Competitor Analysis in Six Easy Steps
Though developing an analysis template isn’t rocket science, it does go beyond the few basic steps that are essential to identify and categorize your competitors. Competitor analysis is crucial to your business’ success, as this kind of in-depth research arms you with the ability to quickly identify market trends and adapt to competitor strategies to gain a stronger foothold or to out-compete them entirely. Competitor analysis empowers businesses to leverage the use of competitive intelligence to analyze and monitor the market competition on an ongoing basis. This, in turn, acts as a key differentiator that helps businesses to understand the behavior of peer companies, enabling them to anticipate their actions and stay a step ahead.
Today several business organizations have realized the need for incorporating competitive information into decision making, but few are adept at treating it as an integral component of a long-term growth strategy. However, to build a competitive strategy, companies must accumulate a wealth of information and dedicate sufficient resources to analyze and act on that data.
The path to the successful execution of such objectives is fraught with numerous pitfalls- the following six-step process will help you develop a competitor analysis template to overcome them:
Step 1: Define your market
Step 2: Create a list of your direct competitors
Step 3: Analyse competitors
Step 4: Summarise competitor product and market strategies
Step 5: Compare and contrast competitors with your products
Step 6: Keep your competitive analysis accurate up-to-date
About the Client
The client is a leading player in the US financial services sector.
Predicaments Faced
We are well aware that understanding and keeping track of your competition is an indispensable part of staying relevant in the marketplace of tomorrow. With similar intent, the client- a financial services provider approached Infiniti Research to leverage its competitor analysis expertise and 
develop a competitor analysis template to keep track of their competition and re-assess the market repetitively using real-time metrics.
Facing an escalating market competition the financial services provider wished to increase its market share by using competitor analysis models to build a differentiated value proposition focused on improving customer loyalty. Also, by assessing the competitor analysis models the financial service client wanted to understand the competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to the market competition.
Solutions Delivered
By systematically engaging in competitor analysis over time the financial services client was able to track market trends that enabled them to better adapt to the competition, pricing trends, and technological innovations. With the help of the devised competitor analysis template, the financial services client gained specific, real-time insights based on the five forces model in terms of the threat of potential market entrants, the initiation of new service/product offerings, and the establishment’s strengths and weaknesses.
The insights gleaned from the competitor analysis template included details on:
- Market potential forecasting
- Competitor pricing strategies
- Tertiary market possibilities
Have you identified your top ten competitors? If not, its time you do. Get in Touch for expert insights on competitor analysis!
