizontal and vertical axis. The furthest points of each represent opposite extremes (Hot and cold for example) that intersect in the middle. With this simple chart, you can drop your own business and the competition into the zone that best represents the combination of both factors.

I often refer to marketing expert Philip Kohler’s simple strategic positioning map of breakfast, shown here. You can easily draw your own map with any two factors of competition to see how a market stacks up.

It’s quite common to see the price on one axis and some important qualitative factor on the other, with the assumption that there should be a rough relationship between price and quality.

Competitive matrix

It’s pretty common for most business plans to also include a competitive matrix. It shows how different competitors stack up according to the factors identified in your competitive framework. 

How do you stack up against the others? Here’s what a typical competitive matrix looks like:

For the record, I’ve seen dozens of competitive matrices in plans and pitches. I’ve never seen a single one that didn’t show that this company does more of what the market wants than all others. So maybe that tells you something about credibility and how to increase it. Still, the ones I see are all in the context of seeking investment, so maybe that’s the nature of the game.

4. Explain your strategies for gaining a competitive edge

Your business plan should also explain the strategies your business will use to capitalize on the opportunities you’ve identified while mitigating any threats from competition. This may involve improving your product/service offerings, targeting underserved market segments, offering more attractive price points, focusing on better customer service, or developing innovative marketing strategies.

While you should cover these strategies in the competition section, this information should be expanded on further in other areas of your business plan. 

For example, based on your competitive analysis you show that most competitors have the same feature set. As part of your strategy, you see a few obvious ways to better serve your target market with additional product features. This information should be referenced within your products and services section to back up your problem and solution statement. 

• Why competition is a good thing

Business owners often wish that they had no competition. They think that with no competition, the entire market for their product or service will be theirs. That is simply not the case—especially for new startups that have truly innovative products and services. Here’s why:

Competition validates your idea

You know you have a good idea when other people are coming up with similar products or services. Competition validates the market and the fact that there are most likely customers for your new product. This also means that the costs of marketing and educating your market go down (see my next point).

Competition helps educate your target market

Being first-to-market can be a huge advantage. It also means that you will have to spend way more than the next player to educate customers about your new widget, your new solution to a problem, and your new approach to services. 

This is especially true for businesses that are extremely innovative. These first-to-market businesses will be facing customers that didn’t know that there was a solution to their problem . These potential customers might not even know that they have a problem that can be solved in a better way. 

If you’re a first-to-market company, you will have an uphill battle to educate consumers—an often expensive and time-consuming process. The 2nd-to-market will enjoy all the benefits of an educated marketplace without the large marketing expense.

Competition pushes you

Businesses that have little or no competition become stagnant. Customers have few alternatives to choose from, so there is no incentive to innovate. Constant competition ensures that your marketplace continues to evolve and that your product offering continues to evolve with it.

Competition forces focus & differentiation

Without competition, it’s easy to lose focus on your core business and your core customers and start expanding into areas that don’t serve your best customers. Competition forces you and your business to figure out how to be different than your competition while focusing on your customers. In the long term, competition will help you build a better business.

• What if there is no competition?

One mistake many new businesses make is thinking that just because nobody else is doing exactly what they’re doing, their business is a sure thing. If you’re struggling to find competitors, ask yourself these questions.

Is there a good reason why no one else is doing it?

The smart thing to do is ask yourself,  “Why isn’t anyone else doing it?”

It’s possible that nobody’s selling cod-liver frozen yogurt in your area because there’s simply no market for it. Ask around, talk to people, and do your market research. If you determine that you’ve got customers out there, you’re in good shape.

But that still doesn’t mean there’s no competition.

How are customers getting their needs met?

There may not be another cod-liver frozen yogurt shop within 500 miles. But maybe an online distributor sells cod-liver oil to do-it-yourselfers who make their own fro-yo at home. Or maybe your potential customers are eating frozen salmon pops right now. 

Are there any businesses that are indirect competitors?

Don’t think of competition as only other businesses that do exactly what you do. Think about what currently exists on the market that your product would displace.

It’s the difference between direct competition and indirect competition. When Henry Ford started successfully mass-producing automobiles in the U.S., he didn’t have other automakers to compete with. His competition was horse-and-buggy makers, bicycles, and railroads.

Do a competitive analysis, but don’t let it derail your planning

While it’s important that you know the competition, don’t get too caught up in the research. 

If all you do is track your competition and do endless competitive analyses, you won’t be able to come up with original ideas. You will end up looking and acting just like your competition. Instead, make a habit of NOT visiting your competition’s website, NOT going into their store, and NOT calling their sales office. 

Focus instead on how you can provide the best service possible and spend your time talking to your customers. Figure out how you can better serve the next person that walks in the door so that they become a lifetime customer, a reference, or a referral source.

If you focus too much on the competition, you will become a copycat. When that happens, it won’t matter to a customer if they walk into your store or the competition’s because you will both be the same.

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software , a co-founder of Borland International, and a recognized expert in business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching and evangelizing for business planning.

Table of Contents

• Don't let competition derail planning

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How to Perform a Competitor Analysis (Examples & Templates)

Written by: Masooma Memon

Thorough competitor analysis is a crucial aspect of any marketing plan .

It helps you understand how challenging it could be to crack a market, what strategies could work, and how you can best position your brand.

It can also tell you what strategies won’t work, what the customer’s expectations are and how much they’re willing to pay.

Without it, you likely won’t survive a day in a new market.

You need to study your competition not only when you’re starting out but also periodically after cementing your feet in the market. This way, you can stay on top of your game, consistently growing your market share.

Not sure where to start?

We’ve got an easy, 6-step competitor analysis template for you in this guide. We’ll also share templates to help you document your findings.

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Table of Contents

What is a competitor analysis, the benefits of competitor analysis for businesses, how to conduct a competitor analysis (step-by-step), 10 competitor analysis templates to use right away, ready to try out this competitor analysis template.

Competitor analysis is the strategic research of your competitors to study their strengths and weaknesses.

By taking the time to analyze your current and potential competitors, you can identify areas for improvement. You want to look out for things like their value proposition, product, marketing and sales tactics.

Besides helping you find gaps in the market, studying your competition helps in the following ways:

• Identify ways to outperform your competitors.
• Understand market trends so you can make sure your business is consistently meeting and even exceeding industry standards.
• Learn what your competitors are doing right. This is important for staying relevant in your market and growing your market share.
• Find out how your product is different from other similar products. This helps you improve brand positioning and informs your marketing copy.

A competitor analysis seeks to study all available information on your competitors, including their pricing, differentiators, positioning, product portfolio, strengths and weaknesses.

The steps below will help you uncover all this and more.

Step 1: Create a List of Your Competitors

Chances are you can recall who your competitors are in a breath.

But if you’re new, identifying who your direct and indirect competitors are will take some time.

Keep in mind that direct competitors offer products and services similar to yours, positioning them as a substitute for your business. They also mostly target the same audience.

On the flip side, indirect competitors are businesses that don’t necessarily offer the same product or service. However, their offering can solve the same customer problem that your business solves.

An easy, cost-effective way to identify competitors is by typing in your product type into the Google search bar.

Let’s suppose you have a project management software . A quick Google search on this will turn up names of companies offering the same type of software.

For creating a comprehensive list of competitors, make sure you google synonyms too. This could be a “project management tool” for the example above.

Another useful tactic is to conduct the same research on social media .

Type in what your business does and you’ll see similar business names pop up.

You can also surf hashtags to learn how other companies are using them.

Lastly, if you’re conducting market research interviews , pay attention to the brand names that target buyers mention in their interviews.

Step 2: Study Competitors’ Product Offerings and Market Share

Once you know who your competitors are, start studying them one by one.

Go through their product portfolio. Look at the products they offer, how they position and price them. Record your findings in a worksheet so you can track and analyze the data you’re gathering. Visme allows you to do this quickly and easily.

You can also grab a template from Visme’s template gallery and create a product and pricing sketch for each competitor. This will make it easy for you to visualize individual competitors.

To determine competitors’ market share, use Statista or a similar resource to get your hands on the numbers.

Track and visualize your findings in this template.

Step 3: Perform a SWOT Analysis

A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis helps you study what competitors are doing to win customers. You can also use it to identify gaps in your market .

For example, let's say a competitor’s customer support team takes pretty long to get back to customers. You can use the information to provide faster customer support and a better experience for customers.

As you hunt for competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, study the following areas:

• Sales strategy
• Brand positioning
• Marketing plan
• Discounts strategy
• Website experience
• Customer support and experience

Running an ecommerce business? Study competitors’ shipping and product return strategies as well.

An effective way to jump-start studying competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and more is through social listening. The goal? To identify what customers are saying about brands on social media channels they use, including chat forums and groups they are a part of.

A similar approach is to study customer reviews. This will help you understand what your competitors’ customers are saying about them.

Are they satisfied with the product quality? Or are they put off by their onboarding process? Do their support requests take long to get answered?

As you go about researching, record your findings in a SWOT analysis template like this one:

If you’re a Visme user, you have the benefit of coordinating your SWOT research efforts with your team.

If you and your business partner are working together on the research work, you can both access and edit the worksheet in Visme at the same time.

To do this, use the Share option from the top right side of your project dashboard in Visme. Select "Share Privately" and add your partner to the project.

From there, you two can collaborate on design , leaving comments for each other.

Step 4: Dig Deeper Into Competitors’ Pricing Strategy

We’ve already mentioned that you need to make notes on how your competitors price their products. But studying their pricing strategy goes deeper.

First, review what discounts competitors offer. Then look at how often they offer discounts.

Studying your competitors’ promo strategies will help you understand how they’re attracting customers and growing sales. It will also give you a good idea of how much the target market is willing to pay and what their expectations are in terms of discounts.

In addition to the manual research to uncover individual competitor pricing, use the same research tools mentioned above — social listening and customer reviews. They'll help identify what customers are saying. Pay attention to how customers respond to the discounts and promotions that competitors run.

Some businesses tend to offer discounts shortly after they launch new products. This can be a turn-off for shoppers who like to shop for the latest collections to stand out from their peers.

Similarly, other businesses extend product deals now and then despite telling customers it’s their last chance to buy.

See if and how that annoys customers and if there’s an opportunity for you to offer something more relevant and unique to the target market.

Step 5: Analyze Competitors’ Marketing Strategy

It’s important to study how competitors are raising brand awareness and moving leads down their marketing funnel .

Begin by identifying where your leading competitors are funneling their resources. Is it PPC they’re investing in? Or are they taking the community-building approach to attract, engage and nurture customers?

Chances are your competitors are big on educating customers, so they’re investing in content marketing .

Also, look at which channels competitors are focusing on. Is it Twitter or Reddit? Or do they have a strong presence on Instagram ?

The answer to this will help you understand where your target audience is present and which marketing channels you should focus on.

Take Clearscope , an SEO content optimization tool, for example. They take an educational approach to their marketing by creating lots of webinar content.

Ahrefs , another SEO tool, on the other hand, is also big on the educational approach. But they create blog content, not webinars.

Step 6: Document Your Research

In this last step, compile all your research in written format.

Create an action plan that includes a tactical list of steps to take. This way, you can discuss and prioritize steps to take with your team. Aim to be concise as you create this competitor analysis document.

If you create a wordy report, nobody will read it. But if you create a document that summarizes your findings and visualizes data in the form of charts and graphs, more people will read and appreciate your hard work.

Want some good news? Visme makes it uber-simple to create easy-to-read graphs and charts . It can help you create an easily shareable and visually engaging analysis document.

Design graphs using templates like the one below:

Alternatively, create new charts in your presentation or report .

All you have to do is to head to Charts & Graphs on the left side of your design dashboard and choose the type of chart you want to create.

From there, Visme gives you a chart to enter data so it can create a custom graph for your project. You can resize the graph you create, tweak its color, animate it and add other interacgive effects.

When you are done designing your document you can easily share it with the rest of your team . Head to the Share button at the top right corner of your design dashboard.

Now select Share Privately from the left side and give permission to team members. Choose whether they can view your work, comment on it, or edit it.

If you prefer to get a link for the work you’ve created, simply grab it from the bottom of the page and share it with your team.

By going into Advanced Settings on the left side, followed by Privacy . You can also allow your team to download the competitor analysis report as a PDF.

And, finally, for the templates that we promised:

1. Retail Store Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

Use this infographic template to record your competitors’ pricing, unique selling proposition (USP), revenue and more.

Since the information is arranged in a table format, you can easily study how each competitor stands against another and how they compare to business.

2. Competitor Analysis Interactive Presentation Template

If you’re looking to pitch some growth ideas to your executive team, this interactive competitor analysis template is for you.

It’s neatly designed so that all information is easy to read.

There are a handful of slides in the template that use tables to compare competitors. You can also always add more slides or remove some to suit your needs.

3. Logistics Firm Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

This is the perfect template for studying and comparing two competitors.

If you prefer, you can also use the beautifully designed template to analyze your business against your leading competitor.

And if need be, you can add another row for comparing another competitor.

4. Edtech Company Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

This is another competitor analysis template to pitch two competitors against one another.

What makes it different from the template above is that it arranges all the comparative pointers at the center. This way, you won’t need to keep looking to the left side to see which pointer you’re studying.

5. Sales Consultant Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This is a great template to record findings on each competitor.

By using it, you can easily get a snapshot of each of your competitor’s free and paid products, USP, features, target market and the marketing channels they use.

6. Media and Marketing Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This template is perfect for recording not just your competitors’ products, features and pricing but also their SWOT analysis.

Consequently, this competitor analysis template can serve as your readable database with all your research findings.

7. Nonprofit SWOT Analysis Infographic Template

If you’re looking to record your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, then this template is perfect.

And if you’re conducting several competitors’ SWOT analyses, make sure you use this template for each one of them.

8. TrackFast Technologies Sales Battlecard Template

This competitor analysis template is useful for comparing your business with your leading competition.

As well as a comparative table, it also features space to record other essential details such as company overview, key differentiators, customer pain points and benefits.

9. Design Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This one is a simple, minimally-designed competitor analysis template for comparing various competitors.

If you need to add another column, you can easily do so by editing the template in Visme.

10. Design Tool Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

Lastly, we’ve got this competitor analysis template.

Its best feature is that the template divides each column into sub-categories, which makes it easy to analyze each aspect.

For example, within the product column, you can easily learn about a competitor’s product features, pricing and USP.

So you see, competitor analysis is critical for tapping into and growing in a market.

But remember, analyzing your competitors and their moves is only part of the task. The other part involves documenting your findings in an easy-to-read and understandable way. This is key to making sure your team implements the findings from the research.

Want to start recording your findings? Sign up for Visme’s document creator for free today and start documenting actionable takeaways.

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About the Author

Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer by day and a novel nerd by night. She crafts research-backed, actionable blog posts for SaaS and marketing brands who aim to employ quality content to educate and engage with their audience.

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• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Competitive Analysis

The seventh in a comprehensive series to help you craft the perfect business plan for your startup.

This article is part of a series on  how to write a great business plan .

The Competitive Analysis section of your business plan is devoted to analyzing your competition--both your current competition and potential competitors who might enter your market.

Every business has competition. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competition--or potential competition--is critical to making sure your business survives and grows. While you don't need to hire a private detective, you do need to thoroughly assess your competition on a regular basis even if you only plan to run a small business.

In fact, small businesses can be especially vulnerable to competition, especially when new companies enter a marketplace.

Competitive analysis can be incredibly complicated and time-consuming... but it doesn't have to be. Here is a simple process you can follow to identify, analyze, and determine the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.

Profile Current Competitors

First develop a basic profile of each of your current competitors. For example, if you plan to open an office supply store you may have three competing stores in your market.

Online retailers will also provide competition, but thoroughly analyzing those companies will be less valuable unless you also decide you want to sell office supplies online. (Although it's also possible that they--or, say, Amazon--are your real competition. Only you can determine that.)

To make the process easier, stick to analyzing companies you will directly compete with. If you plan to set up an accounting firm, you will compete with other accounting firms in your area. If you plan to open a clothing store, you will compete with other clothing retailers in your area.

Again, if you run a clothing store you also compete with online retailers, but there is relatively little you can do about that type of competition other than to work hard to compete in other ways: great service, friendly salespeople, convenient hours, truly understanding your customers, etc.

Once you identify your main competitors, answer these questions about each one. And be objective. It's easy to identify weaknesses in your competition, but less easy (and a lot less fun) to recognize where they may be able to outperform you:

• What are their strengths? Price, service, convenience, extensive inventory are all areas where you may be vulnerable.
• What are their weaknesses? Weaknesses are opportunities you should plan to take advantage of.
• What are their basic objectives? Do they seek to gain market share? Do they attempt to capture premium clients? See your industry through their eyes. What are they trying to achieve?
• What marketing strategies do they use? Look at their advertising, public relations, etc.
• How can you take market share away from their business?
• How will they respond when you enter the market?

While these questions may seem like a lot of work to answer, in reality the process should be fairly easy. You should already have a feel for the competition's strengths and weaknesses... if you know your market and your industry.

To gather information, you can also:

• Check out their websites and marketing materials. Most of the information you need about products, services, prices, and company objectives should be readily available. If that information is not available, you may have identified a weakness.
• Visit their locations. Take a look around. Check out sales materials and promotional literature. Have friends stop in or call to ask for information.
• Evaluate their marketing and advertising campaigns. How a company advertises creates a great opportunity to uncover the objectives and strategies of that business. Advertising should help you quickly determine how a company positions itself, who it markets to, and what strategies it employs to reach potential customers.
• Browse. Search the Internet for news, public relations, and other mentions of your competition. Search blogs and Twitter feeds as well as review and recommendation sites. While most of the information you find will be anecdotal and based on the opinion of just a few people, you may at least get a sense of how some consumers perceive your competition. Plus you may also get advance warning about expansion plans, new markets they intend to enter, or changes in management.

Keep in mind competitive analysis does more than help you understand your competition. Competitive analysis can also help you identify changes you should make to your business strategies. Learn from competitor strengths, take advantage of competitor's weaknesses, and apply the same analysis to your own business plan.

You might be surprised by what you can learn about your business by evaluating other businesses.

Identify Potential Competitors

It can be tough to predict when and where new competitors may pop up. For starters, regularly search for news on your industry, your products, your services, and your target market.

But there are other ways to predict when competition may follow you into a market. Other people may see the same opportunity you see. Think about your business and your industry, and if the following conditions exist, you may face competition does the road:

• The industry enjoys relatively high profit margins
• Entering the market is relatively easy and inexpensive
• The market is growing--the more rapidly it is growing the greater the risk of competition
• Supply and demand is off--supply is low and demand is high
• Very little competition exists, so there is plenty of "room" for others to enter the market

In general terms, if serving your market seems easy you can safely assume competitors will enter your market. A good business plan anticipates and accounts for new competitors.

Now distill what you've learned by answering these questions in your business plan:

• Who are my current competitors? What is their market share? How successful are they?
• What market do current competitors target? Do they focus on a specific customer type, on serving the mass market, or on a particular niche?
• Are competing businesses growing or scaling back their operations? Why? What does that mean for your business?
• How will your company be different from the competition? What competitor weaknesses can you exploit? What competitor strengths will you need to overcome to be successful?
• What will you do if competitors drop out of the marketplace? What will you do to take advantage of the opportunity?
• What will you do if new competitors enter the marketplace? How will you react to and overcome new challenges?

The Competitive Analysis section for our cycling rental business could start something like this:

Primary Competitors

Our nearest and only competition is the bike shops in Harrisonburg, VA. Our next closest competitor is located over 100 miles away.

The in-town bike shops will be strong competitors. They are established businesses with excellent reputations. On the other hand, they offer inferior-quality equipment and their location is significantly less convenient.

Secondary Competitors

We do not plan to sell bicycles for at least the first two years of operation. However, sellers of new equipment do indirectly compete with our business since a customer who buys equipment no longer needs to rent equipment.

Later, when we add new equipment sales to our operation, we will face competition from online retailers. We will compete with new equipment retailers through personalized service and targeted marketing to our existing customer base, especially through online initiatives.

Opportunities

• By offering mid- to high-end quality equipment, we provide customers the opportunity to "try out" bikes they may wish to purchase at a later date, providing additional incentive (besides cost savings) to use our service.
• Offering drive-up, express rental return services will be seen as a much more attractive option compared to the hassle of renting bikes in Harrisonburg and transporting them to intended take-off points for rides.
• Online initiatives like online renewals and online reservations enhances customer convenience and positions us as a cutting-edge supplier in a market largely populated, especially in the cycling segment, by customers who tend to be early technology adapters.
• Renting bikes and cycling equipment may be perceived by some of our target market as a commodity transaction. If we do not differentiate ourselves in terms of quality, convenience, and service, we could face additional competition from other entrants to the market.
• One of the bike shops in Harrisonburg is a subsidiary of a larger corporation with significant financial assets. If we, as hoped, carve out a significant market share, the corporation may use those assets to increase service, improve equipment quality, or cut prices.

While your business plan is primarily intended to convince you that your business makes sense, keep in mind most investors look closely at your competitive analysis. A common mistake made by entrepreneurs is assuming they will simply "do it better" than any competition.

Experienced businesspeople know you will face stiff competition: showing you understand your competition, understand your strengths and weaknesses relative to that competition, and that you understand you will have to adapt and change based on that competition, is critical.

And, even if you do not ever plan to seek financing or bring in investors, you absolutely must know your competition.

The Competitive Analysis section helps you answer the "Against who?" question.

Next time we'll look at another major component in a business plan: how you will set up your Operations .

More in this series:

• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Key Concepts
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: the Executive Summary
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Overview and Objectives
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Products and Services
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Market Opportunities
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Sales and Marketing
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Operations
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Management Team
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Financial Analysis

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How to Perform a Best-in-Class Competitor Analysis (w/ Template)

Get a full competitive analysis framework that's been real-world tested, and learn the tips and tricks for capturing competitor data and conducting research

You will learn

• The value of running a competitor analysis and how to get your stakeholders on board
• Clear and actionable steps for figuring out who your competitors are
• An easy-to-follow playbook for creating a competitor analysis steeped in research and data

Competitor analysis can be hard .

It’s particularly hard (and confusing and incredibly time-consuming) if you’re relatively new in business . Most of the data is ridiculously difficult to get. Even if you manage to dig something up, you always seem to be left with more questions than answers.

How did they manage to get $10M in funding?

Did that absurdly expensive ad campaign pay off?

Did their CEO leave because things aren’t going well at the company?

What does it all mean?

At least that’s what I felt when I was just getting started with competitive analysis. Whether you’re facing a similar struggle or just aren’t sure where to start, I hope this article will help you navigate through every step of the process.

In this article, I will share the competitive analysis framework my team and I have developed (through weeks of research and dozens of iterations), and give you some tips on where to look for data that isn’t publicly available so you can have a competitive advantage .

But before we start…

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your direct competitors’ companies, products, and marketing strategies.

To make your analysis truly useful, it’s important to:

• Pick the right competitors to analyze
• Know which aspects of your competitors’ business are worth analyzing
• Know where to look for the data
• Understand how you can use the insights to improve your own business.

Which brings us to why competitor analysis is worth doing in the first place.

Who can benefit from an analysis framework?

This framework will work well for entrepreneurs , business owners , startup founders , product managers , creators , and marketers .

It covers business metrics, a product analysis, and a marketing assessment, with the marketing bit being a little more in-depth. Feel free to skip certain parts if you’re only interested in one aspect, or better yet, delegate some steps to respective teams if you can.

It doesn’t matter much what kind of product you’re selling or how mature your business is. To use this framework, you may already have a fully functional product, an MVP, or even just a product idea. I’ll be using certain analysis tools to facilitate and automate certain bits of the process. Most of them are either freemium or have a free trial available, so all that you’ll need to invest into the analysis is your own time.

Done properly, competitive analysis will give you plenty of quantitative and qualitative data to back your own business decisions and business strategy (and no, I’m not talking about cloning your competitors’ strategies to come up with a second best product, although this can sometimes work ).

Namely, it can help you:

• Develop (or validate) your Unique Value Proposition
• Prioritize your product development by focusing on the aspects of competitors’ products customers value the most
• Improve your product by capitalizing on competitors’ weaknesses customers complain about
• Find your competitors' strengths to get benchmarks to measure your growth against
• Uncover market segments that aren’t fully served by competitors
• Create a new product category by identifying gaps between what your competitors offer and what the customers need

Who even are your competitors?

I can sense you rolling your eyes at me, but hear me out.

If you’re serious about competitive analysis, it’s not enough to just evaluate the two Industry Leaders everyone’s talking about (that kind of analysis will likely get you depressed real quick).

The competitors you pick for the analysis determine the insights you’ll get at the end, and the decisions you’ll make, based in part on those insights. That’s why including different kinds of competitors (big and small, direct and indirect) into the analysis is critical if you want the results to be comprehensive.

Here’s a handy way to think about your competition that’s based off of Myk Pono’s classification :

It’s best to include at least one competitor from each category into your analysis to make it truly comprehensive.

Whether you can instantly think of over a dozen competitors or can barely recall five, it’s a good idea to turn to Google or a different a search engine ( DuckDuckGo , anyone?) and look up your product category. Examine the products within the top 50 results, along with the ads that are displayed in response to your query — more likely than not, you’ll come across companies you’ve forgotten about, or maybe even learn about a few newcomers.

To give you an example, I’m going to imagine I’m launching a vacation rental website — an alternative to AirBnB. Here’s what my list of competitors may look like broken down by categories:

Now that you have a comprehensive list of your competitors with similar products, it’s time to start the actual analysis.

As you go through the process, feel free to use this Google Sheets template I’ve created.

In the spreadsheet, I like to divide the factors into collapsable sections (yes, these do get pretty lengthy). I also tend to add comments under each aspect with details or links that provide more info. Depending on the stage you’re at with your business, you can also add in a column for your own product to quickly see how it compares to competitors.

What’s included in a competitor analysis framework

• Business & Company metrics 1.1. Company overview 1.2. Funding 1.3. Revenue & customers
• Product 2.1. Product features 2.2. Pricing 2.3. Perks 2.4. Technology
• Customers & awareness 3.1. Share of Voice 3.2. Sentiment 3.3. Key topics 3.4. Geography 3.5. Social media platforms
• Marketing 4.1. SEO 4.2. Social media 4.3. Advertising 4.4. Influencers and other partners 4.5. Content Marketing 4.6. Customer acquisition 4.7. Sales 4.8. Customer service 4.9. Unique strengths

I’ll go into depth about each section below, and again feel free to grab this competitor analysis template to follow along .

1. Business & Company metrics

1.1. company overview.

Your analysis should start with digging up the basic info about your competitors: things like the company’s founding year, the names of the CEO and other key people, locations of the company’s offices, how many employees work there, etc.

You’ll usually find bits of this information on competitors’ websites.

The company’s LinkedIn profile is often useful, particularly for employee counts.

And for info on key people, offices, and founding date, CrunchBase is a great resource.

Your competitors’ job openings can also be found on their websites, LinkedIn, and job search sites like Glassdoor and Indeed . Knowing who they are hiring and which teams they are expanding will give you an idea of what steps they’re about to take, both product- and marketing-wise. Are they about to hire their first sales rep or content marketer? Are they looking for a developer with a specific skill set? Combined with what you know about your industry, your competition’s job openings will tell you a lot about where they are going with their business.

You could also take things one step further and see if you can get an understanding of competitors’ corporate culture. The best place to dig through employee reviews is Glassdoor . There, you can find out what employees think about the culture, the team, the pay, the management – and those are often honest opinions because a lot of the feedback is anonymous.

1.2. Funding

Knowing when, how much, and from whom your competitors received funding can also be important, particularly if you plan on raising capital yourself. It will give you a solid idea on how much funding you can expect to get.

On top of that, venture capitalists (VCs) tend to invest in only one company in a given category so as not to cannibalize their own investments. If an VCs’ name is missing from your competitors’ funding history, they might be a good candidate for you: they missed out on the chance to work with a successful competitor, but now they have the opportunity to invest into a promising startup in the industry (you!).

1.3. Revenue & customers

Your competitors’ revenue and number of customers deserve a separate section in your spreadsheet. For some companies, you’ll be able to find estimates on Owler , but those will often be very rough. A Google search for the name of your competitor combined with the words “revenue,” “customers,” etc. might lead you to interviews or press releases where the companies share this information (because, well, everyone likes to brag).

That said, I bet you won’t be able to find every competitor’s revenue figures this way. To help you dig deeper, I have two hacks to share that go beyond a simple Google search:

Hack #1: Set up alerts for competitors’ interviews and conference presentations.

This one requires some time, but it’s very effective in the long run: you’ll be surprised at just how much your competitors give away at event presentations and in interviews, without being aware of you listening. All you need to do is sign up for Awario (there’s a free 14-day trial available), create an alert for the names of your competitors’ CEOs or other key figures (don’t forget to put the names in double quotes to search for an exact match), and select YouTube as the source for the search. And that’s it! You can now binge-watch those videos right in Awario, without having to leave the tool for a minute, noting your findings along the way.

Hack #2: Use this revenue formula

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr offers a simple formula you can use to calculate a competitor’s revenue estimate, provided you know how many people work there. Take the number of employees the company has listed on its LinkedIn profile and multiply that by $150,000 if well-funded ($200,000 if modestly funded). This should give you an estimate you can work with.

Employee count * $150,000 = Revenue estimate

These details, combined with company info like founding year and employee counts, are important so you can use them as a benchmark against your own growth. How much time did it take each of your competitors to get to the revenue figures they have today? Are you doing as well as a current market leader back when it was an early-stage business?

It’s time to evaluate your competitors’ products or services, the actual things they’re selling. What kind of technology are they using to build it? What is their core selling point? Are there any perks that come with the product: a freemium version, complementary free tools, or services?

2.1. Product features

Let’s get down to the core of your competitors’ business – their product and its key features. A word of caution: this will likely be the longest bit of your spreadsheet.

It’s a good idea to divide the features into groups of related ones to keep things organized.

2.2. Pricing

Assessing competitors’ pricing pages is another crucial step in your analysis (if pricing isn’t available on their website, try reaching out to their sales team).

Here are some questions to consider:

• Can you uncover a segment of the market that doesn’t seem to be fully served by competitors’ plans?
• Say, do they have an affordable plan for startups or small businesses? Discounts for students or non-profits?
• Are there data-heavy options available for agencies and big brands, with Enterprise features like an API or white-label options?

Another thing you can draw from competitors’ pricing strategies is great ideas for A/B testing . Do they offer monthly or annual plans? (If it’s both, what is the default option?) How many packages have they got? Identify the opportunities for your experiments, and prioritize the ones that are common for several competitors.

Dig through your competitors’ websites to see if they offer something complimentary with their product. Do they have a free trial or a freemium version? Are there any “free” tools their customers get access to, or perhaps a perks program in partnership with other tools?

2.4. Technology

Competitors’ technology is an important aspect to assess for tech companies. BuiltWith is a great (and free) tool to figure out the tech stack that a competitor uses. Just type in the URL, and you’ll be able to see what technology the website runs on, along with any third-party scripts and plugins it uses, everything from analytics systems, email marketing services, to A/B testing tools, and CRMs.

A lean alternative to BuiltWith is What Runs , which is a browser extension that analyzes any webpage you’re on.

On top of that, looking at competitors’ job postings (yes, again) is a great way to see what kind of technology stack they’re using by analyzing the skills they require from candidates. To look for job openings, check your competitors’ websites and job search sites like Glassdoor and Indeed .

3. Customers & awareness

Your next big step in analyzing the competition is looking at what their customers have to say about them. In this section, you’ll look at each brand’s Share of Voice, the sentiment behind their mentions, the key topics customers bring up when they talk about your competitors, and more. To measure these, you’ll need a social listening tool like Awario or Mention .

3.1. Share of Voice

Ideally, you’d want to measure the market share for each of your competitors. But alas, it’s nearly impossible. One substitute metric you could use is Share of Voice – the volume of mentions your competitors get on social media and the web compared to each other.

To measure share of voice , create an alert for each competitor’s brand in Awario, give the tool some time to collect the mentions, and jump to the Alert Comparison report to see how much each competitor is talked about on social and the web.

It’s a good idea to keep these alerts running for the long-term (as opposed to just looking at Share of Voice once). This way, you’ll be able to see spikes in their volume of mentions, track what their customers are saying, and see how their (and your own) Share of Voice evolves over time.

3.2. Sentiment

The caveat of measuring the level of awareness a competitor has is that awareness isn’t always a good thing. What if there’s been a data scandal one of the competitors is involved in? What if their customer service is horrible, causing an influx of negative mentions?

That’s not the only reason why measuring the sentiment behind the mentions of your competitors is important. It will also help you understand what these companies’ customers love and hate about their product the most.

On top of that, it can also serve as a benchmark when you analyze the sentiment behind the mentions of your own brand and product. Let’s say, 40% of your mentions are positive, 20% are negative, and the rest are neutral. How do you know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing without a benchmark?

3.3. Key topics

What do your customers focus on when they mention your competitors’ products or write customer reviews?

What do they love and hate the most?

Identifying the key topics within your competitors’ mentions will give quick answers to these questions so you don’t have to dig through mentions by hand. You can find these topic clouds in a social listening dashboard. From there, you can click on any topic to explore the mentions in-depth.

Interestingly, these topic clouds can also offer insight into various aspects of your competitors’ business – and they may help you fill the gaps in other sections in your competitor analysis spreadsheet. Here’s one example: those are the key topics for Loom, a screen recording app, from which you can learn a few useful things if you look closely.

Looks like the company a) has just raised some money, b) offers remote jobs, and c) has just announced a new feature they’re building. And you discovered all that at a glance! Of course, you can further explore any topic by clicking on it to see all the mentions that contain the word/phrase.

3.4. Geography

Looking at the geography and demographics of your competitors’ mentions will let you figure out which markets they are focusing on the most (and, with any luck, find an area that isn’t too saturated yet). You’ll find a map of each brand’s mentions in Awario’s dashboard and reports, along with the breakdown of mentions by language.

Try adjusting the date range in the report to see if there’s been any changes in languages/countries recently. This could mean that your competitors are focusing on a new emerging market – an opportunity you might be interested to explore.

3.5. Social media platforms

Just like with geography, this one will give you an idea on where your competitors’ audience hangs out so you can use these findings in your own marketing strategy and social media strategy. On top of that, if you see platforms that appear to be heavily underused (but do look relevant), those may also be worth experimenting with. Just like with the previous factors, you can compare the platforms side-by-side using Awario’s Alert Comparison report.

4. Marketing

From the SEO perspective, there are two most important things about competition you should focus on: the keywords they rank for and the backlinks they’ve got. The former will give you a solid idea on what type of search terms bring them traffic and sales (so you can shape your own keyword strategy), and the latter will show what authoritative websites in your niche link to them (those will likely be relevant to your website too).

For both tasks, you can use SEO PowerSuite (you can get the free version here ). The toolkit includes 4 apps for different aspects of SEO, but we’ll only need 2 of those to analyze competitors.

Rank Tracker will help you with the keywords. Navigate to the tool’s Ranking Keywords module and type in a competitor’s URL. You’ll see a list of terms they rank for, along with the search volume for each term in your country of choice. It’s a good idea to move the most popular terms to Target Keywords right away so you can keep them for your records. Repeat the process for every competitor, noting their estimated search traffic and top keywords they rank for.

For backlink analysis, you’ll need SEO SpyGlass. Launch the tool and create a project for one of your competitors. Next, jump to Domain Comparison . One by one, specify your competitors’ websites and take a look at how they compare.

Next, jump to Link Intersection – a module that shows you the domains that link to more than one of your competitors. You can sort them by InLink Rank to see the most authoritative websites on your list. Those are likely relevant industry websites that will make a great addition to your backlink profile – make sure to save them so you can reach out and see if you can get a backlink from there.

4.2. Social media

The next step is analyzing what, when, and how your competitors are doing on social media. Rival IQ is a useful tool for this task, and they have a 14-day free trial available. Once you’ve signed up for the tool, specify your competitors’ websites, and the platform will automatically pull their social media profiles.

From there, you’ll be able to see which social networks they’re active on, how many followers they have, how much engagement their posts get, etc. Those insights will be handy to benchmark your own strategy against. The tool will also show you the best times and days of the week to post, based on the engagement competitors’ posts get.

On top of that, it may be a good idea to research if your competitors have a community on social media – a Facebook group or a subreddit dedicated to their product. How big is the community? Are the users engaged?

4.3. Advertising

To get an idea of your competitors’ ad strategy, SimilarWeb is a great (and free) starting point. Enter the URL of a competitor’s website and navigate to the Search section – it will show you if your competitors have any search ads running, and, if they do, what their target keywords are.

The Display section below will show you whether a competitor is running any display ads, and, if they are, which platforms bring them the most traffic.

For Facebook ads, simply open a competitor’s Facebook page and click on Info and ads .

Alternatively, you can use Facebook’s Ad Library to search for your competitors’ ads. Unfortunately, these tools won’t reveal targeting rules your competitors use, but you’ll still get a solid idea of how many ads they’re running, and perhaps get inspiration for your own advertising efforts.

If native ads or other kinds of paid content are a thing in your niche, you can also try searching for “sponsored by [competitor]”, “author” “[competitor]”, etc. in a search engine of your choice (the quotes will make sure you’re looking for an exact match, and all of the words in the query are taken into account). Take note of authoritative platforms you come across and try reaching out to them to inquire about sponsored posts.

4.4. Influencers and other partners

At this point, we’re interested in exploring the partnerships your competitors have that help spread the word about their products. We’ll look at influencers endorsing your competition, publishers they work with, and media platforms they guest blog on, if any.

For the analysis, you’ll need the same social media monitoring alerts for your competitors’ brand you’ve already created in Awario. In your feed, make sure to group the mentions by Authors and sort them by Reach to see the most influential posts first (Reach is calculated based on the number of followers and engagements on social media, and based on the site’s estimated traffic for results from news, blogs, and the web).

This will let you see the most influential posts that mention your competition, including social media posts and blog articles from around the web. Take note of the influencers or publishers they work with – chances are they will be happy to work with you as well.

On top of that, you can also turn to SimilarWeb to see what referral sources are bringing the most visits to your competitors’ websites. Chances are you’ll also find a bunch of blogs and media platforms that generate substantial traffic to their sites.

4.5. Content Marketing

If content is part of your competitors’ strategy, it’s important that you analyze their blog and what they tend to write about. Are the readers engaged? Do the posts get shared around social media a lot? Does the competitor accept guest posts?

BuzzSumo is a great tool to help you out. It will show you the most shared posts on any blog within the past year, so you can get inspiration for your own posts and a better idea of what kind of content resonates with your target audience the best.

4.6. Customer acquisition

I know, a lot of the points above were actually customer acquisition techniques; but this section is reserved for the ones that weren’t outlined before. Do your competitors have a referral strategy? Do they have an affiliate program? Do they sponsor or exhibit at industry conferences? Do they acquire customers in any other creative way?

If applicable, it’s also important to analyze your competitors’ sales strategy. Do they do product demos? What does contacting a rep look like? Is there a phone number you can call?

The best thing to do is try and book a demo (or a call) with every company yourself, taking careful note of every step. Do they require filling out dozens of fields for you to talk to sales? Will they refuse to hold a demo just because your company is “too small”? Is their time zone convenient? How long does it take them to reply?

All of this will help you spot strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ sales strategy to help you shape your own.

4.8. Customer service

Does every competitor offer Customer Support for all customers, or does it start with a particular plan? What channels do they provide support on: is it email, live chat, phone, social media, or all of the above? What is their response time? Do they offer Account Management for Enterprise customers?

Analyzing your competitors’ customer service will help you improve your own. The truth is, in large companies, customer care is often almost non-existent; for a new business in the industry, that’s a great area to capitalize on. If that’s true in your case, make sure to highlight the quality of your customer service on your website.

4.9. Unique strengths

Is there anything else that gives a competitor on your list an unfair advantage over everyone else? For example, is their CEO or somebody else on the team an industry influencer? Does the company publish amazing books that are also free? Have the founders launched successful products before? Make note of each competitor’s unique strengths that are hard to emulate.

What’s next?

Once you’re done with every step of competitive analysis, I’m sure you’ve got a clear understanding of the market and more than a handful of ideas on how to improve your own product. While the research is still fresh in your mind, one bonus step I’d highly recommend to everyone performing the analysis is to map your competitors on a Strategy Canvas (from the book Blue Ocean Strategy ).

A Strategy Canvas is a chart that breaks down your competitors by various aspects of their businesses and products (the pricing and other aspects specific to your product category).

The easiest way to plot this is a line chart, with each factor assigned a score depending on how well it is executed.

Here’s an example from the book: a Strategy Canvas for Southwest, one of the first low-cost airlines in the US, compared to the 2 categories that could be considered its competitors: air travel at the time and car travel.

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy

Depending on the kind of competitors you’ve analyzed, you’ll likely see that most of them follow one or two distinct patterns: those will be the major categories you’re competing with (though they may not be as different as cars and airplanes). It’s time to plot your own product on the canvas and see how it compares to the competitors.

Finally, think of ways to make your product stand out. From your research, recall the things your audience needs more and less of. Blue Ocean Strategy offers a nice way to think about the factors on the canvas in terms of applying them to your own product, called the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid.

• Think of features you could eliminate to lower the cost of your solution : the ones that seem superfluous, are rarely mentioned by customers, and are particularly costly. For Southwest vs. traditional airlines, those were seating class choices and hub connectivity.
• Think of the factors you can reduce way below the industry standard : the ones that need to be there, but can be leveled down significantly. It’s great if price is going to be one of them! For Southwest, those were the prices, meals, and lounges.
• Time to think about the aspects you’ll raise well above the industry standard , especially if they won’t cost you a fortune. What do customers wish they’d get more of? For Southwest, that was the friendliness of the service and the speed of travel.
• Lastly, try and create new features that your closest competitors don’t offer (or borrow them from another product category). With Southwest, it was the frequent departures that traditional airlines didn’t have – but car travel did.

Remember: the idea of a competitive analysis isn’t to steal what they’re doing, it is to understand where your business falls in the market and find new opportunities to make your product stand out.

Eventually, focusing on your customers and gaps between supply and demand will serve you much better than focusing on the competition. And that’s what competitor analysis is for – finding ways to serve the customer better.

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How To Write A Competitive Analysis For Your Business Plan

The Startups Team

The competitive analysis section of your market analysis in your business plan is essential. Knowing your competition is as important as knowing your product and your customer. Market gaps tell you where to develop your product and internal weaknesses tell you where you’re vulnerable to losing customers.

A solid competitive analysis is your way of showing that you know exactly where you stand among your fiercest competitors — and that you have a way to out-maneuver them. The best way to think of the argument you’re trying to articulate is:

“Here is where we can gain the most customers (offense) and here’s where we could potentially lose them (defense).”

Your competitive analysis should start with your SWOT Analysis — Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Threats — to borrow a grad school MBA’s favorite acronym.

Inside the Investor’s Mind

Your investor is probably thinking something like this:

“This idea sounds good, but I’m worried that current or future competition will simply crush this company. I need to know where they are going to stay ahead of their competition in the minds of their customers. I also need to know how they plan on defending whatever market position they capture.”

So here’s what you can do to reassure them.

Lead with your strengths . Talk about what aspects of your product are the best in class and why your customers will fall in love. Companies win based on their ability to win over customers.

You don’t eat at Wendy’s because it’s less terrible than McDonald’s. You eat there because you like their food a lot more. You also eat there because the Baconator cheeseburger is sooo good!

Talk about why customers love your Baconator. Talk about what you offer that just blows people’s minds. Be very descriptive and dig into how those strengths really stand out. Don’t assume for a moment that because you understand the strengths that anyone else does.

“Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse” Customers dine at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse primarily because it is considered the most upscale dining experience in their city. This lends itself well to special events that command a higher price point.

“Tinder” Our customers use Tinder over traditional dating sites because they get immediate responses from potential matches and the interface is so simple it’s fun.

“Local Boutique” Customers shop in our local boutique because they want the experience of interacting with our staff and the enjoyment of trying on clothes in person.

The best way to present your strengths is to start with your number one greatest strength. If investors don’t think your greatest strength is interesting, you can be assured that your third greatest strength isn’t going to make up for that!

In each of these sections of the SWOT Analysis, begin with a few introductory sentences, like the examples above, and then offer a longer narrative explanation below. If the investor understands the point you’re making in just a couple sentences you don’t want to belabor their attention with a crazy novel of an explanation.

Opportunities

Your opportunities are all about expansion. You realize your competition is sleeping on the job and you’re ready to pounce on that opportunity to eat up some delicious market share.

Your opportunities typically come in three flavors:

1. Areas your competition is currently weak

2. Expansion of your customer’s current needs

3. Untapped markets

Ideally, you can tap into all three opportunity categories or you have some special flavors of your own. Your goal here isn’t to list every last opportunity; it’s to show that the market has obvious room for expansion that viable startup (like you) could build a real business in.

Areas of Weak Competition

This is one of the few times in life where it’s OK to pick on someone else! If you’ve made it this far into the plan, it’s because you’ve found a good reason that your would-be competition is dropping the ball.

When sizing up your competition it’s important to have a balanced assessment. You want to avoid the straw man argument. The straw man argument is one when you act like you’re refuting someone’s argument, but in reality that argument was never made by that person.

Instead, focus on how well you know the weakness exists. Show that you have done your homework and that you have a real inside track on why this weakness is legitimate.

The more convincing your research on competitor weakness the more excited investors will get. Don’t skimp here.

Expansion of Current Needs

It’s your job to not only paint a picture of what your customer needs now, but also of what your customer needs next. These needs may not be something you can fulfill now, and that’s fine. What’s important here is that you’re showing that you’re thinking further down the road.

“Our customers who purchase our iPhone will need apps to download, music to listen to, additional cables to charge with, and listening accessories like headphones and Bluetooth speakers.”

Your expansion of current needs should start with obvious extensions of need and then include a few bigger picture potential areas that you may not even get to. It’s good to show what’s more probable and then what’s possible.

Untapped Markets

If you’re not expanding into current markets then you’re moving into the great unknown — untapped markets.

Untapped markets are equally exciting and terrifying to investors. On the one hand, it gets everyone pumped to think about a ton of low-hanging fruit that can be gobbled up easily. On the other hand, that fruit is often sitting in a grove that may or may not even exist.

Your challenge is to show that these untapped markets do in fact exist (read: show your research) and that you can tackle them quickly and efficiently before your competition does.

“We believe that the market for a low cost version of iPhones in underdeveloped countries is even bigger than the U.S. market, because over two thirds of citizens have no access to land lines or cabled Internet. Our iPhone Lite, combined with a global reach for cellular service, will make this critical line of communication both affordable and accessible to millions.”

Don’t let the idea of untapped markets be a golden ticket to make wild claims. Untapped markets only exist if you can build a cogent case around them. The quality of your case is the difference between an investor nodding their head and shaking it.

Demonstrating your weaknesses isn’t the same as saying “we’re so painfully vulnerable we’re not even viable!” Every business has weaknesses, especially in the startup phase. You can bet anyone leaning into your plan is going to jump on these immediately.

Your goal here isn’t to sugar coat the nature of your weaknesses – it’s to articulate them in exact detail to show that you know precisely where to build a defensible position. Articulating your weaknesses well allows you to talk about what you’re going to do about them.

“Our company, Amazon, is particularly concerned about the fact that customers will want to see higher ticket electronics firsthand before making a buying decision. We believe that retailers such as Best Buy will consistently get customers through their doors first before they elect to make a buying decision with us.

Therefore, we have to create guarantees on the lowest price that will entice customers to view at Best Buy but purchase on Amazon because the savings are so significant.”

In this example, we aren’t sugar-coating the concern. We’re highlighting the fact that Amazon will lose customers to Best Buy, but they’re working toward a strategy to curb that customer loss with a lower price. An investor reading that narrative would feel this is a balanced assessment of a weakness coupled with a viable counter-strategy.

Similar to the Strengths section, a great way to present this is with a few declarative scenarios where you’re most concerned, so that your readers get the gist. Thereafter, craft a more detailed description of why and how those weaknesses and threats are important.

Sooner or later (hopefully later) your competition is going to pose some serious threats to your business. In some cases, it may not even be your competition directly. It could be looming legal issues or governance that you’ll have to contend with.

Similar to weaknesses, founders get nervous about being bold about threats. They think “That will scare investors away!” when in fact being up front about how you identify and mitigate threats is the best way to make investors confident about potential issues.

Your best bet is to get in front of your threats first. Similar to your strengths, list the most painful threats first, then explain how you plan on using some Judo-style moves to take them down.

“The biggest single threat to our Amazon business is the lack of control we have around delivery costs. If UPS and FedEx decide to increase costs exponentially, our ability to deliver products at a total price lower than retailers will evaporate.

To combat this, we will negotiate very long term deals with major carriers. We will offer them an exclusivity on volume in exchange for a predetermined rate plan that we can predict for five to 10 years at a time.”

In this example, we’re pointing out (before our investors can) that an increase in delivery costs for a business that relies on delivery is a big deal. But we’re immediately supporting that concern by providing a credible mechanism to offset the threat.

Investors may still have concerns around what the mechanics of the deals with delivery providers may be, but at least now the conversation is about deal mechanics, not whether delivery as a whole will destroy Amazon.

Think of your presentation of threats in two columns — Threat and Mitigation. List your threat in detail, then list your mitigation strategy. In the best case scenario, you can show investors that you’ve thought of threats they haven’t even considered and already have a plan of attack waiting. It’s that type of presentation that builds much-needed trust during the formative stages of that relationship.

Competitors

Your competition can be represented as both “categories of competition” as well as “actual competition.”

Categories of Competition allow you to create groups of competitors that may share some of the same attributes such as “online retailers” or an emotional category such as “People who hate to shop in stores.” You may in fact have many different categories that you compete with and then a few specific competitors that you’re concerned about in each. The category approach works well if you have tons of competitors; for example, if you were an online retailer.

Action competition is more specific to who you can count on your fingers. In this case, you want to be very detailed about who they are, what about them is particularly challenging, and what you plan to do about it.

In each case, the goal is to be very clear about why each competitor has strengths and weaknesses that you’re concerned about. You’re better off listing fewer competitors that are a more direct threat and showing that you know how to compete than creating a giant list of every person that has a website that’s tangentially related to you.

The competitive analysis is just one part of your market analysis. Check out our guides  to each section of your market analysis in order to create a document that will blow your investors away.

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How to Write a Competitor Analysis for a Business Plan (with AI in 2023)

Competitor analysis is a critical component of any business plan. It helps you understand the landscape of your industry, identify opportunities for growth and differentiation, and craft strategies that take advantage of your competitors' weaknesses.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a comprehensive competitor analysis, including how to leverage AI tools like Bizway to make the process more efficient and effective.

Step-by-Step Guide to Performing a Competitor Analysis

1. identify your competitors.

Understanding your competitive landscape begins with pinpointing who your direct and indirect competitors are.

Points to Consider

• Direct Competitors : Those who offer similar products/services in the same market.
• Indirect Competitors : Businesses targeting your customer base with different offerings.
• Utilize market research and customer feedback to list competitors.
• Identify geographical considerations - local, regional, or global competitors.

2. Analyze Their Products/Services

A thorough examination of competitors’ offerings unveils potential areas for differentiation and enhancement in your product/service line.

• Feature comparisons.
• Pricing structures.
• Unique Selling Propositions (USPs).
• Adopt a customer-centric approach to understand how consumers perceive competitors’ offerings.
• Identify gaps in their product/service lines that you could explore.

3. Assess Their Marketing Strategy

Understanding competitors’ marketing approaches aids in crafting a superior, data-driven marketing strategy.

• Target audience.
• Key messages and value propositions.
• Channel effectiveness and presence.
• Use social listening tools to gauge their social media effectiveness.
• Analyze the SEO performance of competitors’ websites.

4. Examine Their Sales Strategy

Investigating sales channels and tactics employed by competitors reveals market penetration strategies and potential areas for diversification.

• Distribution channels.
• Pricing and sales tactics.
• Customer relationship management.
• Secret shop to observe sales tactics and customer experiences.
• Review customer feedback on their purchasing experience.

5. Analyze Their Strengths and Weaknesses

Identifying what competitors excel in and fall short on enables strategic decision-making in exploiting market opportunities.

• Operational efficiency.
• Customer service quality.
• Brand reputation and loyalty.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for each competitor.
• Leverage customer reviews and testimonials to gauge reputation.

Using AI for Competitor Analysis

Automated data collection.

AI automates the harvesting of data from myriad sources, ensuring robust research while saving time.

• Use AI tools to scrape and aggregate data from competitors' websites, social media, and customer review platforms.
• Ensure the data is categorized and stored systematically for easy analysis.

Real-Time Updates

AI provides a competitive edge by monitoring and reporting real-time updates on competitor activities.

• Set up AI monitoring for specific competitor activity: product launches, PR releases, or marketing campaigns.
• Ensure to leverage real-time data to inform swift strategic adjustments.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics via AI deciphers patterns and anticipates future competitor moves, positioning your business proactively.

• Leverage AI to analyze historical data for predicting future trends.
• Utilize these insights to anticipate and formulate preemptive strategies.

Using Bizway for Competitor Analysis and Business Planning

One such AI tool that can revolutionize your competitor analysis process is Bizway . Bizway is an AI-powered business planning and research app that can help you research your competitors and write your entire competitor analysis with just a few clicks. Moreover, Bizway can assist you in writing your entire business plan, saving you time and providing you with expert-level planning documents.

With Bizway, you can automate the process of generating clear, concise planning docs across all areas of business, from an SEO Content Plan to User Onboarding Plan. It also helps fill knowledge gaps in areas of business you're not well-versed in.

So, whether you're a solopreneur, a small business owner, or an aspiring entrepreneur still in school, Bizway is the AI assistant you need to take your business planning to the next level.

Gerrard + Bizway AI Assistant

Start your business journey, today.

Create your personalized 50-step business roadmap in under 1 minute.⚡

Bizway is brought to you by Landmark Labs Ltd.

©2024 Bizway Labs

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How to Write a Competitive Analysis: a Comprehensive Guide

• September 4, 2024
• Business Plan , How to Write

Writing a competitive analysis is like mapping out the playing field of your business. It helps you see who you’re up against, what you’re doing well, and where you could do better.

Whether you’re just starting or looking for ways to grow, understanding your competition is crucial. Let’s dive into how you can get a clear picture of your competition, and how to use it in your business plan.

What is a Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis is a comprehensive evaluation designed to assess the competitive landscape in which a business operates. It involves identifying your main competitors and critically analyzing their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, products, services, and market positioning.

The purpose of this analysis is not only to understand who your competitors are but also to evaluate how they meet their customers’ needs and how your offerings compare.

Key Components:

Here are the key components we include in a competitive analysis:

• Competitor Identification : Begins with identifying both direct competitors (those offering similar products or services) and indirect competitors (those offering alternative solutions to the same customer needs).
• Product and Service Comparison : Involves comparing your products and services against those of your competitors to identify similarities, differences, advantages, and disadvantages.
• Market Positioning : Examines how each competitor positions themselves in the market, including their marketing strategies , target audiences, and brand messaging.
• Strengths and Weaknesses : Assesses the internal factors that contribute to competitors’ success or shortcomings, such as proprietary technology, brand reputation, financial resources, and operational efficiencies.
• Opportunities and Threats : Identifies external factors that could represent opportunities or threats to your competitors, providing insights into potential market shifts, regulatory changes, technological advancements, and evolving customer preferences.
• Customer Base Analysis : Looks at the type of customers your competitors are attracting, their loyalty programs, customer service strategies, and feedback channels.

Why Do We Conduct Competitive Analysis?

The primary purpose of a competitive analysis is to equip businesses with the knowledge to make strategic decisions that enhance their competitive advantage. It helps in:

• Differentiation : Understanding what competitors offer allows a business to differentiate its products or services more effectively, highlighting unique features or benefits that address gaps in the market.
• Strategy Development : Insights gained can inform strategic decisions around marketing, sales, product development, and customer service, ensuring they are tailored to outmaneuver competitors.
• Anticipating Competitor Moves : By analyzing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, businesses can better anticipate future moves, whether it’s a new product launch, market expansion, or pricing strategy .
• Market Trends Identification : Keeps businesses informed about broader market trends and customer preferences, ensuring they remain relevant and responsive to market demands.
• Risk Mitigation : Identifying threats in the competitive landscape allows businesses to develop contingency plans to address potential challenges proactively.

Why Do We Use a Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan?

We use a competitive analysis in a business plan for several key reasons:

• Market Understanding : It helps to gain a deep understanding of the market dynamics, including how saturated the market is, what the competitors offer, and where there might be gaps in the market.
• Strategic Positioning : By identifying your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can better position your own business to compete effectively. It allows you to highlight what makes your business unique and attractive to potential customers.
• Opportunity Identification : Competitive analysis can reveal market trends and shifts that present new opportunities for your business, whether through innovation, market expansion, or diversification.
• Risk Management : Understanding the competitive landscape helps in anticipating potential threats and challenges your business might face, allowing you to develop strategies to mitigate these risks.
• Investor Confidence : Including a competitive analysis in your business plan demonstrates to investors and stakeholders that you have a realistic grasp of your industry and are aware of the competitive challenges. It reassures them that you are prepared to navigate these challenges effectively.
• Informed Decision Making : The insights gained from a competitive analysis can inform various aspects of your business strategy, from marketing and pricing to product development and customer service. This ensures that decisions are made based on a comprehensive understanding of the competitive environment.

How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis?

Preparing a competitive analysis involves several structured steps to ensure a comprehensive understanding of your competitive landscape. Here’s how to go about it:

1. Identify Your Competitors

• Direct Competitors : These businesses offer the same products or services as you do to the same target market .
• Indirect Competitors : These businesses offer different products or services that satisfy the same customer needs as yours.

Start with a broad list and then narrow it down to the most significant competitors for a detailed analysis.

2. Gather Information

Collect data on your identified competitors. Useful sources include:

• Competitors’ websites and social media profiles
• Customer reviews and feedback on platforms like Yelp, Google, or industry-specific forums
• Industry reports and market analysis documents
• Press releases and news articles

Look for information on their products, services, pricing, marketing strategies, target customers , market share, and any other relevant data.

3. Analyze Their Offerings

Compare your competitors’ products or services to your own. Consider:

• The range of products or services offered
• Quality and pricing
• Unique features or benefits
• Customer service and support
• Branding and marketing strategies

4. Evaluate Their Strengths and Weaknesses

Based on the information gathered, assess each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Consider their operational efficiency, customer loyalty, market positioning, innovation capabilities, and financial stability.

5. Identify Opportunities and Threats

From your analysis, determine:

• Opportunities : Areas where your competitors are not meeting customer needs effectively, market segments they are overlooking, or strategic alliances they haven’t formed.
• Threats : Competitors’ strategies that could pose a challenge to your business, such as aggressive pricing, new product launches, or market expansion plans.

6. Assess Their Marketing Strategies

Look at how your competitors are marketing their products or services:

• Which channels are they using? (e.g., social media, email marketing, SEO, PPC)
• What key messages are they conveying?
• How are they positioning their brand?

7. Summarize Your Findings

Create a detailed report summarizing your findings for each competitor, highlighting their key strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities they present to you, and the threats they pose.

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Blog Marketing How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

Written by: Midori Nediger Nov 09, 2023

Your business will always have competition.

And if you don’t know what that competition is up to, you could be missing out on huge opportunities.

That’s why a competitive analysis is so crucial to your success as a business. It gives you the tools to quickly adapt to any changes in the competitive landscape and potentially capitalize on industry trends that your competitors haven’t even noticed.

So let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is a competitive analysis report?

A competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors compared to those of your own business.

Typically, a competitive analysis report will contain:

• A description of your business’s target market
• Details about the features of your product compared to your competitors’ products
• A breakdown of current and projected market share, sales, and revenues
• Comparisons of pricing models
• An analysis of marketing strategy and social media strategy
• A description of customer ratings of the features of each competitor

Whether you’re a startup trying to break into the marketplace , a consultant trying to get results for your client, or an established company looking to cement your foothold against the competition, a well-researched competitive analysis gives you the tools you need to make strategic decisions.

Your competitive analysis should inform your marketing plan , your business plan , your consultant report and every part of your high-level business strategy.

But how do you actually create a competitive analysis report?

How to make competitor analysis report :

• Start with a competitor overview
• Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends
• Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix
• Summarize your strengths and weaknesses with a SWOT analysis
• Show where you fit in the competitive landscape
• Use a competitor analysis template for a professional look and feel

The level of detail you include in each section of your competitive analysis report will vary depending on the stage of your business growth and your goals. For example, a startup might create a report that focuses on market research, while an established business might dive into detail on an emerging competitor.

But let’s talk about the parts of a competitive analysis that every report should include.

1. Start with a competitor overview

A strong report shows exactly what a company must out-compete to be successful.

Meaning you must audit any product or service that currently solves the problem your business is trying to solve for customers and write a quick profile for each competitor.

Like the template below, each competitor profile might include:

• The company’s revenue and market share
• The company’s size and information about their management team
• A broad description of the company’s strengths and weaknesses
• An overview of how the company is perceived by customers

This overview will help your readers get a big-picture view of the market landscape.

2. Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends

You can’t create a competitive analysis report without doing extensive market research , which is all about gathering information to understand your customers, identify opportunities to grow, and recognize trends in the industry.

This research can help you put together the customer personas that will guide business and marketing decisions down the line, and allow you to plan for any shifts that might disrupt the marketplace.

You can conduct primary market research, with:

• Customer interviews
• Online surveys or questionnaires
• In-person focus groups
• Purchasing a competitor product to study packaging and delivery experience

Or secondary market research, by:

• Reading company records
• Examining the current economic conditions
• Researching relevant technological developments

When assembling your market research you may just want provide a high-level summary of the industry trends, like this competitor analysis example shows:

Or you may want to dive into detail on the demographics of a particular consumer segment, like this:

But if you’re a consultant or advisor struggling to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, the report below would be ideal. Covering everything from market forecasts to consumer profiles, it can help you get clients and decision-makers on board.

3. Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix

The feature comparison is arguably the most important part of the competitive analysis. Breaking down your product and your competitors’ products feature-by-feature will allow you to see what really sets everyone apart.

In addition to specific product features, here are some attributes that you might include in a feature comparison matrix:

• Product quality
• Number of features
• Ease of use
• Customer support
• Brand/style/image

The most common format for a features analysis is a simple matrix with you and your competitors along one side and all of the relevant features along the other. You can check off or rate how you perform in each area:

But these tables can get pretty long. Another approach is to focus on the things that provide the most value to the user, like in this competitor analysis example from Mint. It only includes ease of use, costs, and benefits:

If you want to visualize your comparisons in an engaging way, you could use a comparison infographic . 

Great resources for this section of your competitive analysis report are product rating sites like Capterra and G2Crowd . They’ll give you an unbiased view of your company and your competitors.

And as with any market research, it’s critical that you speak with real people who use your product and your competitors’ products. That’s the only way to get an accurate picture of how your target customers rate the competition .

4. Summarize your strengths and weaknesses in a SWOT analysis

When you’re conducting research for your competitive analysis, it’s going to be messy. You’ll have a lot of data and it’ll be hard for an outsider to understand.

That’s what makes the SWOT analysis so essential.

A SWOT analysis is a framework for evaluating your competitive position by listing your key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It can act like a short summary of the rest of your competitive analysis report for anyone who doesn’t have time to dig into the details.

Click the template above to enter our online SWOT analysis maker tool. Customize the template to your liking–no design no-how required.

Here are some questions to kickstart your SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: What are we doing really well (in terms of marketing, products, sales, branding, technology, etc.)?
• Weaknesses: What are we struggling with? What’s holding us back?
• Opportunities: What’s the weakest area for our biggest competitor? Are there any gaps in the market that aren’t current being addressed? What has recently changed in our business or the market?
• Threats: What is our biggest competitor doing much better than us? What new products/features are they working on? What problems aren’t we currently addressing?

In your report, you could arrange your SWOT analysis in a simple list, but it can be helpful to use color-coded quadrants, like the competitor analysis example below. Note how each quadrant is paired with an icon:

5. Show where you fit in the competitive landscape

After summarizing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it’s time to look at the bigger picture. It’s time to figure out where every major competitor currently fits into the competitive landscape.

The most popular way of doing this is to identify the two dimensions that are most important for being competitive in your industry and plot them on a matrix, like this one from the Boston Consulting Group:

And this one from G2 Crowd (which looks at market presence and customer satisfaction):

You may want to focus on where you fit in the market landscape based on your own biggest strengths and weaknesses, or the biggest threats and opportunities you identified in the SWOT analysis.

Or, it may be enough just to summarize in words the features and benefits that set your apart from your competitors (which is a great way to end your report on a high note).

Competitor analysis examples for strategic planning

Let’s delve into some competitor analysis examples that can empower your organization to navigate the market effectively.

1. Competitor analysis example for marketing specialists

Imagine this: You are a Marketing Specialist and your goal is to establish a strong online presence and attract a diverse user base. However, you face stiff competition from established players in the market. Here are some things you should look into when doing your competitor analysis:

Competitor analysis focus:

• SEO strategies: Analyze competitors’ websites to understand their SEO strategies. Identify high-ranking keywords , backlink strategies, and content optimization techniques . Alternatively, if you’re running a local business, you might want to analyze and scrape Google Maps listings to better assess how companies are optimizing Google My Business to generate leads.
• Social media engagement: Examine competitors’ social media presence. Evaluate the type of content that garners engagement, the frequency of posts, and audience interactions.
• Online advertising: Investigate competitors’ online advertising campaigns. Are they leveraging Google Ads, social media ads, or other platforms? Assess the messaging, visuals, and targeting criteria.
• Content marketing: Scrutinize competitors’ content marketing efforts. Identify the topics that resonate with their audience, the formats they use (blogs, videos, infographics), and the platforms they prioritize.

Here’s a SWOT analysis template to help you get started:

2. Competitor analysis example for SME business development managers

Imagine this: As the business development manager for a medium sized start up, you are tasked with expanding the client base. The market is crowded with similar service providers, and differentiation is key. When doing your competitor analysis report, look into:

• Client testimonials and case studies: Explore competitors’ websites for client testimonials and case studies. Identify success stories and areas where clients express satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
• Service offerings: Analyze the range of services offered by competitors. Identify gaps in their offerings or areas where you can provide additional value to clients.
• Pricing models: Investigate competitors’ pricing structures. Are they offering packages, subscription models, or customized solutions? Determine whether there’s room for a more competitive pricing strategy .
• Partnerships and collaborations: Explore potential partnerships or collaborations that competitors have formed. This can provide insights into untapped markets or innovative service delivery methods.

Here’s a competitor analysis comparison chart template that you could use:

3. Competitor analysis example for product managers

Imagine this: You are a Product Manager for a consumer electronics company tasked with improving your company’s products and services. The market is buzzing with innovation, and staying ahead requires a deep understanding of competitor products.

• Feature comparison: Conduct a detailed feature-by-feature comparison of your product with competitors. Identify unique features that set your product apart and areas where you can enhance or differentiate.
• User experience (UX): Use a  UX research tool  to evaluate the user experience of competitors’ products. Analyze customer reviews, app ratings, and usability feedback to understand pain points and areas for improvement.
• Technological advancements: Investigate the technological capabilities of competitors. Are they integrating AI, IoT, or other cutting-edge technologies? Assess whether there are emerging technologies you can leverage.
• Product lifecycle management: Examine competitors’ product release cycles. Identify patterns in their product launches and assess whether there are opportunities for strategic timing or gap exploitation.

To help you get started, use this competitive analysis report template to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the product or service

How to present a competitor analysis

Presenting a competitor analysis effectively involves organizing and communicating information about your competitors in a clear and concise manner. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to present a competitor analysis:

• Introduction: Start with a brief introduction to set the stage. Outline the purpose of the competitor analysis and its significance in the current market context.
• Competitor identification: Clearly list and identify the main competitors. Include both direct and indirect competitors. Briefly describe each competitor’s core business and market presence.
• Key metrics and performance: Present key metrics and performance indicators for each competitor. This may include market share, revenue, growth rate, and any other relevant quantitative data.
• SWOT analysis: Conduct a concise SWOT analysis for each competitor. Summarize their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use a simple visual representation if possible.
• Market positioning: Discuss how each competitor is positioned in the market. This could include their target audience, unique selling propositions, and any specific market niches they occupy. Also, focus on finding keywords , as your competitor’s targeted keywords are the main source of information on their online market performance.
• Strategic moves: Highlight recent strategic moves made by your competitors. This could include product launches, partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, or changes in pricing strategy. Discuss how these moves impact the competitive landscape.
• Recommendations and implications: Based on the analysis, provide recommendations and implications for your company. Identify opportunities to capitalize on competitors’ weaknesses and outline potential threats that need to be addressed. Discuss any adjustments to your own strategy that may be necessary in response to the competitive landscape.

3 tips to improve your competitive analysis report design

How you design your competitive analysis report can have a significant impact on your business success. The right report design can inspire stakeholders to take action based on your findings, while a mediocre design may reflect poorly on your hard work.

Here are a few report design best practices to keep in mind when designing your competitive analysis report:

• Start with a competitive analysis report template
• Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent
• Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

1. Start with a competitor analysis template

The quickest way to lose the confidence of your stakeholders is to present a messy, amateur report design. Besides distracting from the content of the report, it might even put your credibility at risk.

Starting with a pre-designed competitor analysis template, like the one below, takes almost all of the design work out of the mix so you can focus on the content (while still impressing your stakeholders).

And if you’re a consultant competing for a project, a pre-designed template may just give you the edge you need to land that client.

Click on any of our templates; you’ll enter our online drag and drop report maker tool. No design know-how required.

2. Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent

If you take a look at the competitor analysis template below, you might notice that the designer has switched up the layout from page to page, but many of the other design elements are kept consistent.

That consistency helps the report design feel cohesive while making it easier for readers to quickly skim for key pieces of information.

Here are a few quick guidelines for keeping important design elements consistent:

• Use the same color scheme throughout your report (with one highlight color to draw attention to key takeaways and important numbers)
• Use the same font styles for your headers, subheaders, and body text (with no more than 2-3 font styles per report)
• Use the same style of visuals throughout your report (like flat icons or illustrated icons… but not both)

3. Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

The challenge with a competitive analysis report is that you collect heaps of background research, and you have to condense it into a brief report that your client will actually read.

And written summaries will only get you so far.

Visuals like charts and tables are a much better way to communicate a lot of research quickly and concisely, as seen in the market research summary below.

Even lists can be made more engaging and informative by spacing out list items and giving more emphasis to headers:

The more you can replace descriptive paragraphs and long lists with thoughtful visuals, the more your readers will thank you.

A competitive analysis will allow you to think up effective strategies to battle your competition and establish yourself in your target market.

And a report that communicates the findings of your competitive analysis will ensure stakeholders are on board and in the know.

Now that you know how to design a competitive analysis report, you’re ready to get started:

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How to Write a Competitor Analysis for a Business Plan

April 28, 2023

Adam Hoeksema

A competitor analysis for your business plan can be an incredibly important part of the business planning process.  By trying to learn as much as you can about your competitors, you can learn a lot about what to expect in your own business.  You can also identify how you can differentiate your business and gain a competitive advantage.  

In this article I plan to walk through the following:

• What to Include in a Competitor Analysis

How to Find Data on Competitors

Finding competitor data for online businesses, finding competitor data for physical retail businesses, competitor analysis business plan example.

With that as our road map, let’s dive in. 

What is Included in a Business Plan Competitor Analysis

A competitor analysis should include the following components:

Market Overview

• Key Competitors

Competitor Profiles

Competitive positioning, target market, opportunities and threats.

• Conclusions and Strategic Recommendations

Begin with a brief overview of the market or industry you operate in, outlining its size, growth trends, and key segments. This will provide context for the competitive analysis and help you understand the market dynamics.  You can often find some great industry trend data from sources like IBISworld . 

Key Competitors 

Make a list of your main competitors, which may include direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer similar products or services, while indirect competitors offer alternatives or substitutes that could fulfill the same customer needs.  

One major turn off for investors and lenders is to say that you have “no competitors.”  You always have competitors.  If you are opening a coffee shop in your town that doesn’t have a coffee shop, your competitor might be the coffee at the local gas station, or coffee made at home.  

For each key competitor, provide a detailed profile that includes:

• Company background: Briefly describe their history, mission, and size.
• Market share: Estimate their share of the market compared to yours (if you haven’t started yet you won’t have any market share yet) and other competitors.
• Product or service offerings: Describe their products or services and how they compare to yours.
• Pricing strategy: Analyze their pricing model and compare it to your own.
• Distribution channels: Identify the channels they use to distribute their products or services, such as online, retail stores, or partnerships.
• Marketing and promotional strategies: Analyze their marketing efforts, including advertising, social media, and public relations.
• Strengths and weaknesses: Identify their competitive advantages and disadvantages in comparison to your business.

Assess your company's competitive positioning by comparing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) to those of your competitors. Highlight what makes you unique and areas where you can gain a competitive advantage.

Describe your target market and how it differs from your competitors'. Understanding the market segments that your competitors serve will help you better define your own target audience and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.

Based on your competitor analysis, identify potential opportunities to exploit in the market and threats that your competitors may pose to your business. This can help you develop proactive strategies to mitigate risks and capitalize on growth opportunities.

Conclusion and Strategic Recommendations

Summarize your findings and provide recommendations for how your business can differentiate itself, address competitive challenges, and gain market share. This may include recommendations for product or service development, pricing, marketing strategies, or strategic partnerships.

So one of your initial questions should be where in the world do you find reliable data on your competitors, it's not like you can call them and just ask them for their financial statements and customer database!  

Depending on whether your business is primarily online or a physical location, the approach and tools that I use to do competitive research will differ.  I am going to show you examples of the type of research that I like to do and the data that I am able to pull from a couple of tools that we like to utilize. 

There are a few data points that I like to find for online competitors.  I want to know:

• How much organic traffic is my competitor's website getting?
• How much paid traffic is my competitor’s website getting? 
• How much search volume is there for keywords that I want to compete for?
• How much would I have to pay per click for keywords that I want to rank for?

In order to find this data I use two tools.  

• Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Let me show you how I use both tools to gather data on my competitors.

How to Use Ahrefs for Competitor Analysis

Let’s assume I am working on a business plan for a gym in Indianapolis.  I would start by looking at the search volume for “Indianapolis Gyms” which would give me some idea of the number of people searching for this each month.  You can see below that there are 250 monthly searches for this keyword according to Ahrefs. 

Next, I would look to see which gym is top ranked for that keyword and in this example I found a Lifetime Fitness .  Now I can take that keyword and run it through the Ahrefs Site Explorer and I can now see how much website traffic that particular competitor is getting each month.  This particular website is getting about 800 organic website visitors per month. 

Ahrefs can also estimate how much paid traffic a particular website is receiving each month as well.  

If you want to see exactly how I use the Ahrefs tool, check out the short video below:

Watch:  I recorded a demo of using Ahrefs for competitor analysis here. 

How to Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner for Market Research

I also like to use Google Adwords Keyword Planner to gather some additional data about my market.  So again, if I search for “Indianapolis Gyms” I can see Google’s estimate of traffic per month as well as seasonal trends in search volume.  I can also see the average cost per click that advertisers are paying for that keyword.  

As you can see, the cost per click ranges from $1.32 to $5.29 for advertisers right now.  If you can see how much paid traffic your competitor is getting on Ahrefs and you know the average cost per click for relevant keywords from Google Keyword Planner, you can back into a rough estimate of how much your competitor is spending on advertising per month.  I think this can be useful as well.  

One other thing you might notice is that Ahrefs seems to have conservative search volume estimates compared to Google Keyword Planner. We saw 250 monthly searches from Ahrefs and 2,400 from Google Keyword Planner.  This should give you some range of how big your market might be. 

If your competition is not an online business, or doesn’t really have much of an online presence, then finding foot traffic data is going to be much more useful for you in your competitor analysis. 

We have partnered with a company called Advan Research to be able to pull foot traffic data reports from their platform. 

Here is some of the really cool data that we can get and how you might use it in your competitor research. 

Monthly Foot Traffic Data

You can pull monthly foot traffic data for your competitors.  This foot traffic data is based on cell phone GPS data and can provide some great insight on potential customer traffic you might expect.  For example, in the graph below we pulled the monthly traffic for a local Steakhouse that gets about 5,000 visitors per month. 

Daily and Hourly Foot Traffic Data

You can pull foot traffic data for a location by the day and the hour to get an idea of what days and hours are busiest for your competitors and likely to be busiest for you.  

Customer Location Data

One of the most powerful data reports you can pull on a competitor is a heat map of where their customers are coming from.  If you notice that customers are traveling a long distance to your competitor, you could look at finding a location that is closer to a large segment of your competitors' customers. 

Annual Revenue Estimate and Revenue per Square Foot Data

Finally, for larger businesses or publicly traded companies, Advan can provide you with estimates of their annual revenue, revenue per square foot and how many square feet they are renting for their business.  Talk about some serious competitor intelligence that can set you ahead and impress your investors and lenders. 

The following is an example of a competitor analysis for a restaurant business plan which you can adapt to your own business.  I would also recommend that you incorporate data from Ahrefs, Google Adwords Keyword Planner and our Foot Traffic Data Report into this section of your business plan.  The idea here is to get a good understanding of where the competitors stand and to identify your place in the market. 

I. Competitor Analysis

The purpose of this section is to identify and evaluate the main competitors in the local Italian restaurant industry and to determine our competitive positioning. Understanding the competitive landscape will help us to develop effective strategies that enable us to compete effectively in the market, differentiate ourselves, and carve out a sustainable market share. Our analysis will focus on the following key areas

A. Market Overview

The local Italian restaurant market is valued at approximately $X million and is expected to grow at a CAGR of X% over the next five years. The industry is characterized by the presence of several well-established Italian restaurants, popular chain restaurants, and a few emerging independent restaurants. The primary segments within the industry are fine dining, casual dining, and fast-casual dining.

B. Key Competitors

Competitor A (Fine Dining Italian Restaurant)

Market Share : X%

Strengths: High-quality ingredients, exceptional culinary skills, elegant ambiance, and strong brand recognition.

Weaknesses: High pricing, limited menu offerings, and a focus on a specific customer segment (high-income individuals).

Competitor B (Casual Dining Italian Restaurant)

Market Share: X%

Strengths: Wide variety of Italian dishes, family-friendly atmosphere, and strong customer loyalty.

Weaknesses: Inconsistent food quality, slow service during peak hours, and limited menu innovation.

Competitor C (Fast-Casual Italian Restaurant)

Strengths: Quick service, affordable pricing, and convenient locations.

Weaknesses: Limited menu variety, lack of authentic Italian flavors, and a focus on takeout and delivery over dine-in experiences.

C. Competitive Positioning

Based on our analysis, our competitive positioning is as follows:

Unique Value Proposition: Our primary differentiation lies in our commitment to providing authentic Italian cuisine using high-quality, locally-sourced ingredients, combined with exceptional customer service in a warm and inviting atmosphere. This will enable us to attract customers seeking a genuine Italian dining experience that sets us apart from competitors.

Competitive Pricing: Our pricing strategy is to offer value for money while maintaining profitability. By carefully selecting our suppliers and managing our costs, we will be able to offer a competitively priced menu without compromising on quality.

Target Market: We will cater to a broad range of customers, including families, couples, and groups of friends, by offering a versatile menu that appeals to various tastes and preferences. Our focus will be on attracting local patrons and tourists alike, who are looking for an authentic and memorable Italian dining experience.

Marketing and Promotion: We will invest in both traditional and digital marketing strategies to create brand awareness and drive customer traffic. This will include targeted social media campaigns, local newspaper advertisements, participation in local food festivals, and collaboration with local businesses and organizations.

I hope this has been helpful in giving you some ideas on how to gather relevant competitor research so that you can make informed decisions about where you locate and start your business. 

If you are interested in our Foot Traffic Data Report to help provide the data for your competitor analysis or other sections of your business plan, please don’t hesitate to contact us.  

About the Author

Adam is the Co-founder of ProjectionHub which helps entrepreneurs create financial projections for potential investors, lenders and internal business planning. Since 2012, over 50,000 entrepreneurs from around the world have used ProjectionHub to help create financial projections.

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How to Write the Competitive Analysis of a Business Plan

Written by Dave Lavinsky

If you are writing a business plan, hopefully by this point you’ve conducted thorough market research to identify industry trends and identified the target market for your business. Now it’s time to conduct a competitor analysis. This section is included in virtually every simple business plan template , and the information you include will depend on several factors such as how many competitors there are, what they offer, and how large they are in comparison to your company.

Download our Ultimate Business Plan Template here

What is a Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis is a type of market research that identifies your competitors, their strengths and weaknesses, the strategies they are using to compete with you, and what makes your business unique. Before writing this section it’s important to have all the information you collected during your market research phase. This may include market data such as revenue figures, cost trends, and the size of the industry.

Why Do You Need the Competitive Analysis?

If you are planning to raise capital, the investor will require a business plan that includes the competitive analysis section. This section will also come in handy while writing a business plan template , if your company is considering increasing prices or adding new products and services. You can use the information you find to determine how well-positioned your business is to perform in the competitive landscape.

3 Steps to Writing a Competitive Analysis

The steps to developing the competitive analysis section of your business plan include:

• Identify your competition.
• Select the appropriate competitors to analyze.
• Determine your competitive advantage.

1. Identify Your Competition

To start, you must align your definition of competition with that of investors. Investors define competition as to any service or product that a customer can use to fulfill the same need(s) as the company fulfills. This includes companies that offer similar products, substitute products, and other customer options (such as performing the service or building the product themselves). Under this broad definition, any business plan that claims there are no competitors greatly undermines the credibility of the management team.

When identifying competitors, companies often find themselves in a difficult position. On one hand, you may want to show that the business is unique (even under the investors’ broad definition) and list few or no competitors. However, this has a negative connotation. If no or few companies are in a market space, it implies that there may not be a large enough base of potential customers to support the company’s products and/or services.

2. Select the Appropriate Competitors to Analyze

Once your competition has been identified, you want to consider selecting the most appropriate competitors to analyze. Investors will expect that not all competitors are “apples-to-apples” (i.e., they do not offer identical products or services) and therefore will understand if you chose only companies that are closest in nature. So, you must detail both direct and, when applicable, indirect competitors.

Direct competitors are those that serve the same potential customers with similar products and services. If you sell your products or services online, your direct competitors would also include companies whose website ranks in the top 5 positions for your same target keyword on Google Search.

For example, if you are a home-based candle-making company , you would consider direct competitors to be other candle makers that offer similar products at similar prices. Online competitors would also include companies who rank for the following keywords: “homemade candles”, “handmade candles”, or “custom candles.”

Indirect competitors are those that serve the same target market with different products and services or a different target market with similar products and services.

In some cases, you can identify indirect competitors by looking at alternative channels of distribution. For example, a small business selling a product online may compete with a big-box retailer that sells similar products at a lower price.

After selecting the appropriate competitors, you must describe them. In doing so, you must also objectively analyze each of their strengths and weaknesses and the key drivers of competitive differentiation in the same market.

For each competitor, perform a SWOT Analysis and include the following information:

• Competitor’s Name
• Overview of Competitor (where are they located; how long have they been operating)
• Competitor’s Product or Service
• Competitor’s Pricing
• Estimated Market Share
• Location(s)
• Potential Customers (Geographies & Segments)
• Competitor’s Strengths
• Competitor’s Weaknesses

By understanding what your competitors offer and how customers perceive them, you can determine your company’s competitive advantage against each competitor.

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3. Determine Your Competitive Advantage

Perhaps most importantly, you must describe your company’s competitive advantages over the other companies in the space, and ideally how the company’s business model creates barriers to entry. “Barriers to entry” are reasons why it would be difficult for new companies to enter into or compete in the same market.

For instance, you may have a patent that provides value to your customers and makes them less likely to switch suppliers, which protects your business from potential competitors. Or, you may have more resources than the competition and thus be able to provide superior customer service.

Below is a list of areas in which you might have a competitive advantage:

• Size of the Company – Large companies have more resources and can usually offer lower prices than smaller businesses. This is a significant barrier to entry, as starting a small business and competing with a larger company may be difficult.
• Product or Service Differentiation – If your product or service is unique in some way, this will make it less likely that customers will switch to a competitor.
• Experience & Expertise – Experience and knowledge are valuable attributes that can help differentiate you from the competition.
• Location – If you are located in an area where there is high demand for your product or service, this can be a barrier to entry because competitors will not want to open new locations.
• Patents & Copyrights – Protecting intellectual property can prevent others from entering the same market and competing with your company.
• Brand Recognition – Customers are loyal to brands they have come to trust, which protects the company from new competitors.
• Customer Service – Providing excellent customer service can help you retain customers and prevent them from switching suppliers.
• Lowest Cost Offerings – If you can offer a lower price than your competitors, this makes it more difficult for them to compete with you.
• Technology – New technology that enables you to provide a better product or service than your competitors can be an advantage.
• Strategic Partnerships & Alliances – Collaborating with a company that your customers want to work with can help keep them from switching.
• Human Resources – If you have a highly skilled and talented workforce, it can be difficult for competitors to find and employ the same skills.
• Operational Systems – Strong operational systems that lead to greater efficiencies can protect your business from the competition.
• Marketing Strategy – Investing in strong marketing campaigns can make your business difficult to compete with.

For instance, you could say that your [enter any of the bullets from above] is better than your competitors because [insert reason].

The competitive landscape is one of the most important considerations in developing a business plan since it sets the stage by providing information on past and current competitors and their respective strengths and weaknesses. A strong understanding of the competitive landscape is needed before you can develop a strategy for differentiating your company from the competition. Follow the above competitive analysis example and you will be well-prepared to create a winning competitor analysis section of your business plan.

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A Guide to Competitive Analysis: It’s Not Just about Competitors

By Joe Weller | April 16, 2018 (updated February 13, 2024)

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If you were running a cross-country marathon, wouldn’t you want to know something of the terrain and expected weather conditions before you began? The same principle of preparation applies when starting and continuing a business. It’s not enough to focus on your own production and financial goals: You need to understand what’s happening around you, how others create goods or services, the economic forecast, changes in rules and regulations, and more. In other words, you need to conduct a competitive analysis. The thought of searching for and digesting the required information may seem overwhelming, but we make it easy.

In this article, we explain how to focus your analysis by first deciding what questions you want answered. Learn how to find current and potential competitors and how many of them you need to review. Then, we cover the specific aspects of your competitors that you need to consider as well as where to find more information about them. Marketing experts weigh in on how to maintain focus during analysis. We also offer free, downloadable competitive analysis templates to start you on your own information gathering and analysis.

What Is Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis (CA) is a process of identifying competitors and gauging their business and marketing strategies to understand both their strengths and weaknesses and those of your own business. Competitive analysis provides a higher-level perspective of the entire marketing landscape and competitive intelligence.

“Competitive analysis is the process of analyzing all collected information to derive some insight for reducing risk and making better decisions,” explains competitive intelligence expert and author Babette Bensoussan .

“It is about your broader competitive environment,” she says. “I always remind my clients that competitors make up only one element of a business’s competitive environment. Other elements include government, technology, buyers, and suppliers, to name a few that impact how well you can compete.”

What Is the Purpose of a Competitive Analysis?

Researching your competitive landscape is essential to business growth and survival, and helps you offer better products or services to customers. You should gain an understanding of how customers view your company, what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. Therefore, competitive analysis forms a crucial part of marketing plans to help you understand what differentiates your product or service. Particularly when applying for funding, competitive analysis provides valuable insight into business plans. However, competitive analysis offers much more:

• Branding possibilities
• Insight into how competitors design products and messages
• SEO possibilities
• CRO (conversion rate optimization)
• GTM strategies
• User experience (UX) advantages of your and others’ products and websites
• Gaps in the market
• New products and services to develop
• Market trends

According to a Conductor survey , 60 percent of marketers don’t feel proficient in competitive analysis. Many don’t practice it on a regular basis. Knowledge derived from these exercises is critical, and you need to assess competition regularly. Nevertheless, marketing departments often skip competitive analysis, which leaves them with a fragmentary understanding of the landscape and competitors. Being proactive can help you anticipate and prepare for competitor developments and provide you with the agility to take advantage of changes.

According to Bensoussan, “In today’s world of constant change and information overload (whether the information be real or fake), it is critical for any business person to understand the competitive landscape and the forces that impact the profitability and viability of a business.”

What Should Be Included in a Competitive Analysis?

In most cases, a competitive analysis contains a few basic sections, which may vary depending on the size and form of your company and the focus of your analysis:

• A list of your main competitors
• An overview or what you know about them
• Who their target customers are
• A list of their products or services
• What media they use to market their goods and services
• Their current and past marketing strategies
• Their value proposition and effectiveness
• An analysis of all of the strengths and weaknesses of your competition (and your own company)
• An overview of the strategies being used by the competition to achieve their objectives
• An overview of the market and projections for the future

How to Prepare for a Competitive Analysis

One of the crucial prerequisites for a successful competitive analysis is an open mind. Check your beliefs at the door — what you think about your company, your customers, or your competitors isn’t necessarily true. That can be a good thing.

In addition, it is vital to understand why you are conducting an analysis. What are your goals for the business? What are your goals for this analysis? “Always, always be very clear as to what the decision you will be making is all about,” advises Bensoussan. “If you are not clear about your decision, then you will never know if you have good competitive analysis or just some more information.”

She offers these two questions as examples of how different the impact of each answer can be: “Tell me who’s who in the [manufacturing] of zippers?” versus “Should I enter the zipper-manufacturing industry, and can I achieve a return on investment of, say, 15 percent in three years?”

“Which question would help you the most in delivering good quality CA? Which outcome do you think would provide the most value?” Bensoussan asks.

Companies often enlist the help of outside consulting firms dedicated to conducting competitive intelligence research. Guidance on competitive intelligence support, such as database information, software platforms for market program tracking, and more is available through the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals .

Competitor Analysis Frameworks

Over the decades, marketing gurus have developed or advocated several competitive analysis frameworks. Here are six well-known methods to consider.

• Porter’s Five Forces Model: First published in 1979 by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, the Five Forces model provides a view beyond competitors to factors in your industry landscape that may threaten or strengthen your position. The Five Forces include the following:

• Potential New Entrants: Consider how much money, time, and effort it would take for a company to displace you.
• Competitive Rivalry: Determine who your competitors are, who the closest competitors are, and their products, prices, and quality. Fewer rivals mean more opportunity for your unique qualities to shine; many rivals mean more competitors to steal your customers and potentially better deals to lead customers elsewhere.
• Suppliers: The more potential suppliers you have, the better for you. Consider how having fewer suppliers might impact your operation.
• Buyers: If you have many customers, you have the power. Otherwise, buyers can negotiate more advantageous deals elsewhere or find sources other than yours. Consider how you would treat that situation.
• Substitutes (or Complements): A competitor could create a product or model that replaces yours. On the other hand, a new product or service could also complement yours, which would create a symbiotic sales situation. Complements are sometimes considered the sixth force in the model.

Porter stressed the importance of not confusing these constants with temporary disruptions, such as technological innovations or government interventions in industry.

You can download the Five Forces model below to answer your own questions about an industry or business proposition.

Download Five Forces Model

Excel  |  PDF

Industry Life Cycle Overview: Both industries and individual products have life cycles, which reflect the state of sales, whether robust or diminishing. Understand which stage of the life cycle your industry, company, or product is in to help target your marketing efforts. Product life cycles contain such stages as these:

• Introduction: At the introductory stage, a new industry or product is not well known or proven. It is usually marketed to a few early adopters. Because resources focus on product development, testing, and refinement, few or no profits accrue. Marketing focuses on explaining the product, creating awareness around it, and establishing a niche.
• Growth: As awareness grows and the industry or product becomes established, profits may also grow. However, in the growth stage, rival products may also appear. Although improvements require funds, production efficiencies may also develop. Some products have only a short growth phase. For example, a particular fashion may last for only one season. Other products experience a long or extended growth phase, such as software products, which continue their usefulness through upgrades. During the growth stage, marketing centers on differentiating the product, so it stands out from competing products.
• Maturity: In the maturity stage of a product or industry, sales may expand, but at a less accelerated rate. Fewer competitors may dominate the market and may attempt to differentiate on quality or increase sales by touting low costs.
• Saturation: You reach the saturation stage when every customer who could buy the product already owns the product. A lack of innovation or competition from a superior product could result in saturation.
• Decline/Termination: Industries and products decline for several reasons. Innovations may overtake them and render them obsolete. Businesses and product lines may fail to upgrade and innovate. At the decline or termination stage, companies may fold, continue in a smaller market, or merge with larger, successful businesses.  

Strategic Groups Analysis: You perform strategic groups analysis on companies within a business sector, such as automobiles, to see how they vie for their share of consumer expenditure. By dividing companies into strategic groups, you can understand how businesses of different sizes behave in the marketing landscape. Businesses within groups tend to be competitors, whereas businesses in other groups are related but not competitive. For example, running shoes and high-end women’s dress shoes are in different groups. Analyzing companies in this way can also reveal other significant information: direct competitors and their basis for competition; if and how a company can move to another group; and strategic problems and opportunities. Strategic groups are usually plotted on an x-y axis, where two highly relevant criteria form the axes. Here are some examples of criteria:

• Brand ownership
• Company size
• Capacity utilization
• Cost structure
• Geographical market segmentation
• Marketing activities
• Ownership structure
• Sales channels
• Product diversity
• Product quality
• R&D capability
• Vertical and horizontal integration

First, plot the companies where you think they belong on the graph. Now, with all companies plotted, create groupings. If you want, you can use larger or smaller circles to indicate market share. To gain greater insight, perform a Five Forces analysis on them, or consider the mobility barriers that prevent companies from shifting to other strategic groups.  

SWOT: Perhaps one of the most commonly addressed marketing analyses is SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). In essence, SWOT represents what competitors do and do not do well. As you look at SWOT for competitors, also consider it for your own products and services.

• Strengths: What do they do better than you? What are they known for? Is their pricing, inventory, convenience, and level of service better than yours?
• Weaknesses: How do they fall short of your company’s standards? Can you leverage their shortcomings to improve your standing with customers?
• Opportunities: What in your competitors’ landscape can you exploit to your advantage?
• Threats: What in your competitors’ landscape threatens their business position?

Note that strengths and weaknesses focus on internal characteristics, while opportunities and threats concern external forces. SWOT can be performed separately, but it may provide a useful frame for studying a business’ products and services, marketing, and sales.  

Competitive Array: Competitive arrays, also known as competitive matrices , provide a way to quantify characteristics that may be unquantifiable. For example, if company A sells 500 widgets and company B sells 250, it’s clear which company sold more. But how do you quantify the attractiveness of online and print media or innovation? Creating the competitive array can be an individual or group exercise. To start, list your competitors across the top of your writing surface. In the left-most column, list important characteristics. Next, create a column for weighting the importance of each characteristic so that the sum of the characteristics totals one. The higher the weighting, the more important the characteristic (you may have a few characteristics with the same weight). Next, grade each competitor for each characteristic on a scale, such as from one to 10. Now, multiply the grade by the corresponding weight.  

Competitive Value Proposition Analysis: The characteristics of a value proposition are exclusivity, clarity, and credibility. This method concerns how unique the product or service is, how clearly the product message is conveyed, and whether the message is credibly supported by evidence, such as testimonials, statistics, or test results. Because customers remember only a few key advantages of your product from your media promotion, the main value proposition must be correct and clear and mesh with your actual competitive advantage. To figure out how to differentiate your company, you must determine how competitors differentiate themselves from each other. POPs (points of parity), PODs (points of difference), and POIs (points of irrelevance) help you dissect value propositions.

• Points of Parity (POPs): These are elements of customer benefit that both you and your competitors offer.
• Points of Difference (PODs): These are features of customer benefit that you offer but competitors don’t. Keep in mind that not every point of difference is significant to consumers.
• Points of Irrelevance (POIs): These are characteristics that customers don’t care about.

Your unique value proposition (differentiating characteristics) doesn’t need to appeal to every customer. Don’t make your value proposition too general. You can’t be all things to all customers, just as you can’t do what your competitors are doing.

Otherwise, there's no differentiation. You end up being like teenagers, everybody in the same jeans," says Sonia Schechter, Chief Marketing Officer of Marxent , a provider of virtual reality and augmented reality apps for furniture retailers. Therefore, target your message.

Discover your points of parity by using our POP template.

Download Points of Parity Template

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Who Are Your Competitors?

As a first step in competitive analysis, marketing guides typically suggest determining who your competitors are. Competitors can be divided into groups of direct competitors, indirect competitors, and future competitors.

• Direct Competitor: These are companies who sell a direct substitute for your product, operate in the same geographic area, and/or offer the same goods (such as groceries) to the same market. Ask who your customers would buy from if you weren’t in business.
• Indirect Competitor: These are companies in the same geographic area whose products occupy the same general, but not specific, category as your own (e.g., a general bakery versus a designer cake store). Indirect competition satisfies the customer’s need for a particular product or service, although that product or service may be different from yours. Similar products operating in different market segments do not represent direct competitors. For example, a high-end seafood restaurant doesn’t compete with a burger place.
• Future Competitor: Future competitors may currently be indirect competitors who change and expand solutions. In the bakery example, the general bakery could hire a high-end designer to compete with the specialty cake maker. Or, the designer cake store could branch out into breads and muffins.

It may be difficult at first to envision what types of organizations you need to analyze and whether you need to analyze all competitors.To identify competitors, ask yourself who your customers would buy from if your product did not exist. Perhaps even more important, consider who your customers think your competitors are. How many competitors you review depends: If only a few companies do what you do, analyze everyone. If you have many competitors, use Pareto analysis to focus on the critical 20 percent. Larger businesses may analyze the top 10, whereas a small business can focus on three. Disregard online competitors unless you plan to sell online.

‌ Download Pareto Chart Template - Excel

How to Find Current Competitors

Some competitors may seem obvious, but sleuthing can reveal challengers you weren’t aware of.

• Google search for a product or service similar to yours. Consider the companies in paid ads and organic returns.
• Try SEMrush to check which domains are using which keywords.
• Ask your current customers who they would choose besides you.
• Check Alexa, Google Trends, or SimilarWeb for general estimates on the popularity of domain names and keywords.
• Review Dun & Bradstreet for new incorporations.
• Consult Derwent for new patent information.
• See who has booths at trade shows.

How to Find Potential Competitors

While you consider the current playing field, you must also keep your eye on what’s coming around the corner. These are the future new entrants in your niche. Consider who might start a  business that would compete with yours. New competitors can be found in related markets, related technologies, or related products. Companies from other geographical areas with similar products may begin to sell in your area, and former employees or managers can start their own companies based on the themes of your business. In addition, consider the following conditions that may encourage competition:

• A company gains competitive advantage.
• Buyers are dissatisfied with suppliers.
• An unmet demand for goods exists.
• Few major barriers to entry exist.
• The industry offers high profit margins.
• The industry offers unrealized growth potential.
• Competitive rivalry is not intense.

It’s Not All about Competitors ( Competitive Doesn’t Always Mean Competitor )

Depending on what your product or service is and where it is in its life cycle, a competitor focus may not be optimal. For example, for emerging technologies, no true competitor may exist.

“Looking too closely at competition is a massive distraction,” Schechter notes. “If you’re selling a commodity or established product, such as a drugstore, which sells the same thing anywhere, you’d be looking at specific issues, like price, location, and assortment.”

Schecter says marketers themselves often don’t understand that what the competition is doing is not important: “Successful marketing is how you define yourself in the landscape. People don’t care about a feature-by-feature description, or even one feature. They buy the package. They like you. You’re different or you’re solving a particular problem. A new business must define and lay out the landscape for the customer.”

To succeed, understanding what customers want is key. “Marketers have nuanced detail, and customers don’t care about that detail,” Schechter continues. “But, you have to listen to their questions and engage in dialogue with them to gain real understanding,” she points out. She cites Apple’s promotion of the camera in the first iPhone as an example of marketers understanding what — out of thousands of potential functions — was important to consumers. “B2B marketing is the same. It’s about listening to customers, figuring out how they’re shopping, and trying to see through their eyes,” Schechter emphasizes.

“Obsessing over competition can get you off track. If you’re listening to customers, you’ll build the right product. But you don’t need to build your dreams on other people’s ideas,” she concludes.

Where to Find Information for a Competitive Analysis

Remember that every department of your business is a potential source for information, including the following areas:

• Sales: Questions for potential, current, and lost customers
• Research and Development: New patents
• Purchasing: Suppliers
• Marketing: Customers and other consumers

Once you’ve determined who your competitors are and what you want to learn about them and from them, you need to go information hunting:

• Visit offices or brick-and-mortar stores. What do they look like? Who’s there?
• Get financial and organizational information from public filings and from sources like Hoovers, Manta, and Dun & Bradstreet.
• Monitor PR Newswire for new developments and changes.
• Some marketing platforms may actually include information about your competitors.

Interviews and Research Surveys

Interviewing competitor customers and consumers who know little about your business is important to overcoming your preconceptions about the business landscape. You probably have specific questions in mind, but here are the basics:

• Why are you shopping for a solution?
• What were the main reasons you chose the company you did?
• Ranked from most important to least important, what are your five shopping criteria?

Media Scanning or Competitor Content Analysis

You can learn much about competitor products and messaging by scanning media. Media doesn’t just include online content (web pages, tweets, and Facebook posts) — it also includes such traditional marketing collateral as white papers, case studies, and data sheets. Moreover, consider reference materials, such as LexisNexis and Hoovers, and trade, business, or news publications for ads, news stories, and press releases. Media and content can reveal not only new products and new branding, but also new positioning and segmentation strategies, pricing, target markets, and promotion strategy.

What Information to Search for in Competitive Analysis

The approach to analysis depends on the questions requiring answers. To organize your analysis, divide it into three aspects: product or services, marketing, and sales. Each aspect contains its own questions and means of analysis.

Products and Services

Your understanding of products and services must be thorough. Investigate the complete product or service line. Try to understand who your competitors’ customers are and what they need. Look at their pricing strategy and see if it differs for online and brick-and-mortar stores. Also, consider how they differentiate from their competitors.

Tracking competitor sales processes can involve more legwork. For public companies, SEC filings provide some financial information about growth or contraction, but, for private companies, information is less readily available. Information about sales channels may be easy to find through a look in the phone book or online. You can also gather details about the sale process by asking current customers why they chose your product over others. You can also acquire valuable information by following up even after you lose a sale in order to understand the customer’s thinking. What do their partner resales programs look like? What are their revenues versus sales volume?

Marketing Efforts in Competitive Analysis

What does the competitor marketing plan entail? How do competitors invest marketing efforts? What can you do even better? A variety of approaches can help you define competitor marketing strategy.

When you identify marketing assets, take a reasonable sample of items — no need to review all of them. Just remember to keep samples consistent among competitors. Also, when reviewing items, consider the quality of the collateral. It should appear professional, with no typos, and in the formal, professional, idiomatic voice. In addition, a solid library of resources, such as consistent blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, videos, webinars, and podcasts may point you to themes and leads you should follow.

E-Marketing Strategy Competitive Analysis

Few businesses today can function without a web presence that helps generate traffic and inquiries or purchases. Some statistics say that prospective buyers visit a website as many as nine times before purchasing and, depending on the product, visit multiple sites before purchasing. Forrester research after 2010 suggests potential customers visit three sites on average before buying. The more sites visited, the more money the customer intends to spend.

Therefore, understanding how your site compares to your nearest competitors can be helpful. To drive eyes to websites, online purveyors use search engine optimization (SEO) to employ the keywords most likely to garner high search ratings in Google (and other search engines). Marketers frequently also use SEM (search engine marketing) to promote a business or product by increasing visits to a website through paid keywords. Look at how saturated their content is with keywords and where they use keywords, whether in H1 and H2 tags, page titles, content, or links. Also, look at the difficulty level of their keywords.

Consider the usability of the steps in the sales funnel as well as the navigation. What do the  landing pages say? Also, look at backlinks (i.e., links from other pages to your competitor’s page) to your web page. See how many backlinks exist — and from which pages — to understand if this is something you can improve for your website.

Structure is important, but quality content also matters. Online marketing collateral appears as blogs, white papers, ebooks, case studies or user stories, videos, webinars, podcasts, and more. But words and pictures themselves are not valuable if they don’t offer any unique information or concise approaches to existing knowledge. Check whether content is shared and which topics attract attention, or, conversely, what that content and those topics are linked to. What do readers comment on, if they do comment? Who else is sharing what your competitors are publishing?

Social Media

Certain social media platforms appeal to some audiences more than others. The channels a company favors can reveal clues to the demographics of their target market. Make note of what social media buttons they include on pages and where on the page they include them.

Software Tools for Understanding Online Competitors

Besides monitoring content, you can monitor the mechanics of competitor websites to glean more data about how marketing strategy and product offerings are changing. Software helps to automate these investigations for you. Following are some of the many products available:

• BuiltWith : See what platform was used to build a page.
• Ghostery : Find trackers on a website.
• SEMrush : Discover company rankings, organic keywords, AdWords, and analyses of backlinks.
• Versionista : Track web page and website changes, SEO changes, and more.
• Visualping : Monitor webpage updates.
• SpyFu : Find competitor keywords and AdWords, including AdWord and keyword variations and history.
• iSpionage : Track PPC and other keywords in competitor campaigns.
• SimilarWeb : Compare competitor websites to your own.
• Heatmaps: Use large amounts of data to provide a visual representation of how users interact with a website. Heatmaps can indicate where users click and look and for how long. Levels of intensity of activity are usually displayed through colors.
• Session Recording Tools: Record user browsing sessions. Session recording tools can yield a wealth of rich data, but raise some privacy concerns.
• Tag Management Systems: Advanced e-marketing implementations use tags to aid analysis and reporting. Tags are snippets of code that are usually added to the <head> tags of a web page.

Web Page User Testing for UX in Competitive Analysis

It’s essential to understand how consumers approach your website, especially for web-based products and marketing. Allow customers to test your site, and even view it yourself from a customer’s perspective, to help eliminate unnecessary steps and streamline your sales funnel. Doing so can also help to illuminate the opportunities for upsells and cross-sells.

Limiting the analysis to two or three competitors offers a manageable amount of insight into usability, which helps you avoid reviewer overload and confusion. For impartial results, don’t reveal to test participants which website is yours.

Ask test participants to enter words in Google or list the words and phrases they would use to find a certain product or service. Not only does this yield potentially fruitful keywords, it also indicates whether your site appears in search returns.

To get a sense of each participant’s impression, have them look at each website for five seconds and answer the following questions:

• What three words would you use to describe the site?
• What is it about? What products or services are offered and for whom?
• How does this website make you feel?

To understand their process, give participants a task to perform on each website. Ask them to answer the following questions:

• What was the worst thing about your visit to this website?
• What aspects of the experience could be improved?
• What did you like about the website?
• What other comments do you have?
• Which website did you like best and why?

How Much Data Do You Need in a Competitive Analysis?

It may seem overwhelming to sit down and search out your competitors’ business situations. That’s why setting a clear intention before you begin an analysis is so important. In addition, Babette Bensoussan advises that you don’t need to analyze everything:

“Over the years, I have learned that once you have 70 percent of the information required for your chosen analytical technique, you can proceed to the analysis,” she explains. “You never really need all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to tell you what the picture is. This same philosophy applies to analysis. More information may not yield better insights nor improve predictive accuracy.”

How Do I Write a Competitor Analysis Report?

The format of your analysis depends on individual choice and the audience. You may also choose to use one kind of format while you work through the analysis, and another when you present findings.

Take a sheet of paper. In the left-most column, write the names of your closest competitors. Across the top of the page, list the main attributes of each product, such as target market, price, size, method of distribution, extent of customer service, prospective buyers, and so on. Then, make a check or a note for each attribute the competitor fulfils. An additional column can contain information about service or product availability, the website, a toll-free phone number, and other general information.

A competitor profile helps you make a detailed record about each competitor, and also allows you to capture snapshots of a business over time. Consider listing some of the following information:

• Location of offices and factories
• Key personalities, history, and trends
• Ownership, organizational structure, and corporate governance
• Number of employees and skill sets
• Management and management style
• Compensation, benefits, and retention rates
• Plant capacity, utilization rate, age of plant, capital investment
• Product mix per plant and shipping logistics
• Products and services
• Depth of product line
• New products developed and success rate
• Research and development details
• Brands and brand loyalty and awareness
• Patents and licenses
• Quality control conformance
• Cash flow and liquidity
• Profit growth profile
• Method of growth (organic or acquisitive)
• Objectives, mission statement, growth plans, acquisitions
• Marketing strategies
• Segments served, market shares, customer base, growth rate, and customer loyalty
• Promotional mix, promotional budgets, advertising themes, ad agency used, online promotional strategy
• Distribution channels (direct and indirect) and exclusivity agreements

Here is a step-by-step process for writing a competitor analysis report:

• Write down your competitors.
• Write what you know about them already.
• Discover who their target customers are.
• Discover their pricing methods.
• Investigate their marketing strategy.
• Figure out their competitive advantage.

Download our competitive analysis landscape template to get ideas for gathering information and reporting analysis results.

Download Competitive Analysis Landscape Template

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Competitive Analysis for Small Businesses

Small business can be competitive. Beyond meeting financial targets, you need to understand the competitive landscape (short of allowing it to distract you) and then target a niche market.  Many of the same analyses that apply to large businesses also apply to small businesses. However, if this is your first business, or if you don’t have a marketing background, you may want to pay attention to a few aspects.

First, it is helpful to acknowledge how much or how little you know about your competitors by sketching a profile of your top two or three competitors. Next, try to learn all you can about your competition.

You can use the following template to perform a competitive analysis for your small business.

Download Small Business Competitive Analysis Template

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What Is a Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan?

Competitive analysis should play a key role in the preparation of a business plan. Particularly if you seek outside funding, your knowledge of the competitive landscape will show your understanding of your business and the market forces at play.

When starting a business, consider all the analysis questions described above, but pay particular attention to issues of growth and opportunity. Consider addressing the following circumstances:

• Whether current competitors target a specific niche or offer products to the mass market
• If, how, and why competitors are growing or reducing business
• How your company will be stronger than competitors and better able to exploit changes in the market landscape
• What you will offer customers that no one else does (your competitive advantage)

In the business plan, describe the competitive landscape as it relates to direct and indirect competitors and opportunities and risks, emphasizing your competitive advantage. This competitive analysis can form the basis for your first marketing plan.

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• Write Your Business Plan | Part 1 Overview Video
• The Basics of Writing a Business Plan
• How to Use Your Business Plan Most Effectively
• 12 Reasons You Need a Business Plan
• The Main Objectives of a Business Plan
• What to Include and Not Include in a Successful Business Plan
• The Top 4 Types of Business Plans
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Presenting Your Business Plan in 10 Slides
• 6 Tips for Making a Winning Business Presentation
• 3 Key Things You Need to Know About Financing Your Business
• 12 Ways to Set Realistic Business Goals and Objectives
• How to Perfectly Pitch Your Business Plan in 10 Minutes
• Write Your Business Plan | Part 2 Overview Video
• How to Fund Your Business Through Friends and Family Loans and Crowdsourcing
• How to Fund Your Business Using Banks and Credit Unions
• How to Fund Your Business With an SBA Loan
• How to Fund Your Business With Bonds and Indirect Funding Sources
• How to Fund Your Business With Venture Capital
• How to Fund Your Business With Angel Investors
• How to Use Your Business Plan to Track Performance
• How to Make Your Business Plan Attractive to Prospective Partners
• Is This Idea Going to Work? How to Assess the Potential of Your Business.
• When to Update Your Business Plan
• Write Your Business Plan | Part 3 Overview Video
• How to Write the Management Team Section to Your Business Plan
• How to Create a Strategic Hiring Plan
• How to Write a Business Plan Executive Summary That Sells Your Idea
• How to Build a Team of Outside Experts for Your Business
• Use This Worksheet to Write a Product Description That Sells
• What Is Your Unique Selling Proposition? Use This Worksheet to Find Your Greatest Strength.
• How to Raise Money With Your Business Plan
• Customers and Investors Don't Want Products. They Want Solutions.
• Write Your Business Plan | Part 4 Overview Video
• 5 Essential Elements of Your Industry Trends Plan
• How to Identify and Research Your Competition
• Who Is Your Ideal Customer? 4 Questions to Ask Yourself.
• How to Identify Market Trends in Your Business Plan
• How to Define Your Product and Set Your Prices
• How to Determine the Barriers to Entry for Your Business
• How to Get Customers in Your Store and Drive Traffic to Your Website
• How to Effectively Promote Your Business to Customers and Investors
• Write Your Business Plan | Part 5 Overview Video
• What Equipment and Facilities to Include in Your Business Plan
• How to Write an Income Statement for Your Business Plan
• How to Make a Balance Sheet
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• How to Use Financial Ratios to Understand the Health of Your Business
• How to Write an Operations Plan for Retail and Sales Businesses
• How to Make Realistic Financial Forecasts
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• What Technology Needs to Include In Your Business Plan
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• The Role of Franchising
• The Best Ways to Follow Up on a Buisiness Plan
• The Best Books, Sites, Trade Associations and Resources to Get Your Business Funded and Running
• How to Hire the Right Business Plan Consultant
• Business Plan Lingo and Resources All Entrepreneurs Should Know
• How to Write a Letter of Introduction
• What To Put on the Cover Page of a Business Plan
• How to Format Your Business Plan
• 6 Steps to Getting Your Business Plan In Front of Investors

How to Identify and Research Your Competition Emphasizing your competitive advantage is an essential part of any business plan.

By Eric Butow Oct 27, 2023

Key Takeaways

• Why competitive analysis matters
• Questions to ask about your industry
• How to find similar companies

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

This is part 3 / 9 of Write Your Business Plan: Section 4: Marketing Your Business Plan series.

Successful entrepreneurs are renowned for intuitively feeling a market's pulse, project trends before anyone else detects them, and identifying needs that even customers are unaware of. After you are famous, perhaps you can claim a similar psychic connection to the market. But for now, you'll need to reinforce your claims to market insight by presenting solid research in your plan.

Market research aims to understand the reasons consumers will buy your product. It studies consumer behavior, specifically how cultural, societal, and personal factors influence that behavior. For instance, market research aiming to understand consumers who buy in-line skates might study the cultural importance of fitness, the societal acceptability of marketing directed toward children and teens, and the effect of personal influences such as age, occupation, and lifestyle in directing a skate purchase.

Related: 4 Effective Ways To Accomplish This Missing Step That Most Entrepreneurs Overlook

Market research is often split into two varieties: primary and secondary. Primary research studies customers directly, whereas secondary research studies information others have gathered about customers. Primary research might be telephone interviews or online polls with randomly selected target group members. You can also study your own sales records to gather primary research. Secondary research might come from reports on other organizations' websites or blogs about the industry.

Conducting market research provides answers to those unknown elements. It will greatly reduce risk as you start your business. It will help you understand your competitive position and the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. And it will improve your marketing and sales process."

Related: You Need Consumer Insights To Ensure The Success Of Your Business. Here Are Five Ways To Find Them.

Questions to Ask About Your Industry

To start preparing your industry analysis and outlook, dig up the following facts about your field:

• What is your total industry-wide sales volume? In dollars? In units?
• What are the trends in sales volume within your industry?
• Who are the major players and your key competitors? What are they like?
• What does it take to compete? What are the barriers to entry?
• What technological trends affect your industry?
• What are the main modes of marketing?
• How does government regulation affect the industry?
• In what ways are changing consumer tastes affecting your industry?
• What are recent demographic trends affecting the industry?
• How sensitive is the industry to seasons and economic cycles?
• What are key financial measures in your industry (average profit margins, sales commissions, etc.)?

Related: 5 Essential Elements of Your Industry Trends Plan

How to Find Similar Companies

Find a close match when looking at comparable businesses (and their data). For comparative purposes, consider:

• Companies of relative size.
• Companies serving the same geographic area could be global if you plan to be a web-based business.
• Companies with a similar ownership structure. If you are two partners, look for businesses run by a couple of partners rather than an advisory board of twelve.
• Relatively new companies. While you can learn from long-standing businesses, they may be successful today because of their twenty-five-year business history and reputation.

You will want to use the data you have gathered to determine how much business you could do and to figure out how you will fit into and adapt to the marketplace.

Related: How to Make Your Business Stand Out

How To Do Original Research

One limitation of in-house market information is that it may not include exactly what you're looking for. For instance, if you'd like to consider offering consumers financing for their purchases, it's hard to tell how they'd like it since you don't already offer it.

You can get around this limitation by conducting original research—interviewing customers who enter your store, for example, or counting cars that pass the intersection where you plan to open a new location—and combining it with existing data. Follow these steps to spending your market research dollars wisely:

Determine what you need to know about your market. The more focused the research, the more valuable it will be.

• Prioritize the results of the first step. You can't research everything, so concentrate on the information that will give you the best (or quickest) payback.
• Review less expensive research alternatives. Small Business Development Centers and the Small Business Administration can help you develop customer surveys. Your trade association will have good secondary research. Be creative.
• Estimate the cost of performing the research yourself. Keep in mind that with the internet you should not have to spend a ton of money. If you're considering hiring a consultant or a researcher, remember this is your dream, these are your goals, and this is your business.
• Don't pay for what you don't need.

Related: The One Simple Task That Will Help Your Startup Succeed

More in Write Your Business Plan

Section 1: the foundation of a business plan, section 2: putting your business plan to work, section 3: selling your product and team, section 4: marketing your business plan, section 5: organizing operations and finances, section 6: getting your business plan to investors.

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How to Write the Competitive Analysis for Your Business Plan

Back to Business Plans

Written by: Carolyn Young

Carolyn Young is a business writer who focuses on entrepreneurial concepts and the business formation. She has over 25 years of experience in business roles, and has authored several entrepreneurship textbooks.

Edited by: David Lepeska

David has been writing and learning about business, finance and globalization for a quarter-century, starting with a small New York consulting firm in the 1990s.

Published on February 19, 2023

Starting a business usually involves countless tasks, and one of the most important early hurdles is writing a business plan . Many entrepreneurs who aren’t looking for funding think they can skip this step, but that’s never a good idea. 

A crucial element of the business plan is the competitive analysis, mainly because only by understanding your competition will your company be able to beat them.

Fortunately for you, this handy guide lays out all you need to know to whip up an excellent competitive analysis that’s sure to give you a serious advantage. 

• What is a Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis describes your competitors and their products or services and identifies their strengths and weaknesses and competitive advantages. Writing the analysis involves detailed research and an examination of your competitors, their strategies, and their customers.

The goal is to identify how your business can gain a competitive advantage, usually by capitalizing on competitors’ weaknesses or beating them in a particular area, such as price or customer service.

A competitive advantage is critical to the success of your business, and something investors tend to focus on, so be sure to do your homework to determine yours.

• Steps to Write a Competitive Analysis

Writing a competitive analysis involves several steps.

1. Identify your top competitors

First, identify 5-10 competitors. They can be direct or indirect competitors. Direct competitors sell the same or similar products, while indirect competitors sell different products that solve the same problem. Burger King is McDonald’s direct competitor, for instance, while Chipotle is an indirect competitor.  

A good competitive analysis begins with a brief overview of each competitor.

2. Research your competitors

Next, research those competitors to find out more about what they offer, how they offer it, and to whom. You can get this info on the company’s websites, social media, marketing, and any news and financial reporting.  

Their marketing should help you to identify their value proposition and their target market . It may help to study their marketing through the eyes of a consumer. 

What need do they fill? Who would find their marketing appealing? Where do they advertise? If their ads appear on TikTok, they’re looking to attract a younger market. 

Read customer reviews to learn more about what they’re doing right, and more importantly, areas in which they fall short. You might even want to buy some of your competitors’ products, which would certainly help you with the next section of the plan. 

3. Compare products

Now it’s time to thoroughly compare your competitors’ products to your own, examining the features and uses, as well as pricing, quality, and market placement.  

This should show you how your product stacks up and give you ideas about how to improve it, perhaps with new features or added options.  

4. Identify competitor strengths and weaknesses

By now you should be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. What do they do well? Where do they fall short? In your competitor summaries, list the strengths and weaknesses of each. 

5. Identify competitor competitive advantages

At this point you should know each competitor’s competitive advantage. What is their key differentiator? How does their product stand out? A competitive advantage is usually one of the following:

• Customer service
• Brand awareness
• Technology 
• Convenience
• Rapid innovation
• Unique features
• High quality 
• Corporate social responsibility
• Empathetic marketing
• Eco-friendliness
• Employee expertise

6. Determine your competitive advantage

Now we get to the whole point the competitive analysis – figuring out where your business can gain an advantage. What does your company offer that they don’t? What can you do better than they do? Review the above list of competitive advantages – does any of them jump out to you? 

It could be something your business already does or has, or something you need to implement to gain an edge. Either way, it’s critical that you identify at least one differentiator that’s likely to persuade customers to choose your business. 

• Structure Your Competitive Analysis

As previously mentioned, your competitive analysis should be structured as a series of summaries about each competitor and how your company compares. It might help to create a chart or table to illustrate your main points and findings. 

Each summary should mention the key product features as well as strengths, weaknesses, and competitive advantage. Conclude the plan by explaining your competitive advantage, as well as how you will leverage it and sustain it. 

Sounds like a lot of work, right? And this is just one part of your business plan! 

A great deal of effort and research goes into a good competitive analysis, which highlights the complexity, and the importance, of writing a business plan. It’s a lot of work, but also a fantastic learning opportunity that will help develop informed strategies that shape your business. 

Even if you’re not seeking funding, take the time to write a solid business plan and be sure to dig into the competitive analysis. After all, finding and embracing your business’ competitive advantage is likely to be one of the keys to your success. 

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What is competitive analysis? Template, examples, and how-to

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll define what a competitive analysis is, describe the benefits product teams stand to gain from conducting one, and walk through the steps of how to do a competitive analysis.

Through the tutorial, we’ll refer to examples to demonstrate how each step of a competitive analysis works in practice. We’ll also provide a list of customizable, free competitive analysis templates for you to use when completing these steps on your own.

Complete guide to competitive analysis

Picture this: you just came up with the next disruptive, game changing, AI-powered e-commerce marketplace. The objective is to connect buyers with sellers to fulfill their tailored and customized product needs.

You’re confident your product will take on Etsy and other big players in the market. You did some market and user research and have a good idea of your ideal customer and their (underserved) needs. Based on this data, you believe your marketplace can reach product-market fit quickly.

It’s now time for you to dust off your copy of Sun Tzu’s  T he Art of War . Why is that, you ask?

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military textbook that, although dated somewhere between ~500–400 B.C., is one of the most influential management books out there to this day. It provides great strategic and tactical advice. Moreover, it provides guidance to help you assess yourself and your competition to gain an advantage.

Maintaining a competitive advantage is the goal. Even if you have the best product in the world and you know there is a market for it, if you don’t understand your competition, you‘re bound to fail. That’s why you need to perform a competitive analysis.

As the band Rage Against the Machine would say, know your enemy .

What is competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis (sometimes called a competitor analysis or competition analysis) is exactly what it sounds like: a structured approach to identifying and analyzing your competitors. More concretely, it’s an assessment of your competition’s offerings, strategy, strengths, and weaknesses.

A competitive analysis helps you answer questions such as:

• Which other companies are providing a solution similar to ours?
• What are the ideal customer’s minimum expectations?
• What are they currently not getting from our product with regard to those expectations?
• What barriers do competitors in the market fce?
• What should we avoid introducing in our product?
• What price are customers willing to pay for our product?
• What value do we need to provide to make our product stand out in the market?
• What trends are happening and how might they change the playing field?

When conducted thoroughly and regularly, a competitive analysis provides you with tons of information that can be used to improve and optimize your product. The end result is a holistic overview of your competitor landscape.

Why do a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is a fundamental product management instrument. It helps PMs learn what works and what doesn’t when trying to acquire market share, identify market trends, and locate gaps in their product offering.

Competitive analysis exists to help you avoid making mistakes and empower you to beat competitors to the punch in the pursuit of product growth and success.

Knowing your competition will bring you great rewards. Conducting a competitive analysis will help you more effectively:

• Create benchmarks
• Identify opportunities to better serve customers
• Make strategic decisions
• Determine your pricing strategy
• Identify market gaps
• Determine distribution and marketing strategies

Typically, the first time you create a competitor analysis is when doing your market research. This helps you get an idea of the product-market fit , which will evolve along your journey.

As a product manager, your role is not to analyze how well your competitors are able to showcase themselves. It is your job to make the product what the customer needs it to be. Understanding your competitor’s capabilities, pricing, and product positioning helps you in this.

Keep in mind that your competitors will likely showcase themselves to appear better than they probably are. You’ll be able to acquire tons of information about them, but you should take that information with a pinch of salt.

How to do a competitive analysis

There is no a single way to do a competitive analysis. In general, a competitive analysis is made up of three fundamental components:

• A shortlist of competitors
• A competitor deep dive
• A holistic overview and strategy

To demonstrate how to do a competitor analysis, we’ll refer back to the example outlined in the introduction.

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Remember, in our example, we’re looking to disrupt the market with an AI-powered e-commerce marketplace app that helps buyers and sellers connect to fulfill highly customized orders. Let’s call our innovative new product AGORA.

1. Create a shortlist of your competitors

There are three types of competitors:

• Direct — Competitors that offer the same product and target the same ideal customer; you are battling direct competitors heads-on
• Indirect — Competitors that either offer a somewhat similar product or target the same ideal customer
• Replacement — Competitors that offer a different product but target the same ideal customer

For a competitive analysis, you need to identify at least your direct and indirect competitors. So how do you do that? By looking inward and researching obsessively .

Look inward

To figure out who your direct and indirect competitors are, you need to look inward first to understand your product positioning: who are you servicing and what is the offering you are providing?

You can answer these questions by doing a self-assessment using the product canvas . Originally introduced by Roman Pichler, the product canvas has since tbeen tweaked and refined.

In its core, the product canvas covers:

• The name of the product
• Objectives and key metrics for success
• The ideal customer
• A high-level overview of what’s required to meet the customer’s needs
• Just enough product details about short-term goals

For our example product, the competitive analysis might look something like this:

Research obsessively

A simple Google search using keywords from your self-assessment can get you pretty far. Other resources that can help you identify your competitors include tools such as Crunchbase, Similarweb, Statista, etc.

As the old saying goes, the customer knows best. If you don’t have many customers yet, review sites such G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and Google Reviews can help you.

If you do have customers, go ask them. Most customers try and evaluate several products before deciding on the right product to buy. Nothing is stopping you from asking them which other brands they considered and why they ultimately chose yours.

Once you have established who your competitors are, you might find yourself in a market with many direct and indirect competitors. If that is the case, select about seven of the most relevant competitors to include in your competitor deep dive.

2. Do a deep dive on each competitor

From your a shortlist of competitors, choose about seven of your most important and dig up all the relevant information on each one.

The research conducted during the previous step will help you capture the most relevant information about your competitors for the following categories:

Company profile

Ideal customer profile, product information, market approach, swot analysis.

Start by creating a company profile for each of your competitors to gain a better understanding of who they are. Include the following information:

• Name   —  What is the name of your competitor?
• Founding date  —  When was the company founded? How long has it been in the market?
• Company size  —  How many employees does the company have? Are they equipped to service the market and innovate?
• Market share  — The portion of the market controlled by the competitor’s product
• Revenue   —  The income the competitor generates from its product
• Reputation   —  What do customers think of your competitor’s product on a scale from one to five?

Let’s apply this framework to our AGORA competitive analysis example:

It’s important to understand who your competitors are serving and who is buying the product. This not only to reconfirm that the competitor is indeed a direct (or indirect) competitor, but also to understand what customers like and dislike about the competitor’s product.

The information you’re looking for includes:

• Ideal customer   —  Who is the competitor’s target customer and what defines them?
• Motivations   —  What does the customer enjoy about your competitor’s product?
• Frustrations   —  What does the customer hate about the product?
• Primary buyer  —  Who is the primary buyer of the product? Is it the as the ideal customer, or is it a different persona?

Let’s see what this would look like following our AGORA example. Below is an example ideal customer profile for Etsy. First, for the buyer:

And the ideal customer profile for Etsy sellers:

Not to be captain obvious, but you want to capture more details about the product your competitor is offering and its positioning.

The information we’re looking for at this step includes:

• The product   —  What is the tagline your competitor is using to market its product?
• Positioning   —  Based on the quality and price of the product, place the product into a one of several buckets. For example, Economy (low quality, low price), Skimming (low quality, high price), Penetration (high quality, low price), and Premium (high quality, high price)
• Product features   —  What are the key features being marketed and promoted?

Referring to our example AGORA app, the product information associated with Etsy on a competitor analysis might look as follows:

Next, seek to understand how your competitors are bringing the product to market .

List the following information:

• Pricing — What does the product costs? If there is a tiered pricing model, what does it look like?
• Distribution channels — Through which channels is your competitor selling the product?
• Marketing channels — Through which channels is the product being promoted?

In our AGORA competitor analysis example, this section would look something like:

With all the information you’ve collected, you’ll find yourself in a good place to do a SWOT analysis . This is one of the most common and popular competitive analysis frameworks.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats:

• Strengths  —  What is going well for the competitor?
• Weaknesses   —  What is not going well? What obvious flaws are there?
• Opportunities   —  What could give your competitor an advantage?
• Threats  —  What might harm your competitor’s product?

For AGORA, our example competitive analysis might include a SWOT analysis that looks like this:

3. Develop a holistic overview and strategy

Now that you have a better view of your competitors, it’s time to determine how you want to approach them in the market: do you want to avoid your competitors or attack them?

Two extremely useful tools that can help you make this assessment are the competitive matrix and battle cards .

Competitive matrix

One way to operationalize the data you gathered during your competitive analysis is to plot out a four-quadrant competitive matrix.

Define key factors for the and x and y axes and plot yourself and your competition accordingly to see how you stack up. This approach is also known as perceptual mapping.

A competitive matrix for our example would look like this:

Battle cards

You can use the four-quadrant competitive matrix and competitor insights to create battle cards for each of your competitors.

Battle cards are a visual aid that help you compare your product against those of your competitors at a glance. It’s a quick and easy way to see how you stack up in key areas of performance and value. It’s also a neat way to help sales in their conversations with customers.

Here’s what you should include on each battle card:

• Company name — Name of your competitor
• Powers  —  What makes this competitor stand out from the rest?
• How we win   —  What should we do to gain a competitive advantage over this competitor?
• Why we lose   —  What is this competitor better at? What should we avoid so we don’t lose market share?
• Pricing   —  How much of a threat is the competitor’s product to our market share (low, medium, or high)?
• Strategy   — Should we attack or avoid this competitor?

A battle card for our example competitive analysis might look as follows:

Alternative competitive analysis frameworks

If you‘ve followed the framework described above, you should have solid insight into your competitors, your product opportunities, and the best strategy to attack or avoid your competitors in the market.

If you want to dig deeper, you can follow up your competitive analysis by producing a Five Forces analysis and/or customer journey map .

The Five Forces model

You still might want to consider gaining more insights into the competitive structure of the market you are in — in other words, gain a better understanding of how easy it is to either enter or be replaced by a competitor in the market.

A great framework to use for this type of competitor analysis is the Five Forces model , originally conceived by Michael Porter.

According to the Five Forces model, you can assess the market you are in by looking at:

• Intensity of competitive rivalry
• Negotiation power of new buyers
• Negotiation power of suppliers
• Threat of new entrants
• Threat of substitutes

Customer journey map

Instead of zooming out, you can also zoom in on the journey ideal customers make when interacting with the product itself, the distribution, or marketing channels.

On a journey map, your touchpoints are the customer, the activity performed, how the customer experiences the activities, and their expectations.

Free competitive analysis templates

A competitive analysis is a continuously updated document packed with information about your most important competitors to help you determine how to approach them in your target market.

The competitive analysis model described in this article consists of three steps that are designed to produce the insights you need to rule the market once and for all.

Below are free, customizable competitive analysis templates for each step of the process described in this article:

• Competitive analysis template
• Product canvas template
• Competitive matrix template
• Battle card template
• Customer journey map template

NOTE : To use and customize the competitive analysis templates above, after opening, select File > Make a copy from the main menu.

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What Is a Competitive Analysis & How to Conduct It?

Whenever you prepare for a big game, you always analyze your competitor, be it’s strengths or weaknesses.

Same analysis should be conducted for planning your brand strategy.

Competitor analysis is an in-depth analysis of the market positioning of your brand and your competitor. It helps you to evaluate business development ideas, and prepare a growth strategy.

As said by Jack Ma, “You should learn from your competitor but never copy. Copy and you die”. Hence the only competitive advantage is the ability of your brand to learn faster than your competition.

What is competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is a process of gathering information on the products, services and marketing strategies of your rival brands – i.e. the competitors of your brand in the same industry.

This analysis helps brands to find out their advantages and disadvantages and prepare a strong marketing strategy to grow and thrive towards success.

This helps in enhancing your judgments and also to comprehend the market environment and positioning yourself in the industry.

Why is Competitive Analysis Important?

Competitive analysis is important because it provides you with an opportunity to build concrete strategy for your brand and eliminates guesswork.

The following are the reasons for performing a competitive analysis :

Competitive market research is an in-depth form of research of the market parameters and your target customers that would differentiate your product offerings from those of your competitors.

It is an essential operation that extends beyond just comparing your products and services with your competitors.

A deep dive research into the market not only helps to find distinguishers but also to capitalize and invest in them.

It also helps in laying a foundation for the sales and marketing plan that would genuinely differentiate your brand from the industry.

Factors to consider in Competitive analysis

A thorough analysis of your competitor’s plan can help you identify their product offerings, mission and vision statements, target markets, marketing techniques, and many more.

You might even discover new competitors who earlier you didn’t know existed in the market.

Competitive analysis is conducted to understand the unique selling points of your brand and how you stand out from others in the industry.

Let’s see the following steps to understand your brand positioning in the market.

Locobuzz can be a powerful partner in your competitive analysis. By monitoring your competitors’ social media and online mentions, you can gain valuable insights into their customer sentiment, brand perception, and overall performance.

Our advanced sentiment analysis tools help you understand how customers feel about your competitors, allowing you to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand.

Additionally, Locobbuzz’s customer journey mapping capabilities enable you to compare your customer experience against competitors, pinpointing areas for improvement and innovation.

By leveraging Locobuzz, you can make data-driven decisions to outperform your competition and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Examples of competitive analysis

Incorporating competitive analysis into your business would be very essential and critical to remain in the industry.

Examining your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, and shortcomings can provide you with useful insights and help you to make better decisions and judgments for your brand.

This analysis allows you to keep up with the new trends, and new possibilities and prevent potential pitfalls.

It guarantees that you can manage your resources wisely, integrate market trends into your brand, and fine-tune your plans to satisfy the needs of your customers.

Lastly conducting a thorough competitive study allows you to position your brand in the market and eventually leads to making profits and achieving long-term success.

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How to Leverage Competitive Insights for Business Growth

Nathan Thompson

Nathan is a revenue-focused marketing leader. By day he manages Demand Gen right here at Copy.ai, by night he enjoys family time in the Rocky Mountains!

What are Competitive Insights?

Ever feel like you're running a race with a blindfold on? That's business without competitive insights. To truly get ahead, you need to know the terrain, the competition, and your own strengths and weaknesses. Enter competitive insights.

Competitive insights are all about gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about your rivals to sharpen your business strategy. Dive into their market share, positioning, product offerings, marketing tactics, and customer sentiment, and you'll uncover gems of information that help you make smarter decisions and stay ahead of the pack.

Think of competitive insights as your business's secret weapon. They give you a panoramic view of the competitive landscape, helping you spot opportunities, foresee challenges, and tweak your strategies. By understanding where your competitors shine and where they stumble, you can differentiate your offerings, target untapped markets, and boost your market positioning.

But wait, there's more—just kidding, we don't do that here. Competitive insights aren't just about your direct competitors. They also involve keeping an eye on broader industry trends, emerging technologies, and shifting customer preferences. Stay tuned to these factors, and you'll be able to pivot your strategies and stay relevant as the market evolves.

Ignoring competitive insights? That's a one-way ticket to GTM Bloat—misaligned teams, missed opportunities, wasted resources, and lost market share. On the flip side, companies that master competitive insights make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and ultimately gain a competitive edge.

In the next sections, we'll dive deeper into the perks of competitive insights and break down the key components of a killer competitive analysis. By the end of this read, you'll be a pro at gathering, analyzing, and applying competitive insights to drive your business success.

Benefits of Competitive Insights

Competitive insights are like a secret weapon for businesses aiming to stay ahead in today's rapid-paced market. Understanding your competitors' strategies, strengths, and weaknesses lets you make informed decisions that drive growth and profitability.

First up, improved decision-making . Knowing the lay of the land helps you spot opportunities and threats, allowing you to tweak your strategies accordingly. This data-driven approach minimizes risks and maximizes your success potential.

Next, let's talk about better market positioning . By analyzing your competitors' positioning, you can find gaps in the market and make your offerings stand out. This not only attracts but also retains customers, boosting your market share.

And don't forget enhanced product development . By studying your competitors' products and services, you can pinpoint areas ripe for improvement and innovation. This knowledge helps you create superior offerings that meet customer needs and exceed expectations, giving you that coveted competitive edge.

In the fast-growing e-commerce sector, competitive insights are crucial. According to Forbes , the global e-commerce market is set to hit $6.3 trillion by 2024. To thrive in this competitive environment, businesses must leverage competitive insights to make strategic decisions and stay ahead of the curve.

Key Components of Competitive Insights

Competitive insights are like the secret sauce to understanding your business's market position. Let's break down these elements so you can whip up a strategy that's not just effective but downright delicious.

1. Identifying Competitors

Identifying your key competitors is the first step in gathering competitive insights. Understanding who you're up against helps you better position your business for success. Start by researching industry leaders and established players in your market. Look for companies offering similar products or services and targeting the same customer base.

Analyze market trends to spot emerging competitors or disruptors. Keep an eye on industry news, attend trade shows and conferences, and monitor social media buzz to stay informed about new entrants or innovative startups that could potentially threaten your market share.

Competitive analysis tools like Copy.ai, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SimilarWeb can help you identify online competitors by providing insights into website traffic, search rankings, and advertising strategies. Understanding influencer marketing can further help identify competitors in the digital space leveraging influencers to reach your target audience.

Thoroughly researching and identifying your key competitors equips you to move on to the next step: analyzing their market share and positioning in relation to your own business.

2. Market Share Analysis

Market share analysis isn't just a fancy term; it's your compass in the competitive jungle. Knowing your market share—and that of your rivals—means you can make savvy calls on pricing, product tweaks, and marketing moves.

Want to dive into market share analysis? Start with market research reports from heavyweights like Gartner, Forrester, or IBISWorld. These reports break down market share by company and dish out juicy insights on industry trends and growth forecasts.

Another smart move is to scrutinize your own sales data against the total market size. This gives you a crystal-clear snapshot of your current market share and highlights areas ripe for improvement. Tools like AI-powered sales analytics can turbocharge this process, offering valuable insights into your sales performance.

Keeping an eye on your market share over time is crucial. Regular monitoring helps you spot trends and shifts in the competitive landscape, letting you pivot your strategies swiftly in response to market changes or competitor moves.

Mix these methods and keep analyzing your market share consistently. You'll be armed with data-driven insights that fuel business growth and keep you ahead of the pack.

3. Competitor Positioning

Understanding competitor positioning is like unlocking a treasure chest of competitive insights. It's all about dissecting how your rivals present themselves in the market, their unique value propositions, and how customers perceive them. This intel helps you spot market gaps and craft strategies to make your brand stand out.

Kick things off by diving into your competitors' marketing strategies. Scrutinize their websites, social media presence, ad campaigns, and content marketing. Pay attention to their key messages, target audiences, and the channels they use. This will reveal how they're trying to carve out their niche in the market.

Then, take a hard look at your competitors' product offerings. Compare features, pricing, and overall value propositions with your own. Pinpoint their unique selling points and areas where they might have the upper hand. Think about how their products align with their marketing messages and overall positioning strategy.

Brand perception is a game-changer in competitor positioning. Gauge how customers view your competitors by keeping an eye on online reviews, social media chatter, and customer feedback. Look for recurring themes or sentiments. Are customers happy with their products or services? Do they see the brand as trustworthy, innovative, or high-quality?

Reputation and brand perception go hand in hand. Investigate your competitors' industry reputation by reading news articles, press releases, and industry publications. Note any awards, recognitions, or partnerships that boost their credibility. Also, watch out for any negative press or controversies that could tarnish their reputation.

For a deeper dive into competitor positioning, consider leveraging AI for sales enablement. AI-powered tools can sift through mountains of data from various sources, offering insights into your competitors' strategies, customer sentiment, and market trends.

4. Brand Perception and Reputation

Brand perception and reputation are like the secret sauce in your business recipe. They shape how customers see and interact with you. So, how do you get the lowdown on these crucial factors? Here are some savvy methods for assessing brand perception and reputation:

First up, keep your ear to the ground on social media. Use social listening tools to track mentions of your brand and your competitors. These tools help you gauge conversations, sentiment, and trends across various platforms. This real-time data gives you a front-row seat to how people perceive your brand and where you might need a tune-up.

Next, dive into customer reviews on your website, e-commerce platforms, and third-party review sites. Both the glowing praises and the grumbles are goldmines of insights into customer experiences and expectations. Spot common themes or recurring issues that could be shaping brand perception and tackle them head-on.

Lastly, consider brand tracking tools to keep tabs on key metrics like brand awareness, favorability, and loyalty over time. These tools often blend survey data with social media analytics to give you a 360-degree view of your brand's health. And hey, don't forget to check out AI tools for sales forecasting —they can crunch historical data and spot trends that might influence future sales and brand perception.

Regularly evaluating brand perception and reputation helps you spot opportunities to boost your brand image, address customer concerns, and stand out from the competition. So, roll up your sleeves and get to it!

5. Product and Service Offerings

Want to outsmart your competitors? Start by diving deep into their products and services. Compare their features and benefits with yours. Spot their strengths, weaknesses, and those unique selling points that make them stand out. It's like a game of chess—know their moves to anticipate your next one.

Next up, let's talk pricing strategies. Are they going for the premium, mid-range, or budget crowd? Do they throw in discounts, bundles, or subscription models? Understanding their pricing can help you make savvy decisions about your own strategy and carve out your niche.

Customer feedback is your next goldmine. Dive into reviews, testimonials, and social media chatter. Gauge customer satisfaction and pinpoint common pain points or praises. These insights are invaluable for tweaking your own offerings to better meet customer needs.

Now, let's dissect their marketing channels and tactics. What platforms are they using? Are they all about content marketing, paid ads, influencer partnerships, or something else? By understanding how they're reaching and engaging their audience, you can fine-tune your own marketing game plan and find ways to stand out.

And here's a fun twist: AI is shaking up sales prospecting . As AI tools get smarter, they help businesses understand customer needs and preferences better, allowing for tailored offerings. Stay updated with the latest AI trends and technologies to keep your products and services competitive in this ever-evolving market.

6. Marketing Channels and Tactics

Understanding your competitors' marketing strategies is like getting a sneak peek into their playbook. By diving into their marketing channels and tactics, you can spot opportunities to make your brand stand out and gain that coveted competitive edge.

First up, let's dissect your competitors' digital marketing efforts. Check out their website, social media presence, email campaigns, and online ads. Look for patterns in their content strategy: What topics do they cover? How often do they post? What's their tone? Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs can help you uncover their top-performing keywords and give you a glimpse into their SEO game.

Now, let's shift gears to offline marketing. Think traditional ads like print, billboards, or TV commercials. Attend industry events and trade shows to see how your competitors present themselves and engage with potential customers. Analyze their sales process, from lead generation to sales collateral and customer support.

For deeper insights, marketing analytics tools are your best friends. Platforms like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social can track your competitors' website traffic, social media engagement, and audience demographics. Leveraging these tools will give you a clearer picture of their marketing performance and highlight areas where you can up your game.

Don't forget to keep an eye on how your competitors are using emerging technologies like AI in their marketing. AI-powered tools, such as AI in sales calls , can provide valuable insights by analyzing their sales conversations and identifying key messaging points.

Thoroughly assessing your competitors' marketing channels and tactics will arm you with valuable insights. You'll be ready to make data-driven decisions and craft a marketing plan that propels your business ahead of the competition.

How to Implement Competitive Insights

Diving into competitive insights is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle of your market—exciting, challenging, and ultimately rewarding. Here's your roadmap to mastering this strategic process:

Phase 1: Gathering Competitive Insights

Understanding your market and outpacing the competition starts with gathering competitive insights. Here’s how you can get the intel you need:

Use Competitive Analysis Tools

Competitive analysis tools are your new best friends. Platforms like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SpyFu spill the beans on your competitors' online antics—think website traffic, top keywords, backlink profiles, and ad strategies. These tools highlight gaps in your strategy and spotlight areas ripe for improvement. And remember, Copy.ai is your go-to GTM AI Platform for streamlining this process.

Conduct Market Research

Market research is your secret weapon for understanding your target audience and their views on your competitors. Dive into surveys, focus groups, and customer interviews to gather qualitative data on brand perception, customer preferences, and pain points. Pair this with industry reports and market share data for a quantitative snapshot of the competitive landscape.

Monitor Industry Trends

Keeping up with industry trends is like having a crystal ball for emerging opportunities and threats. Attend industry conferences, follow thought leaders on social media, and subscribe to key publications to stay in the know. And don’t forget, AI-powered sales managers can help monitor trends and gather insights by crunching data from all corners of the web.

Once you’ve got a treasure trove of competitive data, it’s time to analyze and interpret it to extract actionable insights. Ready to boost your GTM Velocity? Let’s dive in!

Phase 2: Analyzing Competitive Insights

You've gathered a treasure trove of data on your competitors. Now, let's roll up our sleeves and dive into the analysis. This step is where the magic happens—where data transforms into actionable insights that can catapult your business strategy ahead of the pack.

Enter the world of data analytics platforms . These nifty tools help you sift through mountains of data with the finesse of a master chef slicing through vegetables. Copy.ai, Google Analytics, Tableau, and Power BI are your go-to sous-chefs. They’ll help you whip up visualizations—think charts, graphs, and dashboards—that make complex data as digestible as a Sunday brunch.

As you dissect your competitive data, zero in on key trends and patterns . What are the common threads in your competitors' marketing strategies, product offerings, pricing, and customer engagement? For instance, if several competitors are diving deep into B2B content marketing , perhaps it's time to dip your toes into that pool too.

Don't stop there. Compare your findings with industry benchmarks . This will give you a reality check on how your business measures up. You can find these benchmarks through trade associations, market research firms, and trusty online resources.

With your competitive data analyzed and insights in hand, it's time to act. Let these revelations shape your business strategy, product development, marketing campaigns, and sales efforts. If you notice competitors targeting a customer segment you've overlooked, adjust your marketing sails to catch that wind.

By making competitive analysis a regular part of your decision-making process, you'll stay a step ahead of the competition and drive long-term success for your business. And remember, it's not just about keeping up—it's about leading the pack with GTM Velocity.

Phase 3: Using Competitive Insights

You've gathered your competitive insights, now let's put them to work and supercharge your business strategy. Ready for some actionable tips? Let's dive in:

• Spot the gaps: Use your competitive analysis to identify areas where your business can level up—think product features, pricing, marketing tactics, or customer service.
• Craft your unique value proposition: Take a good look at your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. Now, create a unique value proposition that makes your business the star of the show.
• Fine-tune your target audience: Dig into your competitors' customer base and find those untapped or underserved segments that align with your strengths. Adjust your target audience accordingly.
• Boost your marketing game: Borrow a page from your competitors' marketing playbook to refine your own strategy. Identify the best channels, messaging, and tactics to engage your audience.
• Innovate and stand out: Let competitive insights fuel innovation in your products, services, or business model. Seek opportunities to differentiate and offer unique value to your customers.

But hold up—sidestepping common pitfalls is key:

• Don't just copy—innovate: Learning from competitors is smart, but copying them? Not so much. Use insights as a springboard for innovation and unique value creation.
• Play to your strengths: Keep your eye on your own unique strengths and core competencies. Make sure your strategies amplify what you do best.
• Avoid knee-jerk reactions: Think before you leap in response to competitors' moves. Evaluate the potential impact and decide if a response is truly necessary.

Ready to turn insights into action? Here's how:

• Set your priorities: Pinpoint the most impactful and feasible actions based on your insights. Focus on initiatives that align with your business goals and resources.
• Map out a plan: Develop a detailed plan for each initiative, including timelines, resources, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track success.
• Communicate and collaborate: Get everyone on board. Make sure all stakeholders understand the insights and their role in executing the plan. Foster cross-functional collaboration to drive implementation.
• Monitor and tweak: Keep an eye on progress and impact using your KPIs. Be ready to adapt your strategies based on new insights or shifts in the competitive landscape.

Leverage competitive insights to make data-driven decisions that optimize your B2B sales strategies , enhance your market positioning, and drive business growth. Keep a pulse on your competitors and adjust your strategies to stay ahead in the ever-evolving business world.

Tools and Resources

Gathering competitive insights isn't just about having the right tools—it's about wielding them like a pro. These tools help businesses decode competitor data, enabling smart decisions and keeping them ahead of the pack. Let's dive into the essentials:

Competitive Analysis Tools

Several powerful competitive analysis tools can help you gain valuable insights into your competitors' strategies and performance:

• SEMrush : Ideal for keyword research, SEMrush lets you identify the keywords your competitors are targeting and ranking for. It provides detailed data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and potential traffic, enabling you to optimize your content strategy.
• Ahrefs : Renowned for its backlink analysis capabilities, Ahrefs helps you understand your competitors' link-building strategies. Examine their backlink profiles to identify opportunities for acquiring high-quality links and boosting your website's authority and search engine rankings.
• Moz : Offering a suite of SEO tools, Moz provides valuable insights into your competitors' online presence. With features like keyword research, link analysis, and site audits, Moz enables you to benchmark your performance against competitors and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Now, let's talk data analytics. Platforms like Google Analytics, Tableau, and PowerBI help you make sense of the data you collect. These platforms allow you to visualize and analyze competitor insights alongside your own performance metrics, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and adjust your strategies.

Effective competitive analysis often goes hand-in-hand with thorough account planning . This ensures you not only understand your competitors but also tailor your approach to each specific account or target market. Combining insights from competitive analysis tools with a well-structured account planning process positions your business for success, even in the most competitive markets.

Data Analytics Platforms

Data analytics platforms are your secret weapon for gathering and analyzing competitive insights. They turn the chaos of raw data into patterns, trends, and golden opportunities for growth. Let's dive into some of the most popular data analytics platforms:

• Google Analytics : This web analytics powerhouse offers detailed insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. Understand your audience and optimize your online presence to outshine the competition.
• Tableau : Tableau is the Picasso of data visualization. Create interactive dashboards and reports with ease. Its user-friendly interface and advanced analytics capabilities help you uncover valuable insights and communicate them effectively to your stakeholders.
• Power BI : Microsoft's Power BI is the Swiss Army knife of business intelligence. Connect, visualize, and analyze data from various sources. Its robust features and seamless integration with other Microsoft tools make it a go-to for organizations aiming to supercharge their decision-making processes.

But why stop there? Enter generative AI tools . These tools automate data processing, generate insights, and even create content based on analyzed data. Imagine saving time and resources while gaining valuable competitive intelligence—sounds like a win-win.

Market research services also play a pivotal role in gathering competitive insights. These services offer in-depth analysis of market trends, consumer behavior, and competitor strategies. Leveraging the expertise of market research professionals gives you a comprehensive understanding of your industry landscape, helping you make informed decisions to stay ahead of the competition.

Final Thoughts

Competitive insights are no longer a luxury—they're a necessity.

From identifying competitors and analyzing market share to understanding brand perception and dissecting marketing tactics, competitive insights provide a comprehensive view of your business environment. They empower you to spot opportunities, mitigate risks, and differentiate your offerings in a crowded marketplace.

Remember, the key to success lies not just in collecting data, but in transforming it into actionable insights. Utilize the tools and resources available—from competitive analysis platforms to data analytics tools—to gain a deeper understanding of your competitors. Embrace emerging technologies like AI to enhance your competitive intelligence efforts and drive innovation.

As you implement competitive insights, stay agile and be prepared to adapt your strategies based on new information and market changes. Regularly revisit and refine your competitive analysis process to ensure it remains relevant and effective.

By making competitive insights an integral part of your business strategy, you'll be well-equipped to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, and drive sustainable growth. In the ever-evolving world of business, those who harness the power of competitive insights will not just survive—they'll thrive.

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Write a Business Plan: Essential Tips and Strategies for Entrepreneurs

When starting a new venture or expanding an existing one, it's crucial to write a business plan . A business plan serves as a roadmap for your company's future, outlining your goals and strategies for achieving them. It's a vital tool for attracting investors and securing funding, demonstrating your understanding of your market and industry. Additionally, a well-crafted business plan can help you identify potential challenges and opportunities, allowing you to make informed decisions.

Importance of a Business Plan

The importance of a business plan cannot be overstated. It provides clarity and direction for your business, helping you stay focused on your objectives and navigate any obstacles that may arise. A well-written business plan also serves as a valuable communication tool, allowing you to articulate your vision to potential stakeholders and partners.

Benefits When you Write a Business Plan

When you write a business plan offers numerous benefits beyond securing funding. It forces you to conduct thorough research and analysis, giving you deep insights into your market, competition, and target audience. Moreover, it helps you set realistic financial projections and milestones for measuring success.

Key Components of a Business Plan

A comprehensive business plan typically includes critical components such as an executive summary, company description, market analysis, organization and management structure, product or service line, marketing strategy, financial projections, and funding requirements.

Understanding the Basics

Strikingly Website on a Laptop

To start, let's understand what is a business plan. A business plan is a written document that outlines your business's goals and how you plan to achieve them. It serves as a roadmap for your company, guiding decision-making and setting the direction for growth and success.

The purpose of a business plan is to provide a clear vision for your business and communicate that vision to potential investors, partners, and employees. It helps you articulate your strategy, identify potential challenges, and establish measurable goals.

A business plan typically includes an executive summary, company description, market analysis, organization and management structure, product or service line, marketing and sales strategy, funding request, financial projections, and an appendix with supporting documents.

Now that we've got a good grasp of why a business plan is important, let's dive into the different components that make up this crucial document. Understanding each element will help you create a comprehensive and effective business plan that sets you up for success. So, let's take a closer look at what goes into writing a business plan and how each section contributes to the overall success of your business.

Research and Analysis

Quantum Template from Strikingly

Market research is essential for business planning . It is crucial for understanding your target market, identifying customer needs, and assessing the demand for your products or services. Conducting surveys, analyzing industry reports, and gathering data on consumer behavior are crucial steps in this process.

Competition analysis involves studying your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, identifying potential threats, and finding opportunities to differentiate your business. This helps you position your products or services effectively in the market and develop strategies to gain a competitive edge.

SWOT analysis for business planning involves evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that can impact your business. Identifying internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats helps make informed decisions and develop a robust business strategy.

How to Write a Business Plan

Go For Thoughts Template from Strikingly

When you write a business plan is essential for any entrepreneur or business owner. It provides a roadmap for the future of your business and helps you communicate your vision to potential investors or partners. Creating a compelling business plan can also help you identify pitfalls and opportunities, giving you a better chance at success.

Executive Summary

The executive summary is a brief overview of your business plan, covering the key points such as your company's mission, goals, and financial projections. It should be concise yet compelling, grabbing the reader's attention and giving them a clear understanding of what your business is all about.

Company Description

In this section, you'll need to provide detailed information about your company, including its history, mission statement, and legal structure. You also highlighted what sets your company apart from others in the industry and why customers should choose your products or services over those of competitors.

Products and Services

This part of the business plan outlines what you offer customers and how it fulfills their needs or solves their problems. You'll need to describe each product or service in detail, including its features, benefits, and pricing strategy. It's important to demonstrate how your offerings provide value to potential customers clearly.

Remember that creating a business plan is not just about getting funding; it's also about setting goals for yourself and building a roadmap for future success. By carefully crafting each section of your business plan with these keywords in mind - write a business plan, how to write business plan - you can ensure that it effectively communicates the value of your business and its growth potential.

Financial Projections

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When you write a business plan, it's crucial to include financial statements and projections to demonstrate your business's financial viability. This section should include income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements that clearly show your company's financial health. By projecting future financial performance based on historical data and market trends, you can showcase your business's potential profitability to investors and stakeholders.

Financial Statements and Projections

In this section, you'll need to present detailed financial statements such as profit and loss, balance sheets, and cash flow projections. These documents provide an overview of your company's financial position and performance over a specific period. By including these statements in your business plan, you can give potential investors insight into how your business is expected to perform financially.

Break-even Analysis

Another essential component of financial projections is the break-even analysis, which helps you determine the point at which your total revenue equals your total costs. This analysis lets you understand how much product or service you need to sell to cover all expenses and generate profits. By including a break-even analysis in your business plan, you can demonstrate a clear understanding of your cost structure and pricing strategy.

Funding Requirements

This section outlines the funding requirements for launching or growing your business. Whether you're seeking investment from venture capitalists or applying for a small business loan, it's essential to clearly state how much funding you need and how it will be utilized within your business operations. By providing detailed information about funding requirements in your business plan, you can show potential investors that their capital will be put to good use.

Implementation and Review

After you have written your business plan, the next step is to implement it. The action plan for execution outlines the specific steps you need to take to achieve your business goals. This includes assigning responsibilities, setting deadlines, and allocating resources effectively. It's essential to have a clear roadmap for implementation to ensure that your business plan translates into real-world success.

Action Plan for Execution

Your action plan should detail the tasks that need to be completed, who will be responsible for each task, and the timeline for completion. This will help you stay organized and focused as you work towards achieving your business objectives. By breaking down larger goals into smaller actionable steps, you can make progress more manageable and trackable.

Milestones and Metrics

Setting milestones and metrics is crucial for monitoring the progress of your business plan implementation. Milestones are vital achievements or events that indicate progress toward your goals, while metrics are quantifiable measures to track performance. By establishing clear milestones and metrics, you can assess whether your business is on track and make any necessary adjustments along the way.

Regular Review and Updates

Regularly reviewing and updating your business plan is essential for keeping it relevant and effective. As your business evolves, market conditions change, or new opportunities arise, you must revisit your strategy and make necessary adjustments. By staying proactive in reviewing and updating your business plan, you can ensure that it remains a valuable tool for guiding your business toward success.

Strikingly Features for Business Planning

Strikingly Landing Page

Strikingly is an excellent platform for creating business plans because of its user-friendly interface and intuitive design tools. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, Strikingly makes it easy to write a business plan that is both professional and visually appealing.

Using Strikingly for Creating Business Plans

In today's competitive business landscape, a well-crafted business plan is essential for outlining your vision, securing funding, and guiding your entrepreneurial journey. Strikingly, with its user-friendly platform and powerful features, empowers you to create comprehensive and professional business plans that effectively communicate your ideas.

• Executive Summary. Provide a concise overview of your business, including your mission, vision, products or services, target market, and financial projections. Strikingly's platform allows you to create a visually appealing executive summary.
• Market Analysis. Conduct thorough market research to understand your industry, target market, competitors, and trends. Strikingly's analytics tools can help you gather market data.
• Company Description. Clearly articulate your company's purpose, values, and unique selling proposition (USP). Strikingly's platform allows you to create a compelling company description.
• Products or Services. Detail your offerings, including their features, benefits, and pricing. Strikingly's e-commerce features can be used to showcase your products or services.
• Marketing and Sales Strategy. Outline your marketing and sales plan, including your target audience, marketing channels, and sales tactics. Strikingly's platform allows you to create landing pages and capture leads.
• Operations Plan. Describe your business operations, including your team, facilities, and supply chain.
• Financial Projections. Develop realistic financial projections, including income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. Strikingly's integration with financial tools can help you create financial projections.
• Management Team. Introduce your management team and their qualifications. Strikingly's platform allows you to create team profiles.
• Funding Request. If seeking funding, outline your funding requirements and how the funds will be used.
• Appendix. Include supporting documents, such as resumes, permits, or licenses. Strikingly's platform allows you to upload supporting documents.

Strikingly's Advantages for Business Plan Creation

• User-Friendly Interface. Strikingly's platform is easy to use, even for those without technical expertise.
• Customizable Templates. Choose a template that aligns with your business plan's structure and create a professional presentation.
• Content Creation Tools. Easily create and edit your business plan's content, including text, images, and charts.
• Collaboration Features. Collaborate with your team members to develop and refine your business plan.
• Analytics Integration. Track your progress and measure the effectiveness of your business plan using Strikingly's analytics tools.
• Presentation Features. Create visually appealing presentations to showcase your business plan to investors or stakeholders.
• Lead Capture. Capture leads from potential investors or partners using Strikingly's lead generation forms.
• Mobile Optimization. Ensure your business plan is accessible on mobile devices, as many investors and stakeholders review plans on their smartphones or tablets.
• Scalability. As your business grows, Strikingly's platform can scale to accommodate your expanding needs.
• Customer Support. Receive assistance and support from Strikingly's dedicated customer service team.

By leveraging Strikingly's platform and following these steps, you can create a comprehensive and persuasive business plan that effectively communicates your vision and attracts the support you need to succeed. Remember, a well-crafted business plan is an essential tool for any entrepreneur.

Templates for Business Plans

Strikingly offers a variety of fully customizable business plan templates. From traditional text-based layouts to more visual, infographic-style designs, there's something for everyone. These templates provide a solid foundation and can be easily tailored to reflect your unique business concept.

Customization and Collaboration Features

One of Strikingly's standout features is its customization options, which allow you to personalize every aspect of your business plan to align with your brand identity . Additionally, the platform supports collaboration among team members or stakeholders, making it easy to gather feedback and input from others while working on your business plan.

Mannheim Template from Strikingly

As you write a business plan, remember to keep it concise and focused on your goals. Communicate your ideas effectively using clear and straightforward language. Avoid using jargon or technical terms that may confuse your audience.

When you write a business plan, it's important to highlight the unique value proposition of your business and how it will address the needs of your target market . Clearly outline your financial projections, marketing strategies, and operational plans to demonstrate the potential success of your business. Remember to regularly review and update your business plan as your company grows and evolves to ensure that it remains relevant and aligned with your goals.

Final Tips When You Write a Business Plan

Conduct thorough research and analysis to support your strategies and projections when creating a business plan. Be realistic in your financial projections and consider various scenarios to prepare for potential challenges.

Resources for Creating a Business Plan

Many online tools and templates are available to help you create a professional business plan. Look for reputable sources that offer guidance on writing different sections of the plan and examples of successful plans for reference.

After completing your business plan, it's crucial to revisit and revise it regularly to reflect changes in the market or your business environment. Track your progress and update the plan accordingly to stay aligned with your objectives.

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How to Analyse Competitor Ads Like a Pro | 7-Step Creative Analysis Guide

How to Analyse Your Competitors Ads Like a Pro

With our seven-step guide, learn how to perform a creative analysis of your competitors. Analyse ads like a pro and create brilliant campaigns that outshine the competition!

You’ve spent countless hours fine-tuning your ads—perfecting the visuals, crafting compelling copy, and even running A/B tests on every possible element. Yet, despite all that effort, the results are underwhelming, with only a few conversions trickling in.

What’s going wrong?

Chances are, your competitors are outshining you by doing something you haven’t cracked yet. In the world of advertising, the competition never sleeps, and to beat them, you need to do more than just create a great ad—you need to create a better one.

The solution? A solid competitor ad analysis. By dissecting your competitors' strategies, you can:

• Spot the messaging, creatives, and CTAs that work best in your industry.
• Uncover gaps in your own marketing approach.
• Gain valuable insights to improve your campaigns.

This seven-step guide will teach you how to analyse ads like a pro and give you the edge you need to create campaigns that don’t just compete—they dominate.

Theme 1: Concept

Your ad's concept is essentially its core idea or theme - the overarching message you want to convey to your audience.

For example, a travel company's concept could be to "Explore the world with us" or to "Experience luxury at affordable prices." See the difference? One focuses on adventure, while the other emphasises affordability. For your ads, it's important to find a theme or concept that resonates with your target audience.

To do so, look at what core messages your competitor's ads try to convey.

Ask yourself:

• What's their main message or value proposition?
• What pain points are they addressing?
• How are they positioning their product or service? I.e., are they focusing on features, benefits, or emotional appeal?

To find your competitor's ad themes, use tools like MagicBrief's brand tracker to analyse the core ideas they're emphasising over time. For example, this brand frequently highlights 'personalised plans' or 'testimonials of significant weight loss,' as shown in the chart below:

Step 2: Analyse Your Competitor's Hooks

A good hook makes a person stop in their tracks to view your ad, and hopefully, take action. These can take different forms, such as a question, bold statement, or statistic, i.e, did you know that 8 out of 10 people prefer our product?

When researching your competition, break down their hook frame by frame. During this process, ask yourself the following:

• What type of hook are they using?
• What creative format are they using? I.e, Split Screen, or DTC (Direct to Camera)?
• What emotional triggers are they using? I.e Fear, Curiosity, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), etc
• Are they using text overlays or captions?
• How does the hook relate to the overall concept of the ad?
• What visuals or music are they using to support their hook?

Like with themes, MagicBrief allows you to see which hooks your competitors predominantly use, how often, and when. After identifying which hooks they rely on to get clicks, you can strategize on making your hooks more compelling and unique.

Step 3: Ad Script

An ad isn't just about having a strong hook, body, and call to action. It's about how the script is structured, or how the individual sections work together to form a cohesive message. If these sections don’t flow well, you won't maintain the audience's interest.

You can break down your competitor's ad script scene by scene. For example:

• Scenes 1 and 2:  Establish the problem or pain point that the product/service solves
• Scene 3: Introduce the solution and highlight its benefits
• Scene 4: Showcase social proof through testimonials or user-generated content (UGC)
• Scene 5: Present a call to action

During your analysis, you'll want to find out things like the number of scenes the ad has, each scene's purpose, and how the messages flow from one scene to the next, i.e., pain point, solution, social proof, and call to action.

If you require ad transcripts, use MagicBrief's transcript feature.  This feature allows you to access the entire ad script, scene by scene, and analyse each section’s effectiveness. Use these insights to refine your own ad script and create a powerful, cohesive message that resonates with your audience.

Stage 4: Visuals and Music

Next, focus on your competitor's ads visuals and music. These elements are key in building an emotional connection and reinforcing its core message.

Pay close attention to shot types—whether close-ups, wide angles, or product-focused—and how the lighting (dramatic or natural) influences the overall mood. Notice if special effects or text overlays are used to highlight key points.

When it comes to music, consider how it sets the tone. Is it fast and energetic or slow and emotional? Does it match different parts of the ad? Visuals and music should create a cohesive experience that keeps viewers engaged.

For instance, if competitors use fast-paced music and lifestyle scenes without product shots, you might stand out by opting for slower, emotional music and a more product-focused visual approach.

Remember that the point of competitor research isn’t to copy but to understand what works and make it your own. If you believe tweaking the visuals or music in your ad can strengthen its impact, then go for it! Just be sure to be data-driven and use insights from your research to support any changes you make.

Stage 5: Ad Pacing

Ever noticed how the best movies have excellent pacing? With a proper balance between fast and slow scenes and the story progressing at an appropriate speed, the pacing keeps viewers hooked. The same goes for ads.

Take note of how your competitor paces their ad. Do they start strong and steady or build up to a climax? Are there any moments where you're drifting off? If so, why? Is the ad too long or does it lack variety in its pacing?

The pacing should align with the ad's objective and target audience, whether to create awareness, generate interest, or drive action. Younger audiences, for example, are used to streaming platforms like TikTok and Twitch, making them accustomed to fast-paced content. Meanwhile, older audiences may prefer a slower pace with more time to absorb information.

When determining your own pace, ask yourself the following:

• Does the pacing align with the overall ad message and objective?
• Is there a good balance between high-energy moments and slower, informative sections?
• Does the pacing feel natural for the audience you're targeting?
• How does the pacing support the ad's key emotional or persuasive points?

To quickly find brands with excellent and effective pacing, use MagicBrief's AI-powered ad performance estimates. With just a few clicks, you’ll uncover top-rated ads, analysed for key factors like ad longevity, script quality, and editing pace. Use these as inspiration for your own ad pacing and keep your audience engaged and enticed.

Stage 6: Message Consistency

Have you ever visited a landing page that didn't match its corresponding ad? It may have promoted a free trial, but the landing page only mentioned a discounted price. This lack of consistency can spike up bounce rates and ruin conversion rates. 

To ensure your ads are congruent throughout, check if your competitor's ad's intent and messaging are clear, specific, and aligned with their landing page or website. Visual elements, like colour, images, and fonts, should also remain consistent.

For example, if your ad features a bright and playful tone, your landing page should also reflect that energy.

Stage 7: Create Ads Based on Everything You’ve  Learned

Now that you’ve got a sense of what works, it’s time to take that knowledge and make it your own. Focus on a couple of key themes that really speak to your audience and fit your brand.

• Pick 2-3 themes that click with your brand and resonate with your audience.
• Create a few ad variations for each theme—play around with different headlines, visuals, and styles.
• Test them out to see which one gets the best reaction.
• If ads highlighting your product’s unique benefits get more attention than limited-time offers, double down on that approach.
• Keep tweaking and improving your ads based on the feedback you get.

By doing this, you’ll build a solid core concept for your ads while still keeping things fresh and interesting.

Refine Ads and Roll Out New Ones Based on Analytics

A creative strategist doesn’t rely solely on gut feelings or copying competitors to create successful ads. They must delve into analytics, using data to refine existing ads and roll out new ones. That’s how they truly optimise campaigns and achieve better results.

But if analysing data isn’t your strong suit, no worries! MagicBrief's Creative Analytics simplifies the process by delivering easy-to-understand insights tailored to the metrics that matter most to you. With MagicBrief, you'll quickly see which ads need work and which exceed expectations.

If, on the other hand, you need ad inspiration, MagicBrief’s Chrome extension allows you to save competitor ads from the Facebook Ad Library or TikTok Creative Centre for further study. Alternatively, you can search and filter ads from our extensive ad library, which contains over  5,000,000 ads from 25,000+ brands.

Start MagicBrief for free today and use our wide range of analytics and inspiration tools. Get access to our chrome extension, ad library, creative analytic tools, and more. With MagicBrief by your side, you can feel confident that your ads are always optimised for success.

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Save ads from the Facebook Ad Library forever!

Use the Free MagicBrief Chrome Extension to save and download ads from the Facebook Ad Library. You’ll also get extra data on the ads.

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Ever dreamt of owning your own grocery store? With the growing shift towards local and organic products, it might seem like an enticing business idea. Consumers are increasingly prioritizing fresh, locally-sourced produce and unique grocery experiences, creating a ripe opportunity for passionate entrepreneurs. But is it profitable to open your own grocery store? This blog post will walk you through the key factors to consider, offering insights, practical tips, and real-world examples to help you make an informed decision.

Market Analysis

Understanding the industry landscape.

The grocery industry is vast and dynamic, with annual sales in the U.S. alone surpassing $700 billion. Despite the dominance of large chains like Walmart and Kroger, there is a significant market for independent grocery stores, especially those that offer specialized products or cater to niche markets. According to recent reports, consumers are increasingly drawn to stores that provide organic, non-GMO, and locally sourced items.

Consumer Spending Patterns

Consumer behavior has shifted remarkably in recent years. Shoppers are now more conscious of what they buy, focusing on health, sustainability, and supporting local businesses. Nielsen data reveals that sales of organic food have grown by double digits annually, indicating a strong consumer preference for healthier options. Understanding these spending patterns is crucial for positioning your store effectively in the market.

Profitability Analysis

Is the grocery business profitable? The answer largely depends on your location, target market, and business model. On average, grocery stores operate with a profit margin of 1-3%. While this might seem low, high-volume sales and strategic cost management can lead to significant profits. The key lies in offering products that meet consumer demands and differentiating your store from the competition.

Costs and Investments

Initial investments.

Opening a grocery store requires substantial initial investment. Key expenses include securing a location, purchasing equipment, and stocking inventory. Real estate costs vary widely depending on location, with urban areas typically commanding higher prices. Essential equipment includes refrigeration units, shelving, and point-of-sale systems.

Ongoing Costs

Running a grocery store involves ongoing expenses such as rent, utilities, staffing, and inventory replenishment. Staffing costs can be significant, as you'll need a team to manage operations, from checkout clerks to stockers and managers. Additionally, utilities like electricity and water can add up, particularly if you're running refrigeration units and electric or powered doors. You’ll want to be sure to consider a professional like  Edelman-Lyon when it comes to your automatic door services, which will be a necessity. 

Financial Planning

Effective  financial planning is crucial for managing these costs and ensuring profitability. This includes budgeting for unexpected expenses and maintaining a healthy cash flow. Many successful grocery store owners recommend setting aside at least six months' worth of operating expenses before opening your doors.

Competitive Strategies

Unique product offerings.

To carve out a niche in the competitive grocery market, consider offering unique products that aren't readily available at larger chains. This could include locally-sourced produce, artisanal goods, or specialty food items. By catering to specific consumer preferences, you can attract a loyal customer base.

Community Engagement

Building a strong relationship with the local community can set your store apart. Hosting events, sponsoring local initiatives, or featuring products from nearby farms and producers can foster goodwill and drive foot traffic. Engaged customers are more likely to choose your store over impersonal chain supermarkets.

Technology Integration

Incorporating technology into your operations can enhance customer experience and streamline processes. For example, offering online ordering and delivery services can cater to busy consumers. Additionally, installing electric or powered doors can improve accessibility and convenience, making your store more appealing to all customers.

Operational Considerations

Supply chain management.

Efficient supply chain management is critical for maintaining inventory levels and minimizing waste. Establish relationships with reliable suppliers and implement inventory control systems to track stock levels in real-time. This ensures that shelves are always stocked with fresh, high-quality products.

Inventory Control

Effective inventory management involves balancing stock levels to meet customer demand without overstocking, which can lead to spoilage and increased costs. Using inventory management software can help streamline this process, providing insights into sales trends and inventory turnover rates.

Regulatory Compliance

Operating a grocery store requires compliance with various regulations, including health and safety standards, labor laws, and zoning requirements. Ensure that your store meets all local, state, and federal regulations to avoid fines and disruptions. Regularly review and update compliance measures to stay current with any changes in legislation.

Marketing and Branding

Effective marketing strategies.

A strong marketing strategy is essential for attracting and retaining customers. Utilize social media platforms to engage with your audience, share promotions, and showcase new products. Email marketing campaigns can also keep customers informed about special offers and events.

Building a Strong Brand

Creating a memorable brand involves more than just a catchy logo. Your brand should reflect your store's values and mission. Whether it's a commitment to sustainability, community support, or exceptional customer service, communicate these values consistently across all marketing channels.

Enhancing In-Store Experience

The in-store experience plays a significant role in customer retention. Ensure that your store is clean, well-organized, and welcoming. Friendly and knowledgeable staff can enhance the shopping experience, making customers feel valued and appreciated.

Future Outlook

Industry trends.

The grocery industry is constantly evolving, with trends such as online shopping, health and wellness, and sustainability shaping consumer preferences. Staying informed about these trends can help you adapt your business strategy and stay competitive.

Opportunities for Innovation

Innovation is key to staying ahead in the grocery business. Consider implementing new technologies, such as self-checkout systems and AI-driven inventory management. Exploring partnerships with local farms and producers can also provide unique product offerings that set your store apart.

Growth Potential

While the grocery industry is competitive, there is significant growth potential for stores that can effectively meet consumer demands. Focus on continuous improvement, customer feedback, and staying adaptable to market changes to ensure long-term success.

Wrapping it Up

Opening a grocery store is a challenging yet rewarding venture. By understanding the market, managing costs, and implementing effective strategies, you can build a profitable business that meets the needs of today's discerning consumers. Whether it's offering unique products, engaging with the community, or leveraging technology, there are numerous ways to differentiate your store and attract loyal customers.

Ready to take the plunge? Start planning today and turn your grocery store dream into reality. If you need expert guidance, consider booking a consultation with industry professionals who can provide tailored advice and support. Here's to your success in the grocery business!

Copyright © 2024 SCORE Association, SCORE.org

Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.

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Why Kenya needs a national policy on competition, and how to get one

The array of stakeholders to formulate the national policy on competition would need to be broad enough to include regional stakeholders.

By  Priscilla Njako

Manager, Buyer Power

Competition Authority of Kenya

The Competition Act has served the country well since coming into effect in 2011. The past 13 years have seen the successful mainstreaming of the law as an effective tool of market regulation.

This reality invites the question: can we now work backwards from the Competition Act, towards a national policy on competition? The answer, to use Kenyan parlance, is: ‘burrofcos’! In fact, from where I sit, there is a clear benefit of legislation having preceded policy.

The information and insights gathered from enforcement of the Competition Act over the past 13 years present an invaluable repository to inform formulation of a strong policy.

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The Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK)’s annual reports until June 2023, reveal that the agency investigated 334 anti-competitive practices, with the manufacturing sector leading in the number of cases.

For example, the sector led with 36 percent of all cases investigated in the financial year ending June 2021, 19 percent in the year ending June 2022 and 15.5 percent as of June 2023.

On the mergers and acquisition front, the Authority analysed 1,353 applications from virtually every sector of the national economy, giving it valuable information on the nature and structure of Kenya’s markets.

Addition of abuse of buyer power to the enforcement repertoire five years ago has afforded the CAK a microscopic look into the terrain within which micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) operate.

A subsequent national competition policy would therefore be a best bet fit in supporting sustainability of these enterprises that make up a significant 98 percent of all businesses in the country and create 30 percent of all jobs, annually.

That said, I consider that two things would be most critical in the policy formulation and design process. The first is effective stakeholder engagement.

This is fundamental, given the close tie-in between public participation and the constitutional imperative of transparency and accountability by public bodies.

The array of stakeholders would need to be broad enough to include regional stakeholders such as the Comesa Competition Commission and the East African Community Competition Authority, while still reaching parties that operate from the fringes of the economic space, specifically MSMEs.

Second, the policy design would do well to prioritise monitoring and evaluation, with assessment of impacts taking precedence over activities and processes.

Within the policy should be embedded a monitoring framework that incorporates evaluation throughout the implementation process.

This is in line with the government’s move towards institutionalisation of performance management in the public service.

It will appear that, after all, there is something to be said in support of law preceding policy.

However, legislating in the absence of a public policy is equivalent to putting the cart before the horse, which, though possible, is not optimal nor effective option for setting direction, guiding and influencing decision-making.

Priscilla is the Manager, the Buyer Power Department, the Competition Authority of Kenya.  

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