Competitor analysis is critical for any company looking to stand out in the marketplace. If you set up an online store without researching what your competitors are doing, you will probably have to revamp your business as soon as difficulties start knocking on the door.
The advantage of e-commerce is that everything on the web is measurable. With a few clicks and a little patience, you can get relevant data about the performance of rival platforms. This way, you can discover opportunities and get ahead of those who have not done their homework.
Want to know the best practices for effective competitor analysis? Read on and check out our tips!
Research Your Competitors In-Depth
This tip may seem obvious, but many fail to identify their competitors. Usually, the beginning entrepreneur looks only at the big names in the market and misses the real threats in his segment. Therefore, it is necessary to go deeper in the research.
A good practice is to gather the main keywords for which you want to be found and type them into search engines. This way you can see the companies that stand out in the results and start to analyze them. Often, by doing this, you end up discovering new names that have been gaining traction recently.
Do a SWOT Analysis
The SWOT analysis serves to identify the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This way, it becomes clearer the path we must take to reduce the chances of error in our business.
When identifying opportunities, for example, you will naturally research what rival brands are doing. If you notice that none of them are offering a certain service, this may be a gap to stand out. Therefore, SWOT analysis helps you understand different aspects of the market you are in.
Create Audience Research
It is common that our perception of some brands is not the same as that of the public. Therefore, it is necessary to create surveys to know, in fact, the opinion of consumers. Today there are several tools for creating forms, one of the most popular is Google.
The most important thing here is to elaborate the questionnaires well before sending them to people. Another care that you should take is to make sure that the participants do not know which company is conducting the survey, as this can influence the results. After collecting the data, it is advisable to gather everything in a spreadsheet to facilitate the analysis.
Use Technology To Your Advantage
As we said at the beginning, on the Internet everything is measurable. So there is no reason not to get as much information as possible from your competitors. We can not always get a clear picture only through observations and surveys with the public, so the ideal is that you use a tool that provides this data.
In this case, you can use SimilarWeb. This is a platform that provides complete information about your competitors' sites, such as
- number of visits;
- position in search engine ranking
- traffic origin;
- time users spend on the site;
- audience interests.
Do you realize how difficult it is to collect information for your e-commerce and thus make a complete competitor analysis? However, remember to also analyze your channels to identify possible failures.
Want to dig deeper into the subject? Then read our article about the Google Analytics metrics you should always keep track of!
