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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.

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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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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 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.

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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

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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.

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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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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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How to Write a Competitive Analysis: a Comprehensive Guide

• September 4, 2024

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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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 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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What Is Competitive Analysis and How to Do It Effectively

• 15 min read

Rebecca Strehlow, Copywriter at Crunchbase

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, market researcher or marketing enthusiast, knowing your competitors inside and out is a crucial part of the job. 

Competitive analysis is more than a quick online search; instead, it’s a systematic process that allows you to gain valuable insights into your competitive environment. By examining the strengths, weaknesses, strategies and market positions of rival companies, you can make informed decisions that help you come out on top.

Let’s dive into what competitor analysis is and how to do it, as well as the tools and templates you need to thrive in the modern market.

What is competitive analysis? 

Competitor analysis, often referred to as competitive analysis, is the systematic process of gathering and evaluating information about your competitors to gain a deep understanding of the competitive landscape in your industry. It involves delving into your competitors’ business models, marketing practices, product offerings, target audiences and much more.

This practice helps you keep a pulse on competing products in the market and make well-informed decisions for your business. It also enables you to find opportunities for growth, anticipate trends and proactively respond to potential threats.

Benefits of competitor analysis

The advantages of doing competitive analysis can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line. Here are just some of its key benefits: 

• Informed decision-making: By understanding your competitors’ strategies, you can make well-informed decisions about your own business. This includes choices related to product development, marketing and pricing.
• Identification of market opportunities: Competitor analysis can reveal gaps in the market or areas where your competitors may be underperforming. These insights can help you identify new opportunities for growth and expansion.
• Risk mitigation: By staying aware of your competitors’ activities, you can better anticipate potential threats and challenges. This proactive approach enables you to develop strategies to effectively mitigate risks and overcome threats before they happen.
• Benchmarking: Comparing your business to competitors helps establish benchmarks for performance. This allows you to measure your progress and identify areas where you excel or need improvement.
• Product and service enhancement: Analyzing competitors’ products and services can inspire improvements in your offerings, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Improved marketing strategy: Understanding how your competitors market their products or services can help you refine your own marketing strategy to better reach your target audience.
• Adaptation to market shifts: The business environment is constantly evolving. Competitor analysis helps you stay agile and adapt to changes in customer preferences, technology and market trends.
• Competitive advantage: Armed with insights from competitive analysis, you can develop strategies to gain a competitive advantage in your industry.
• Long-term sustainability : Consistent competitor analysis allows your business to plan for the long term by identifying potential challenges and opportunities that may arise in the future.

Together, these benefits can empower you to thrive in the face of competition and establish a strong presence in the market. 

How to do competitor analysis 

To harness these advantages, you’ll need to learn how to perform competitive analysis effectively. The process is quite structured and involves several key steps to ensure that you gather relevant data and gain actionable insights.

• Identify your competitors
• Define your objectives
• Collect data
• Look for the 4 Ps
• Conduct a SWOT analysis

1. Identify your competitors

To pinpoint your competitors, create a list of organizations that compete with you both directly and indirectly in the marketplace. 

Direct competitors are organizations that offer similar products or services to the same target audience. In other words, they’re the businesses that potential customers could choose instead of your company.

To identify your direct competition, start by examining businesses that operate in the same industry or niche. Ask yourself questions such as:

• Who offers products or services that are nearly identical to ours?
• Who targets the same customer segments and geographical areas as we do?
• Who are our primary rivals when it comes to market share and sales?

Once you have identified these direct competitors, you can create a list or spreadsheet to keep track of their names, key characteristics and any available data that will be useful in your analysis.

Next, you’ll want to identify your indirect competitors. Indirect competitors serve a similar target market as your company, but may offer different products or services. They are indirect rivals because they can influence consumer choices, even though they are not in direct competition with your business. To identify indirect competitors:

• Look for businesses that serve the same customer needs, even if their products or services are not identical to yours.
• Consider how customers might choose between your offerings and those of indirect competitors.
• Examine businesses that could potentially expand into your market.

Including both direct and indirect competitors in your analysis provides a more holistic view of your competitive landscape and helps you anticipate shifts in consumer preferences or market dynamics.

Remember that the business environment is constantly changing, and new competitors may emerge over time. Regularly updating your list of competitors is essential to ensure that your competitor analysis stays relevant.

2. Define your objectives

The next step in competitive analysis is to clearly outline your objectives. This will ensure that you’re gathering relevant information that directly supports your business strategy. Here’s how to define your objectives effectively:

• Clarify your goals: Begin by outlining your overarching goals. Common objectives may include improving market share, optimizing pricing strategies, enhancing product development or refining marketing tactics.
• Identify your information needs: Use your goals to determine exactly what kind of information you’ll need. Ask yourself: What kind of data or insights will be most helpful in achieving your stated objectives? For example, if you want to improve product development, you may need data on your competitors’ product features, customer reviews and pricing.
• Develop KPIs: Write down the key performance indicators that are most relevant to your objectives. KPIs are quantifiable metrics that will help you measure your progress. For instance, if your goal is to enhance marketing strategies, relevant KPIs might include website traffic, conversion rates or social media engagement.
• Determine a time frame: Understanding the time frame of this project will influence the depth and scope of your analysis. Are you conducting a one-time competitor analysis, or is this an ongoing process? 
• Align with business strategy: Ensure that the above aligns with your overall business strategy. Your competitor analysis should directly contribute to the success and growth of your business.
• Adapt when necessary: Be open to adjusting your objectives as needed. The business landscape can change rapidly, and you may need to adapt in response to new opportunities or challenges.

When you define your objectives, you give yourself a clear roadmap for your research. This helps you focus on gathering the most pertinent data and ensures that your analysis directly benefits your business. Whether you’re looking to outperform competitors in a particular area or gain a broader understanding of the competitive landscape, well-defined objectives are the cornerstone of a successful analysis. 

3. Collect data

Effective data collection is another fundamental step in the competitor analysis process, as the quality and relevance of the data you gather directly influence the insights you gain. Begin by identifying data sources that will give you the information you’re looking for. These sources can include both online and offline channels.

Online sources are often the richest and most accessible. Common data sources for competitive monitoring include:

• Crunchbase : Crunchbase is a valuable resource for gathering data about companies, including your competitors. It offers details about a company’s firmographics, funding, leadership team, investor relationships and key metrics. This data helps you understand your competitors’ financial health, investment history, growth strategies and potential areas of expansion. 
• Company websites: Competitor websites are valuable sources of information about your competitors’ products, services, pricing and promotional strategies. They provide direct insights into how your competitors present themselves to customers and the market. 
• Social media: Social media platforms such as Facebook , X (formerly Twitter) , Instagram and LinkedIn offer a glimpse into your competitors’ marketing and promotional efforts. Analyze their posts, content engagement and follower interactions to understand their messaging and customer engagement strategies. You can also use social media to monitor comments, reviews and conversations to gauge customer sentiment and identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Customer review sites: Review sites like G2 , Capterra or dedicated industry-specific review platforms also offer candid customer feedback. Analyze the reviews to understand customer satisfaction levels, identify pain points and discover areas where your competitors excel or underperform. Some reviews may also mention pricing, which can help you determine how customers perceive the value of your competitors’ products or services.
• Market reports: Market research companies like Nielsen , Gartner , Forrester and Euromonitor International often produce comprehensive market reports across various industries. They often include data on market size, growth projections and emerging opportunities, helping you assess the overall landscape your competitors operate in. Market reports may also include company profiles, giving you information about their market share, strategies and financial performance. 
• Industry publications: Business publications and journals often publish in-depth articles and analysis about trends, innovations and market players. They can provide valuable information about your competitors’ strategies, market positioning and noteworthy developments. Crunchbase News , which offers data-driven reporting on private markets, is a great place to start.
• Government databases: Government databases can provide access to financial and regulatory information about companies, including your competitors. This data may include financial statements, business registrations and industry-specific regulatory compliance, helping you understand their financial health and legal compliance.

As you gather this data, make sure you have an organized place to put it. A good idea is to create a competitor matrix, also referred to as a competitor grid, which is a spreadsheet for organizing your research. List out your competitors on one axis of the grid (either the horizontal or vertical axis is fine). On the other axis, list the data points you’re looking to collect, such as company location, market position, price and branding.

A couple additional notes: pay attention to both your data accuracy as well as any ethical considerations. Confirm that the information you gather is up to date and reliable, as outdated or inaccurate data can lead to erroneous conclusions. On top of that, be mindful of legal requirements. Respect privacy rights, copyright and intellectual property laws when gathering data.

4. Look for the 4 Ps

Next, you’ll want to analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies. A systematic way to approach this is by looking at the 4 Ps of marketing, also known as the marketing mix. These are product, price, place and promotion, which you can break down into the following questions:

• What are the key features and attributes of our competitors’ products?
• How does the quality of our competitors’ products compare to ours?
• Are there any unique or innovative features in our competitors’ products that we should be aware of?
• What is the product life cycle of our competitors’ offerings, and how does that impact their market presence?
• How do our competitors brand and position their products in the market?
• Do our competitors offer a wide product range, or do they focus on a niche market?
• What are the customer reviews and feedback on our competitors’ products, and what strengths or weaknesses do they highlight?
• How do our competitors handle product updates, customer support and warranties?
• What are the pricing strategies employed by our competitors (e.g., premium, value, competitive or penetration pricing)?
• How do our competitors price their products or services compared to our pricing?
• What types of discounts, promotions or special offers do our competitors use, and how frequently do they change them?
• Do our competitors offer bundle pricing or product packages?
• How do our competitors handle pricing changes and adjustments based on market conditions or demand?
• What is the perceived value of our competitors’ products or services in relation to their pricing?
• Are there any loyalty programs or customer rewards related to pricing that our competitors offer?
• How do competitors communicate their pricing to customers, and does it align with their branding and positioning strategies?

Place (distribution)

• What distribution channels do our competitors use to reach their customers (e.g., direct sales, retailers, e-commerce or wholesalers)?
• How extensive is the geographic reach of our competitors’ distribution networks?
• Are there specific partnerships or collaborations that our competitors have with distributors or retailers?
• What is the availability and accessibility of our competitors’ products or services, both online and offline?
• How do our competitors handle inventory management, logistics and fulfillment to ensure timely delivery to customers?
• Do our competitors have a physical presence, and how does it impact their brand and customer engagement?
• What is the overall customer experience with the distribution and availability of our competitors’ offerings?
• Are there any supply chain or distribution challenges that our competitors face?
• What are the core elements of our competitors’ marketing and advertising strategies (e.g., online ads, content marketing, social media, traditional media)?
• How do our competitors position their brand, and what is their unique selling proposition?
• What messaging and tone do our competitors use in their advertising and marketing campaigns?
• How do our competitors engage with customers on social media, and how do they manage their online reputation?
• What content marketing tactics do our competitors employ to educate and engage their audience?
• Do our competitors use influencer marketing or partnerships with other brands or organizations?
• What customer feedback, testimonials or case studies do our competitors use in their promotional materials?
• How do our competitors measure the success and impact of their promotional efforts, and what adjustments do they make based on these metrics?

These questions will force you to think hard about your competitors and the ways they position their product or service in the market. Be sure to make a note of these data points so you have an organized spreadsheet with your competitive analysis. 

5. Conduct a SWOT analysis

Now, conduct a SWOT analysis using all the data and insights you’ve gathered. A SWOT analysis is a competitive analysis framework for systematically evaluating your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Create a table or slide deck with the following notes about each competitor:

• Strengths: Consider areas like product quality, brand reputation, financial stability and unique capabilities. What does your competitor excel at? What are their key assets and resources? What advantages do they have over your business and other competitors?
• Weaknesses: Analyze your competitors’ weaknesses, which are internal factors that put them at a disadvantage. Evaluate areas where they struggle, such as customer service issues, product limitations or operational inefficiencies. Where does your competitor fall short? What are their operational or financial weaknesses? Are there aspects of their products or services that receive consistent criticism?
• Opportunities: Consider the external factors and opportunities that your competitors can capitalize on. These may include market trends, emerging customer needs, technological advancements or changes in regulations. Here, you’ll want to ask yourself the following questions: What market opportunities are your competitors pursuing? Are there emerging trends that they are well-positioned to benefit from? How do they adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands?
• Threats: Evaluate the external factors and threats that pose risks to your competitors’ business. These could be increased competition, economic downturns, changing consumer preferences or regulatory challenges. What are the external threats that our competitors face? How do market or industry conditions pose risks to their operations? Are there competitive pressures that could erode their market share?

After identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your competitors, it’s time to analyze the findings. Look for connections and relationships between these factors. For example, how do strengths offset weaknesses, or how can opportunities be leveraged to mitigate threats? Consider how these factors impact your competitors’ overall competitive positioning.

Competitive analysis templates

Competitive analysis is a complex task, but you don’t have to start from scratch. These competitor analysis templates provide a structured framework for gathering and analyzing data about your competitors:

• Competitor research template
• Competitor matrix template
• Social media competitor analysis template
• SWOT analysis template

1. Competitor research template

This advanced search template is a helpful starting point for gathering data about competing companies. You can customize the template by adding multiple search filters, such as industry, geographic location and funding information, to pull up the companies that match your competitor profiles. The more you fine-tune your search, the more precise your list of competitors will be.

2. Competitor matrix template

A competitor matrix template , like this one from HubSpot , allows you to systematically compare key features, pricing and other attributes of your products or services with those of your competitors. By comparing these attributes side by side, you can better assess your biggest threats and identify areas where your business can excel.

3. Social media competitor analysis template

This social media competitor analysis template offers a structured framework for assessing and comparing your social media performance with that of your competitors. With sections for tracking key metrics, content strategies, audience engagement and more, this template simplifies the process of understanding how your social media efforts stack up against the competition. 

4. SWOT analysis template

This SWOT analysis template represents one of the most important types of competitive analysis templates. A template can simplify the SWOT analysis process and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, helping you identify areas for improvement, capitalize on advantages and mitigate potential risks.

Competitive analysis examples

To understand how competitive analysis works in practice, let’s explore a few real-world examples that highlight its significance within different industries:

1. Apple vs. Samsung

Tech giants Apple and Samsung have long been rivals in the smartphone market. Both companies must scrutinize each other’s product launches, innovations and market share to stay competitive. Their competitive analysis involves a deep dive into one another’s product features, pricing strategies, branding and marketing tactics. 

2. Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have engaged in one of the most iconic and enduring business rivalries. Competitor analysis here includes assessing their advertising campaigns, product diversification, distribution networks and customer preferences. These two giants need to continuously monitor each other’s market positioning in order to win over consumers.

3. Amazon vs. Walmart

Amazon and Walmart are leaders in e-commerce and retail. They must perform ongoing competitive analysis to compare delivery speeds, pricing structures, customer experience and market expansion strategies. Both companies are committed to staying ahead by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the other.

4. Airbnb vs. Booking.com

Another iconic competitor analysis example is within the online travel industry. Airbnb and Booking.com are key competitors that need to evaluate each other’s user reviews, property listings, pricing and website user experience. Both platforms continuously track each other’s offerings to enhance their competitive position.

5. Nike vs. Adidas

Nike and Adidas are major players in the athletic apparel industry. These companies closely follow each other’s strategies to dominate the market. Their competitive analysis includes examining product innovations, brand endorsements, athlete sponsorships and global market presence. 

Competitor analysis tools 

In order to conduct robust competitive analysis like the companies above, you’re going to need the right tools. These include everything from online databases to website monitoring platforms. Here are our top recommendations: 

1. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a comprehensive business intelligence tool that provides best-in-class data about both public and private companies, including your competitors. You’ll get insights into funding, leadership teams, key metrics and investor relationships, allowing you to understand your competitors’ financial health, investment history and market focus. This information is vital for identifying potential threats in the market, as well as opportunities to differentiate yourself. Learn more about market research on Crunchbase .

2. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening and consumer intelligence platform that helps you monitor your competitors’ social media mentions, customer sentiment and brand reputation. This allows you to gauge public sentiment about your competitors and identify areas where you can strengthen your brand’s image and stand out in the market.

SEMrush is most commonly known as an SEO platform, but it’s also a useful competitive analysis tool. It helps you analyze your competitors’ digital marketing strategies, keywords, backlinks and advertising efforts. Ultimately, this gives you insights into your competitors’ online presence and helps you identify their strengths and weaknesses in the digital space. Note that you can view SEMrush web traffic data directly from Crunchbase .

4. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a market intelligence platform that offers insights into website traffic, audience demographics and online performance. It allows you to benchmark your website’s performance against those of your competitors, discover their traffic sources and understand their online audiences.

IPqwery is a competitive analysis tool that offers insights into your competitors’ patent portfolios, technological innovations and intellectual property strategies. This allows you to assess innovation, identify potential partnerships, and evaluate the intellectual property landscape. IPqwery data is available with Crunchbase Data Boost .

Achieve sustainable growth with competitor analysis

Competitive analysis doesn’t only involve gathering information, but it’s also about turning insights into actions that drive your business forward. Competitor analysis is an important part of market research for startups and large companies alike, as it’s fundamental for long-term success. By carefully assessing your rivals and industry trends, you can adapt your strategies and stay ahead of the curve. 

• market research
• Originally published October 26, 2023, updated December 19, 2023

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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.

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Start your business journey, today.

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

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How to Write a Competitive Analysis for Your Small Business (With Template)

Running a small business can be highly competitive. This means that small business owners, especially those who run very small operations, have more to contend with than just trying to meet their sales goals. To keep your business surviving, you also need to understand your position when compared to your competitors.

Knowing more about your competitors requires a lot of research and observation. More importantly, you have to learn how to turn all this information into actions that will help you stand out from your main competitors. 

This step-by-step guide to writing a competitive analysis for your small business will walk you through how to identify what makes your competitors tick and plan what you can do to thrive among them.

Your Competitive Analysis: Preliminary Information

The first part of your competitive analysis only requires basic research. You’ll just be looking up and making note of easy-to-find facts about your competitor’s business. For this part, you’ll need to have some idea about who your small business competitors are, where to find their website and social media pages, and perhaps have access to their offline marketing materials such as brochures, ads, and posters.

Free Competitive Analysis Template 

Download the free  Competitive Analysis Template Worksheet to use with this tutorial. Use it to collect information on your small business competitors.

Here are the steps you need to take to get started:

Step 1: List Your Competitors 

Start by listing at least three of your main competitors. These are the businesses or people who provide a similar product or service to yours. They also tend to serve the same market. 

It’s also best to look for those businesses that are of a similar size as yours. For example, if you’re a solo entrepreneur selling handmade potholders online, big chain grocery stores usually aren’t your direct competitors, even if they might carry handmade potholders in their inventory. Instead, look for other small to medium scale producers of handmade potholders and similar kitchen accessories.

Step 2: Write a Brief Overview 

Write a brief description of the competitor’s business and why you think they’re a competitor.

Also, how much do you know about each competitor in the first place? Do you know the business well enough to fill up most of the worksheet without research or do you have to dig deeper? 

Note if you've made contact with each competitor, whether as a customer or by meeting them at industry events. Having that information near the top of your competitive analysis will help you quickly see how much you do know about your competitive climate.

Step 3: Know Their Target Customers

Next, identify the customers that your competitors tend to attract. You can do this by going through their marketing materials, social media pages, website, blog, seeing where they advertise, etc. This material will help you figure out who they are trying to reach.

Here are some questions you can work to answer as you attempt to identify your competitor’s target market:

• Based on your competitor’s marketing message, what kind of customer does the viewer have to be for these messages to appeal to him or her? What is their age range? Where do they have to be located? What's their profession, if any? What other customer demographics can you infer? You're essentially trying to come up with a "buyer persona", a character who best represents the person your competition is trying to reach.
• Do their marketing materials appear gendered? This just means: do the marketing materials specifically refer to men or women? This could be in the form of the language they use, the images, and illustrations in their ads and other marketing content. Or do they appeal to a broader audience?
• Are they targeting low, middle, or high income customers? Look at their pricing information, including how they phrase it. If they use words like discounts, sale, affordable, or cheap, then they aren’t targeting the high income crowd. Also look at the marketing materials themselves, whether it’s a brochure or online banner. Are they attention-grabbing or elegant?
• What is the main messaging of their marketing materials? What common customer problems or goals do they often refer to? Let’s say you’re a pet sitter going through a rival business’ brochure. There is a huge difference between a brochure emphasizing frequent real-time online updates, and another brochure emphasizing pet pampering and grooming. The group of clients who are attracted by frequent real-time online updates are often focused on the safety and welfare of their pets, while those looking for more pampering and grooming services are focused on comfort and appearance.
• Do they have separate marketing messages for different segments? Sometimes, you might see a stark difference between how your competitor markets their business for one type of customer versus how they present themselves to another type of customer. For example, if you're trying to sell services as a math tutor to high school students who are struggling to pass their math subjects, you'll be making a completely different pitch than you would to those students who need additional help with their SAT math so that they could get into prestigious universities. Your message to the struggling students might be closer to "I'll help you finally pass your math tests!" While your message to the other market will be similar to "I'll help you get into the school of your dreams!" Also, be sure to note if your competitor does something similar with their own customer segments. 

Discover how to create your first buyer persona:

Step 4: List Their Pricing

Don’t forget to list how your competitors price their products and services. Include other information such as pricing for installment plans, pricing for product and service packages, as well as shipping fees. Note in your worksheet how their prices compare with yours—if you’ve already set rates for your products and services.

Deeper Competitive Analysis

Now that you know the basics about your rival businesses, it’s time to dig deeper by looking into the strategies that run behind the scenes.

Step 5: Itemize Their Marketing Strategy

Though you and your competitors will be running your businesses independently, marketing is one of the areas where you’ll be going head to head. 

Most small businesses might not have the resources or the opportunities to execute detailed and expansive marketing plans, but your marketing is essentially the message that your customers’ see. The more they are familiar with your message and find an affinity with it, the more likely they are to choose you. 

Learn more about marketing basics and developing your initial marketing plan:

This is why it’s important to have an understanding not just of your own marketing messages, but your competitors as well. Deconstruct how their marketing works. Analyze the following:

• Print Marketing methods such as brochures, posters, billboards, etc. Make note not just of the content but also the materials. Do they use high quality ink and paper? Are they glossy and in color or were they just photocopied?
• Social Media. Note the social media channels where each of your competitors have a presence. How many fans or followers do they have? How many comments or shares do their posts get?
• Website. What’s the first thing visitors see in your competitor’s website? Is there much text on the website, and if there is, what does it emphasize about your competitor’s business? Do they have customer reviews and testimonials? Make note of the design as well. Is their website static and minimalist, or does it have animation and other interactive features? Apart from judging the copy, design, and features of the site itself, does the site rank well for relevant search terms that you think your potential customers could use? If you’re selling handmade leather wallets, try doing a Google search for “handmade leather tool wallets” and see if any of your competitors are in the first few pages.
• Blog. Do they have a company blog? If they do, how often is it updated? Are there comments or social media shares on the blog posts?
• Advertising. Have you seen any of their ads online, in local newspapers, or in the yellow pages? What is the call-to-action on their ads, is it to call a number, visit a store, or check out a website? In what format are their ads? Interstitial , banner, or native? Are there coupons attached to the ads? What product features are they promoting?
• Promotions, Sales, or Events. Do your competitors hold any recurring sales, promos, or events meant to attract new customers? Do they attend trade shows or sponsor third-party events?
• Partnerships. Do they partner with other businesses or individuals? What types of partners do they choose and what do they typically cross-promote with these partners?

Step 6: Identify Their Competitive Advantage

Next, find out what makes each competitor unique. This is their “competitive advantage,” the aspect of their business that could help them outperform you and the other businesses on the list. What do they offer that the other businesses on the list don’t? Why would some customers pick them over you or your other competitors?

Two obvious ways for small business owners to compete are by providing the highest quality product or having better service. Here are some other criteria you should be looking at:

• targeting an underserved market (these are the people whom most of your competitors don't address or explicitly sell to)
• targeting a highly specific market
• lower prices
• frequent discounts and promos
• a long company history
• a famous or high-profile founder
• an interesting company story (interesting founding stories tend to be profiled by the media)
• compelling marketing (such as memorable imagery, taglines, or jingles)
• large online audience via their website, blog, or social media accounts
• broader range of products and services

As you’re filling up this section, you’ll start thinking about what your own competitive advantage will be. Go through the list above and try to spot areas where you can do much better than the competitors you’ve researched.

Step 7: Find Their Strengths and Weaknesses

This section serves as a summary and analysis for all of the research you've done so far. You'll review all the aspects of your competition's business and determine whether they are strengths or weaknesses. List their strengths and advantages under "Strengths" in the worksheet. Note down how equipped you are to deal with these strengths. Can you do better than them or would it serve you better to outdo them elsewhere?

The same goes for their weaknesses. Do their weaknesses present an opportunity for you? Will they be able to overcome these weaknesses easily? If so, how will it affect your business if a competitor turns their weaknesses into strengths?

If you need additional information for this portion, look for any reviews of each competitor’s product or service. Search for their business name or products on social media and see what people are saying. This can help you see a business’s weakness and strengths based on what their customers see.

Know Your Small Business Competitors

Once you’ve followed the steps above and filled out your competitive analysis worksheet, you’ll be able to understand your competitors almost as well as you understand your own business. The trick is turning that information into action.

Given what you now know about the competition, make the necessary changes to your business plan to accommodate any new insights you’ve learned. Will you be changing your pricing model to reflect what your competitors do, or will you aim for a different market altogether? Will you focus on the marketing channels that they’ve ignored? 

You don't have to compete with them in all aspects of running a business—everything from marketing to product quality—but you do have to find the one or two things that will be your own competitive advantage.

Without adjusting your plans in this way, you won’t be able to protect your business against tough competition. After all, it’s likely that rival businesses will be doing a competitive analysis of you too.

Editorial Note: This content was originally published in 2016. We're sharing it again because our editors have determined that this information is still accurate and relevant.

What is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One?

Updated: April 24, 2024

Published: June 19, 2017

Every time I work with a new brand, my first order of business is to conduct a competitive analysis. 

A competitive analysis report helps me understand the brand’s position in the market, map competitors’ strengths/weaknesses, and discover growth opportunities. 

In this article, I’ll break down the exact steps I follow to conduct competitor analysis and identify ways to one-up top brands in the market. 

We’ll cover:

What is competitive analysis?

What is competitive market research, competitive analysis in marketing.

• How To Conduct Competitive Analysis in 5 Steps

How to Do a Competitive Analysis (the Extended Cut)

Competitive product analysis, competitive analysis example, competitive analysis templates.

• Competitive Analysis FAQs

Competitive analysis is the process of comparing your competitors against your brand to understand their core differentiators, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s an in-depth breakdown of each competitor’s market position, sales & marketing tactics, growth strategy, and other business-critical aspects to see what they’re doing right and find opportunities for your business.

Competitive analysis gives you a clearer picture of the market landscape to make informed decisions for your growth. 

That said, you have to remember that competitive analysis is an opportunity to learn from others. It isn’t:

• Copying successful competitors to the T.
• Trying to undercut others’ pricing.
• A one-and-done exercise.

Let’s look at how this exercise can help your business before breaking down my 5-step competitive analysis framework.

10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates

Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.

• SWOT Analysis
• Battle Cards
• Feature Comparison
• Strategic Overview

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Four Reasons to Perform Competitive Analysis 

If you’re on the fence about investing time and effort in analyzing your competitors, know that it gives you a complete picture of the market and where you stand in it.

Here are four main reasons why I perform a competitive analysis exercise whenever working with a brand for the first time:

• Identify your differentiators. Think of competitor analysis as a chance to reflect on your own business and discover what sets you apart from the crowd. And if you’re only starting out, it helps you brainstorm the best opportunities to differentiate your business.
• Find competitors’ strengths. What are your competitors doing right to drive their growth? Analyzing the ins and outs of an industry leader will tell you what they did well to reach the top position in the market.
• Set benchmarks for success. A competitor analysis gives you a realistic idea of mapping your progress with success metrics. While every business has its own path to success, you can always look at a competitor’s trajectory to assess whether you’re on the right track.
• Get closer to your target audience. A good competitor analysis framework zooms in on your audience. It gives you a pulse of your customers by evaluating what they like, dislike, prefer, and complain about when reviewing competing brands.

The bottom line: Whether you’re starting a new business or revamping an existing one, a competitive analysis eliminates guesswork and gives you concrete information to build your business strategy.

Competitive market research is a vital exercise that goes beyond merely comparing products or services. It involves an in-depth analysis of the market metrics that distinguish your offerings from those of your competitors.

A thorough market research doesn't just highlight these differences but leverages them, laying a solid foundation for a sales and marketing strategy that truly differentiates your business in a bustling market.

In the next section, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of conducting a detailed competitive analysis tailored to your brand.

10 Competitive Analysis Templates

Fill out the form to access the templates., essential aspects to cover in competitive analysis research .

Before we walk through our step-by-step process for conducting competitor analysis, let’s look at the main aspects to include for every competitor:

• Overview. A summary of the company — where it’s located, target market, and target audience.
• Primary offering. A breakdown of what they sell and how they compare against your brand.
• Pricing strategy. A comparison of their pricing for different products with your pricing.
• Positioning.  An analysis of their core messaging to see how they position themselves. Customer feedback: A curation of what customers have to say about the brand.

Now, it’s time to learn how to conduct a competitive analysis with an example to contextualize each step. 

Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a competitor analysis, you'll be able to:

• Identify gaps in the market.
• Develop new products and services.
• Uncover market trends.
• Market and sell more effectively.

As you can see, learning any of these four components will lead your brand down the path of achievement.

Next, let's dive into some steps you can take to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis.

How to Conduct Competitive Analysis in 5 Quick Steps

As a content marketer, I’ve performed a competitive analysis for several brands to improve their messaging, plan their marketing strategy, and explore new channels. Here are the five steps I follow to analyze competitors.

1. Identify and categorize all competitors.

The first step is a simple yet strategic one. You have to identify all possible competitors in your industry, even the lesser-known ones. The goal here is to be aware of all the players in the market instead of arbitrarily choosing to ignore a few.

As you find more and more competitors, categorize them into these buckets:

• Direct competitors. These brands offer the same product/service as you to the same target audience. People will often compare you to these brands when making a buying decision. For example, Arcade and Storylane are direct competitors in the demo automation category.
• Indirect competitors. These businesses solve the same problem but with a different solution. They present opportunities for you to expand your offering. For example, Scribe and Whatfix solve the problem of documentation + internal training, but in different ways.
• Legacy competitors. These are established companies operating in your industry for several years. They have a solid reputation in the market and are a trusted name among customers. For example, Ahrefs is a legacy competitor in the SEO industry.
• Emerging competitors. These are new players in the market with an innovative business model and unique value propositions that pose a threat to existing brands. For example, ChatGPT came in as a disruptor in the conversational AI space and outperformed several brands. 

Here’s a competitive matrix classifying brands in the community and housing space:

Testing It Out

To help you understand each step clearly, we’ll use the example of Trello and create a competitor analysis report using these steps.

Here’s a table of the main competitors for Trello:

able of the main competitors for Trello:

2. Determine each competitor’s market position.

Once you know all your competitors, start analyzing their position in the market. This step will help you understand where you currently stand in terms of market share and customer satisfaction. It’ll also reveal the big guns in your industry — the leading competitors to prioritize in your analysis report.

Plus, visualizing the market landscape will tell you what’s missing in the current state. You can find gaps and opportunities for your brand to thrive even in a saturated market.

To map competitors’ market positions, create a graph with two factors: market presence (Y-axis) and customer satisfaction (X-axis). Then, place competitors in each of these quadrants:

• Niche. These are brands with a low market share but rank high on customer satisfaction. They’re likely targeting a specific segment of the audience and doing it well.
• Contenders. These brands rank low on customer satisfaction but have a good market presence. They might be new entrants with a strong sales and marketing strategy.
• Leaders. These brands own a big market share and have highly satisfied customers. They’re the dominant players with a solid reputation among your audience.
• High performers. These are another category of new entrants scoring high on customer satisfaction but with a low market share. They’re a good alternative for people not looking to buy from big brands.

This visualization will tell you exactly how crowded the market is. But it’ll also highlight ways to gain momentum and compete with existing brands.

Here’s a market landscape grid by G2 documenting all of Trello’s competitors in the project management space. For a leading brand like Trello, the goal would be to look at top brands in two quadrants: “Leaders” and “High Performers.” 

Image Source

3. Extensively benchmark key competitors.

Step 2 will narrow down your focus from dozens of competitors to the few most important ones to target. Now, it’s time to examine each competitor thoroughly and prepare a benchmarking report.

Remember that this exercise isn’t meant to find shortcomings in every competitor. You have to objectively determine both the good and bad aspects of each brand.

Here are the core factors to consider when benchmarking competitors:

• Quality. Assess the quality of products/services for each competitor. You can compare product features to see what’s giving them an edge over you. You can also evaluate customer reviews to understand what users have to say about the quality of their offering.
• Price. Document the price points for every competitor to understand their pricing tactics. You can also interview their customers to find the value for money from users’ perspectives.
• Customer service. Check how they deliver support — through chat, phone, email, knowledge base, and more. You can also find customer ratings on different third-party platforms.
• Brand reputation. You should also compare each competitor’s reputation in the market to understand how people perceive the brand. Look out for anything critical people say about specific competitors.  
• Financial health. If possible, look for performance indicators to assess a brand's financial progress. You can find data on metrics like revenue growth and profit margins. 

This benchmarking exercise will involve a combination of primary and secondary research. Invest enough time in this step to ensure that your competitive analysis is completely airtight.

Check out this example of a competitor benchmarking report for workforce intelligence tools:

Here’s how I benchmarked Asana based on these criteria using the information I could find:

4. Deep dive into their marketing strategy.

While the first few steps will tell you what you can improve in your core product or service, you also need to find how competitors market their products.

You need to deep-dive into their marketing strategies to learn how they approach buyers. I analyze every marketing channel, then note my observations on how they speak to their audience and highlight their brand personality.

Here are a few key marketing channels to explore:

• Website. Analyze the website structure and copy to understand their positioning and brand voice.
• Email. Subscribe to emails to learn their cadence, copywriting style, content covered, and other aspects.
• Paid ads. Use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to find if any competitor is running paid ads on search engines.
• Thought leadership. Follow a brand’s thought leadership efforts with content assets like podcasts, webinars, courses, and more.
• Digital PR. Explore whether a brand is investing in digital PR to build buzz around its business and analyze its strategy.
• Social media. See how actively brands use different social channels and what kind of content is working best for them.
• Partnerships. Analyze high-value partnerships to see if brands work closely with any companies and mutually benefit each other.

You can create a detailed document capturing every detail of a competitor’s marketing strategy. This will give you the right direction to plan your marketing efforts. 

5. Perform a SWOT analysis.

The final step in a competitive analysis exercise is creating a SWOT analysis matrix for each company. This means you‘ll take note of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Think of it as the final step to consolidate all your research and answer these questions:

• What is your competitor doing well?
• Where do they have an advantage over your brand?
• What is the weakest area for your competitor?
• Where does your brand have the advantage over your competitor?
• In what areas would you consider this competitor a threat?
• Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified?

You can use tools like Miro to visualize this data. Once you visually present this data, you’ll get a clearer idea of where you can outgrow each competitor. 

Here’s a SWOT analysis matrix I created for Asana as a competitor of Trello:

• Determine who your competitors are.
• Determine what products your competitors offer.
• Research your competitors' sales tactics and results.
• Take a look at your competitors' pricing, as well as any perks they offer.
• Ensure you're meeting competitive shipping costs.
• Analyze how your competitors market their products.
• Take note of your competition's content strategy.
• Learn what technology stack your competitors use.
• Analyze the level of engagement on your competitors' content.
• Observe how they promote marketing content.
• Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms.
• Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

To run a complete and effective competitive analysis, use these ten templates, which range in purpose from sales to marketing to product strategy.

Featured Resource: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates

1. Assess your current product pricing.

The first step in any product analysis is to assess current pricing.

Nintendo offers three models of its Switch console: The smaller lite version is priced at $199, the standard version is $299, and the new OLED version is $349.

Sony, meanwhile, offers two versions of its PlayStation 5 console: The standard edition costs $499, and the digital version, which doesn’t include a disc drive, is $399.

2. Compare key features.

Next is a comparison of key features. In the case of our console example, this means comparing features like processing power, memory, and hard drive space.

3. Pinpoint differentiators.

With basic features compared, it’s time to dive deeper with differentiators. While a glance at the chart above seems to indicate that the PS5 is outperforming its competition, this data only tells part of the story.

Here’s why: The big selling point of the standard and OLED Switch models is that they can be played as either handheld consoles or docked with a base station connected to a TV. What’s more, this “switching” happens seamlessly, allowing players to play whenever, wherever.

The Playstation offering, meanwhile, has leaned into market-exclusive games that are only available on its system to help differentiate them from their competitors.

4. Identify market gaps.

The last step in a competitive product analysis is looking for gaps in the market that could help your company get ahead.

When it comes to the console market, one potential opportunity gaining traction is the delivery of games via cloud-based services rather than physical hardware.

Companies like Nvidia and Google have already made inroads in this space, and if they can overcome issues with bandwidth and latency, it could change the market at scale.

How do you stack up against the competition? Where are you similar, and what sets you apart? This is the goal of competitive analysis.

By understanding where your brand and competitors overlap and diverge, you’re better positioned to make strategic decisions that can help grow your brand.

Of course, it’s one thing to understand the benefits of competitive analysis, and it’s another to actually carry out an analysis that yields actionable results. Don’t worry — we’ve got you covered with a quick example.

Sony vs. Nintendo: Not all fun and games.

Let’s take a look at popular gaming system companies Sony and Nintendo.

Sony’s newest offering — the Playstation 5 — recently hit the market but has been plagued by supply shortages.

Nintendo’s Switch console, meanwhile, has been around for several years but remains a consistent seller, especially among teens and children.

This scenario is familiar for many companies on both sides of the coin; some have introduced new products designed to compete with established market leaders, while others are looking to ensure that reliable sales don’t fall.

Using some of the steps listed above, here’s a quick competitive analysis example.

In our example, it’s Sony vs Nintendo, but it’s also worth considering Microsoft’s Xbox, which occupies the same general market vertical.

This is critical for effective analysis; even if you’re focused on specific competitors and how they compare, it’s worth considering other similar market offerings.

PlayStation offers two PS5 versions, digital and standard, at different price points, while Nintendo offers three versions of its console.

Both companies also sell peripherals — for example, Sony sells virtual reality (VR) add-ons, while Nintendo sells gaming peripherals such as steering wheels, tennis rackets, and differing controller configurations.

When it comes to sales tactics and marketing, Sony and Nintendo have very different approaches.

In part thanks to the recent semiconductor shortage, Sony has driven up demand via scarcity — very low volumes of PS5 consoles remain available. Nintendo, meanwhile, has adopted a broader approach by targeting families as its primary customer base.

This effort is bolstered by the Switch Lite product line, which is smaller and less expensive, making it a popular choice for children.

The numbers tell the tale : Through September 2021, Nintendo sold 14.3 million consoles, while Sony sold 7.8 million.

Sony has the higher price point: Their standard PS5 sells for $499, while Nintendo’s most expensive offering comes in at $349. Both offer robust digital marketplaces and the ability to easily download new games or services.

Here, the key differentiators are flexibility and fidelity. The Switch is flexible — users can dock it with their television and play it like a standard console or pick it up and take it anywhere as a handheld gaming system.

The PS5, meanwhile, has superior graphics hardware and processing power for gamers who want the highest-fidelity experience.

5. Analyze how your competitors market their products.

If you compare the marketing efforts of Nintendo and Sony, the difference is immediately apparent: Sony’s ads feature realistic in-game footage and speak to the exclusive nature of their game titles.

The company has managed to secure deals with several high-profile game developers for exclusive access to new and existing IPs.

Nintendo, meanwhile, uses brightly lit ads showing happy families playing together or children using their smaller Switches while traveling.

6. Analyze the level of engagement on your competitor's content.

Engagement helps drive sales and encourage repeat purchases.

While there are several ways to measure engagement, social media is one of the most straightforward: In general, more followers equates to more engagement and greater market impact.

When it comes to our example, Sony enjoys a significant lead over Nintendo: While the official Playstation Facebook page has 38 million followers, Nintendo has just 5 million.

Competitive analysis is complex, especially when you’re assessing multiple companies and products simultaneously.

To help streamline the process, we’ve created 10 free templates that make it possible to see how you stack up against the competition — and what you can do to increase market share.

Let’s break down our SWOT analysis template. Here’s what it looks like:

The Beginner's Guide to the Competitive Matrix [+ Templates]

9 Best Marketing Research Methods to Know Your Buyer Better [+ Examples]

SWOT Analysis: How To Do One [With Template & Examples]

28 Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research

Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

TAM, SAM & SOM: What Do They Mean & How Do You Calculate Them?

How to Run a Competitor Analysis [Free Guide]

5 Challenges Marketers Face in Understanding Audiences [New Data + Market Researcher Tips]

Causal Research: The Complete Guide

10 free templates to help you understand and beat the competition.

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What Is a Competitive Analysis? (How-To Guide)

A competitive analysis helps businesses discover strengths and weaknesses of companies in their industry. Create a competitive analysis with this free template.

A competitive analysis tells business owners what their competitors are doing and identifies opportunities to outperform them.

Running a competitive analysis is about finding the strengths and weaknesses of the companies in your industry. By researching competitors’ products, sales, and marketing, you can decide how to move forward with your business strategy.

Competitive analyses are valuable at any stage of a business. But how do you make one? This post explains how to run a competitive analysis to meet your goals.

There’s also a free competitor analysis template to make the process easier.

Free competitor research template

Find a strategic angle to achieve sales success, uncover your product-market fit, and stand out from the competition with our free template.

What is a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is a type of  market research . It’s the process of evaluating and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors in your market. It involves gathering and analyzing data on competitors’ products, pricing, marketing strategies, distribution channels, and customer base.

Doing a competitive analysis helps you find potential advantages and barriers within your target market or products. It allows brands to monitor how direct and indirect competitors handle marketing, pricing, and distribution.

Competitor analysis example: what does one look like?

There’s no single way to do a competitive analysis. How it looks will vary depending on what you’re trying to learn about your competitors.

You might do a competitor analysis on a specific part of your competitors’ operations—like their website—or you might do a complete analysis of their entire marketing and sales team. The goal is to help you understand your competitors’ actions and how your business should respond.

There’s more than one way to structure a competitive analysis. Here are some types of information often included:

For a broad competitive analysis, you might look at your competitors’:

• Target customers
• Unique value add  or what sets their products apart
• Sales pitch
• Price points  for products
• Shipping  Policy

High-level information can help you understand the fundamental differences between your competitors. For a more specific analysis, try looking at your competitors’: 

• Website features (design, content)
• Customer experience (checkout flow, customer support)
• Marketing content (product descriptions, blog posts)
• Social media (post frequency, engagement rates)
• Promotions (sales, discounts)
• Communications (abandoned cart emails, newsletters)
• Reviews (customer feedback, complaints)

What’s included in a competitive analysis is up to you. Use your research to answer specific questions that will help your business take action for future growth.

Need an example? Here’s what a simple competitor analysis might look like:

Read more:  What Is Product Development? Learn The 7-Step Framework Helping Businesses Get to Market, Faster and Easier .

Why competitor analysis matters for ecommerce

It’s easier to compete when you understand the competition. Knowing what your competitors are doing helps you plan a response, whether that’s adjusting your pricing strategy, tailoring your target audience, or copying a good practice.

A wider view of your ecommerce space can also help you see what sets your business apart. 

If you’re  starting an ecommerce business , an analysis of competitors will help you:

• Make informed marketing decisions
• Identify industry trends
• Benchmark against competitors
• Find your unique value proposition
• Determine pricing
• Unearth new ways of speaking to customers
• Find gaps in your marketing or product line

A competitive analysis is a living document that should be updated as a company grows.

As you develop new products, update your marketing strategy, or expand into new areas, a current competitive analysis document is a powerful resource.

It can reveal opportunities to gain leverage on your competitors, while highlighting areas where competition is intense. 

When to do a competitive analysis

When building a business, a thorough competitive analysis is a great way to deepen your understanding of market factors.

As you grow, repeat your competitive analysis to stay in the loop with the industry’s latest products, features, and marketing tactics. Running regular reports will also help you compare how your business responds to broader trends.

Refresh your competitive analysis any time your business or industry changes significantly. A sudden surge in product demand or a Google algorithm update are both good reasons to review what your competitors are doing.

When deciding how often to revisit your competitor analysis, consider how fast-paced your industry is. Will your data be outdated in a month, quarter, or year? If a new competitor enters your market, remember they’ll likely analyze your activities, too.

How to do a competitive analysis

Keep your competitor research organized by following these seven steps:

1. Select 7–10 competitors 

If you don’t know your competitors, step into a customer’s shoes and search for your products or services on Google, Amazon, or marketplaces relevant to your business. Identify competitors that:

• Sell similar products
• Have a similar philosophy or mission
• Market to your audience
• Are new to the marketplace
• Are established in the marketplace 

A diverse list of competitors will provide insight into how different companies are responding to challenges within your market.

2. Create a spreadsheet

As you collect competitor data, keep it organized in a table or spreadsheet—bonus points if your table design allows for easy updates over time.

Within your document, build sections for comparing competitors based on your research objectives, such as: 

• Price range
• Product offerings
• Social media engagement
• Lead generation strategy
• First-time visitor offers

3. Choose direct competitors and indirect competitors

Categorize each business in your spreadsheet as a direct, indirect, or tertiary competitor. This will help you determine how they relate to you.

• Direct competitors  sell a similar product or service to a similar audience. Nike and Adidas are primary competitors.
• Indirect competitors  offer a high- or low-end version of a product to different audiences. Victoria’s Secret and Walmart are secondary competitors.
• Tertiary competitors  are brands that market to your audience but don’t sell similar products or directly compete with you. They represent potential partners or future competitors—think Gatorade and Under Armour.

4. Identify your competitors’ positioning

Positioning  is a business’s most persuasive marketing tool. Good positioning connects you with a target audience and informs your messaging and values. 

Understanding your competitors’ positioning is essential. You can learn how other companies talk to your customers and find a unique, relevant voice for your brand. 

Analyze these channels to see how competitors position themselves:

• Social media
• Press releases
• Website copy
• Product copy

When identifying your competitors’ positioning, ask yourself:

• What story is being told?
• How are products described? 
• How is the company described? 
• What is the unique  value proposition ? 

Understand how competitors interact with their followers, customers, and other stakeholders. If you can pinpoint their communication framework, you’ll be able to clearly position yourself within the market.

5. Determine competitive advantage and offerings

Most successful companies sell unique products or offer distinctive experiences. It could be an innovative feature, a secret recipe, or unparalleled customer service.

Think of these offerings as a company’s competitive advantage or  unique selling proposition (USP) .

A fashion retailer’s competitive advantage might be high-quality products sold with expedited shipping. An online educator’s USP could be their 20 years of experience.

Look at your competitors’ goods and services and decide where their advantage lies. Their brand will likely be closely tied to their unique offering.

Read customer reviews to see why your target audience shops with competing companies. They may like lower price points, premium materials, or sustainable practices.

Learning about the competitive advantages in your space will help you figure out where you should and shouldn’t try to compete.

6. Understand how your competitors market their products

Successful ecommerce stores often outpace the competition through marketing, not with their products alone.

But don’t assume you need to compete across all marketing channels to stay in front of customers.

Instead, use your competitive analysis to find out how your competitors are reaching customers and where they focus their marketing resources. 

Maybe your competitors are all about targeting customers through Instagram or capturing traffic with helpful blog posts.

Use software tools (listed below) to collect marketing data. Then, assume the role of a customer for a first-hand experience of competitor marketing.

You can try:

• Signing up for newsletters
• Subscribing to blogs
• Following competitors on social media
• Abandoning products in a shopping cart
• Purchasing a product

As you study competitors’ marketing and document your findings, you can decide whether to compete in popular marketing channels or reach your customers through less-used avenues.

The insights gathered during this stage will be helpful for sales and marketing teams. 

7. Conduct a SWOT analysis

Consider  conducting a SWOT analysis  to accompany the data you collect. 

SWOT is a competitive analysis framework that lists your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. SWOT leans into your competitors’ strengths and compares them to your business to find areas for improvement. 

Strengths and weaknesses are elements of your business that you control and change over time, including:

• Product offering
• Partnerships
• Intellectual property
• Number of employees
• Market share

Opportunities and threats are outside your control. You can plan for changes but can’t influence these elements. They include:

• Competitor products
• The economy
• Consumer trends
• Market size
• Market demand

Aim to run a SWOT analysis annually. It helps inform your break-even analysis and keeps tabs on the competitive landscape. You’ll want to include an updated SWOT analysis in your  business plan  if you seek funding.

🎯 TIP:  If you’re interested in writing a business plan but don’t know where to start, here’s a sample  business plan template . Thousands of people have used this template to create their own plans (and it’s completely free to use).

Collect data with these competitive analysis tools

Once you know which competitors to study, it’s time to research and collect data for your competitive analysis. The good news is that many tools and software are available to make data collection easier.

Let’s look at a few resources that can help you gather insights into your  competition’s keywords ,  content marketing , social media strategy, and more.

SEO Analysis

• Ahrefs : See your competitors’ top-performing keywords and estimated traffic.
• SE Ranking : Find out your competitors’ paid and organic search performance.

PPC/keyword performance

• SimilarWeb : Get insights into estimated monthly visits and traffic to gauge your competitors’ market share.
• SpyFu : Download your competition’s most profitable keywords from their PPC campaigns.
• iSpionage : See which keywords your competitors target on Google Ads, plus their projected monthly budget.
• SEMrush : Run audits on competing sites and analyze their backlinks.

Social media performance

• RivalIQ : See how often competitors post on social media, their average engagement rates, and their most successful content.
• Followerwonk : Get Twitter (now X) insights about follower demographics, key influencers, and performance metrics.
• Sprout Social : Measure competitors’ performance across social channels.

Email marketing

• Owletter : Analyze changes and spot trends in your competitors’ email strategy.
• MailCharts : Aggregate emails to get insights into email frequency, subject line tactics, and more.

Content marketing performance

• BuzzSumo : See the top-performing content for general topics and specific competitors.
• Monitor Backlinks : Monitor backlinks and get notified each time someone references your or your competitors’ content.

Use resources like these to gather data and drop it into your competitive analysis spreadsheet to store your findings in a single, organized space.

A competitive analysis template

If you’re unsure how to start your competitor analysis, here’s an example template to get the ball rolling. 

Let’s say you sell makeup brushes. To compare competitor approaches and identify where you can stand out, you might develop a table like this:

Add as many sections as needed to your template, but remember to keep the group of primary and secondary competitors below 10, so things stay relevant.

Want a simple competitive analysis template to speed up the process? 

6 pitfalls of competitive analysis in marketing 

Now that you know how to create a competitive assessment, let’s go over some of the pitfalls that may affect the insights you’ve gathered.

1. Competitive analysis is not a one-and-done exercise

Never updating your data can create a false picture, which leads to poor decision-making. Businesses are constantly evolving, so it’s important to consider competitor analysis as an ongoing process.

2. Confirmation bias is real

We all have a tendency to favor our initial assumptions. This is called  confirmation bias . As you work through your analysis, try to challenge preconceived ideas about your competitors. Let the data build an objective picture of your competitor landscape.

3. Data without action is useless

If you’re putting in the work to do a competitor analysis, don’t let your findings gather virtual dust. Make a strategic plan to respond to your competitors’ activities with your own updates.

4. Working harder instead of smarter

Don’t reinvent the wheel and do things the hard way: leverage the latest data collection tools to provide the right information without the legwork.

Many of today’s tools significantly speed up competitor research and provide bespoke insights and data points.

5. Starting without a direction

If you’re directionless while creating your competitive analysis, finding actionable takeaways will be more challenging. Before diving into research, define your goals and what you hope to learn about your competition.

6. Not accounting for market timing

When looking at competitor data, study how companies have grown and progressed over time, rather than examining their approach at a single fixed point.

Sometimes, information about how your competitors have evolved can be more valuable than knowing what they’re doing now. Understanding how similar companies have successfully navigated your industry will help you make better decisions.

Competitive analysis: your business edge

Competitive intelligence  is vital when  starting a business . By doing market competition analysis on an ongoing basis, you can stay on top of your competition. You’ll be able to break into new markets, launch new products, and keep tabs on your competitors’ customers—giving you a cutting-edge approach that keeps your business or startup agile. 

Competitive Analysis FAQ

What's inside a competitive analysis.

• A competitor’s target customers
• Their market share
• Their major competitive advantages
• Key product features
• Product price points across marketplaces
• Shipping policies
• If competitors received funding or venture capital.

How do you write a competitive analysis?

• Choose seven to 10 competitors.
• Create a spreadsheet to track your data.
• Determine competitor types.
• Identifying positioning.
• Determine competitive advantage and offering.
• Understand how your competition markets themselves.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis.

Is SWOT a competitive analysis?

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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 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.

Finish Your Business Plan Today!

If you’d like to quickly and easily complete your business plan, download Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template and complete your plan and financial model in hours.

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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Other Resources for Writing Your Business Plan

How to Write a Great Business Plan Executive Summary

How to Expertly Write the Company Description in Your Business Plan

The Customer Analysis Section of Your Business Plan

How to Write the Market Analysis Section of a Business Plan

The Management Team Section of Your Business Plan

Financial Assumptions and Your Business Plan

How to Create Financial Projections for Your Business Plan

Everything You Need to Know about the Business Plan Appendix

Business Plan Conclusion: Summary & Recap

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14 Detailed Competitor Analysis Templates to Help You Plan

Written by: Raja Mandal

No successful business lives in a bubble.

Whether you're just starting your business or scaling growth, you need to analyze your competitors' strategies, strengths, weaknesses and next steps consistently. It helps your business push beyond its limits, innovate and expand more rapidly.

Competitor analysis templates make it easy for you to gather valuable insights into market trends, customer preferences and potential opportunities. With a framework in place, you can easily analyze and turn data into practical insights, optimize your business strategies and stay ahead of the curve.

To help you conduct and communicate your competitive research, we have gathered 14 detailed competitor analysis templates.

These templates will assist you in creating your analysis and making informed decisions for your business.

Let's jump right in!

Table of Contents

What is a competitor analysis, benefits of a competitor analysis, 14 best competitor analysis templates, competitor analysis faqs.

• Competitor analysis is a process where you identify, research, and evaluate your competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses compared to your own business.
• It empowers you to fine-tune your unique selling proposition, enhance your products and services, identify market gaps, stay proactive against potential threats and gain a winning edge.
• Visme's competitor analysis templates make it simple for marketers to research and gather insights about their market.
• They are easily customizable and interactive, so you can include charts and graphs for data visualizations and export them in various formats, including JPG, PNG, PDF, and HTML5.
• Choose your favorite from the list's 14 detailed competitor analysis templates or Visme’s template library and use Visme’s drag-and-drop editor to customize them. Tap into advanced features, like the AI image generator, dynamic fields, and collaboration tools, which will help you along the way.
• Sign up for a free account in Visme and conduct your next competitor analysis effortlessly.

Competitor analysis is about researching and evaluating your competition to gain insights into their strategies, strengths and weaknesses.

In simpler terms, it's like doing a little detective work to determine what your competitors are up to, what they're doing better (or worse) and finding ways to stay ahead of them.

Competitive analysis reveals the following:

• All the competitors in your market (direct, indirect and replacement)
• The products, services and solutions they offer
• Their strengths, weaknesses,  revenue, customer base and market share
• How your products, services and brand stack up against your competitors

With the insights you gather, you can make the right decisions for your business and get it prepared for the market.

Competitor analysis involves monitoring both direct and indirect competitors. This gives you a broad view of your industry and reveals unique ideas and strategies for your business.

Also, you shouldn’t limit competitor analysis to just one part of your business, such as marketing or sales. All departments, including project management, can benefit from conducting a competitive analysis.

For example, your project team might notice that a competitor used some innovative new technology to make their project launch an immense success. They can learn from this and explore better tech solutions to enhance theirs.

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Before proceeding to the competitor analysis templates, let's first understand why it is crucial to watch what our competition is doing.

Even if you are already familiar with the reasons, you can still use this section as a checklist to ensure you take the right steps.

1. Develop or Fine-tune your Unique Selling Proposition

Competitor analysis is a great way to discover your business's uniqueness.

How? You'll see what you do differently or better by comparing your company to others. This helps you develop or fine-tune your unique selling proposition (USP).

It's all about knowing what makes you stand out from the crowd. Because in the end, it's your USP that can lure customers away from your competitors!

For instance, if you're a SaaS company offering project management tools and notice that your competitors lack a real-time collaboration feature, this feature can be your unique selling proposition to stand out in the market.

2. Improve Your Products and Services

Observing competitors lets you gather many ideas to improve your products or services.

Taking note of their strengths can motivate you to match or even exceed their quality level while pinpointing their weaknesses can help you avoid making similar errors. This approach benefits you and your customers, as you can use market knowledge to enhance your offerings.

For instance, if you notice through your competitor analysis that many similar businesses in your field have an excellent after-sales service program, yet you lack one, you could use this insight to introduce and improve upon your after-sales service.

3. Identify and Fill Gaps in Your Business

Conducting a competitor analysis involves carefully examining your industry and pinpointing improvement areas. It's about discovering the different aspects of your business and uncovering any missing pieces or areas of weakness.

This will help you discover potential gaps in your business—products, services or strategies—and then take steps to address them, ensuring you remain competitive and cover all your bases.

Let’s say your competitors are all targeting the market's premium segment. Your competitive analysis may reveal a gap in the market for budget-friendly options. You can use this insight to offer affordable products or services catering to a broader audience.

4. Establish Benchmarks

Understanding the performance of your competitors is crucial for measuring the success of your business. This process allows you to establish valuable benchmarks for your business.

These benchmarks help set performance standards, offer targets for improvement and create a direction for the overall growth of the business. That way‌, you'll hop on the right track and adjust your sail whenever necessary.

For instance, if your competitors consistently gain social media followers at a rate of 10% per month, this could serve as a benchmark for your social media growth goals.

Use this weekly KPI report template to record and present your company's performance after establishing the benchmarks.

5. Stay Aware of Potential Threats

Lastly, conducting a competitor analysis keeps you in the loop about any potential challenges that may be on the horizon. Whether it's a new product launch, a strategic move or a marketing campaign from your competitors, none of that will catch you off guard. You can prepare and respond effectively, ensuring your business stays resilient and competitive.

After conducting competitor analysis, you may find out that one of your competitors is launching a product that directly competes with your best seller. You can act on this insight by implementing proactive strategies—such as improving your product or offering additional value—to retain your customers.

Here are the 14 best competitor analysis templates from Visme’s library. They range from infographics and reports to charts and whiteboards, so use them accordingly.

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1. Competitor Analysis Interactive Presentation Template

Let's start with this interactive presentation template. It's an engaging tool to present an in-depth look at your competitive landscape. It has valuable slides that outline your major competitors, compare features and display key statistics about where you stand against them.

With customizable icons and tables, you can compare competitions effectively. The template’s interactive nature helps you provide an engaging presentation experience and better understand the market competition.

If you're short on time or looking for a quicker way to create presentations, Visme's AI presentation maker is your best bet. With this tool, all you need to do is give a text prompt and choose a style, and the AI will generate all the design elements, including text and images.

You can customize the presentation template to add your personal touch and make it more visually appealing.

2. Brand Porter's Five Forces Presentation Template

The Porter's Five Forces presentation template from Visme is a comprehensive tool for analyzing your brand's competitive environment. The template visualizes five primary forces that shape your brand's market dynamics: competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, the threat of substitution and the threat of new entrants.

The template layout is packed with engaging colors and beautiful 3D illustrations to make your presentation more vivid. With clear data widgets like radial gauges, you can easily visualize data demonstrating the underlying forces.

Here are five additional Porter's Five Forces templates that you can use to understand the competitive landscape and a template to help you visualize how the framework works.

3. Edtech Company Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

The competitor analysis infographic template simplifies the process of comparing competitive forces. Its straightforward design with two columns provides clarity that helps in detailed competitor analysis.

The vibrant vector icons between each component not only add visually pleasing aesthetics but also help distinguish different sections. This concise template allows you to communicate complex information about your competitor analysis in an easy-to-understand manner.

Create engaging and interactive infographics, presentations and other documents with Visme's interactive design features . You can easily add clickable menus, hover effects, pop-ups, quizzes and other interactive elements to make your competitive analysis more fun and engaging.

For example, you can add hover effects or popups that reveal more information about your competitors or link to external websites that do the same.

With Visme, you can easily create visually appealing and interactive content for your competitive analysis, making the process entertaining and effective.

4. Real Estate Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

The real estate competitor analysis infographic template is an effective tool for comparing crucial aspects of different businesses in an insightful and efficient manner. The template has a professional and modern appearance with a color scheme of gray, black and white.

The table layout comprehensively compares factors, such as pricing, unique selling proposition (USP), customer support and target market. Additionally, vector icons are present in each column to enhance visual clarity and create a more engaging experience for the audience.

5. Brand Social Media Competitor Analysis Report Template

This easy-to-understand template helps you present your social media competitor analysis in a visually appealing way.

The social media competitor analysis report template has a sleek gray color scheme that gives your report a professional and attractive look. It comprises pages displaying Facebook and Instagram analytics, audience demographics and more.

The template includes charts to help you visualize your data effectively, such as bar graphs for Facebook analytics and line graphs for audience demographics.

To ensure consistent branding of all your business documents, apply your brand elements to every document you create. Visme's brand wizard tool can help you do this in just a few clicks.

Copy and paste your website URL, and the tool will extract your brand elements, such as brand colors, fonts, and company logos. With just one click, you can apply these elements to every document you create in Visme.

6. FinTech Competitive Analysis Whiteboard Template

Brainstorm with your team using this competitive analysis whiteboard template and gather ideas on getting an edge over competitors.

The template is structured in a table format, providing information on your competitors' mission, SWOT analysis , features, pricing, primary target and winning points.

Customize this template using Visme's free online whiteboard tool . It's easier to use than most whiteboards out there, plus you'll get all the functionalities of a whiteboard, including infinite canvas, freehand drawing, sticky notes, text box and more.

The best part is that you get all the other features in Visme, including the illustrations, interactivity, and animations on your whiteboard.

This tool is perfect for creating flows, plans, sketches and wireframes during brainstorming sessions, which can make your competitive analysis process more effective.

7. IT Cloud Solutions Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

Conduct your competitive research in a visually appealing and engaging way using this competitor analysis worksheet template.

The template features bright colors such as blue, purple and green, which adds a lively tone while maintaining clarity. It's designed as a worksheet, providing blank spaces to fill out important details such as an overview, USP, products, pricing and target market for various competitors.

Use each section to research specific areas of your competitors’ businesses and make the analysis more structured and comprehensive.

You can collaborate with your team members to work on this worksheet or any other document for competitor analysis to make the process more effective. And Visme's collaborative design features will help you do that seamlessly.

You can invite your team members via email or a shareable or private link and utilize features like live editing, commenting, annotating and more to work on the document.

8. Sales Consultant Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

The sales consultant competitor analysis worksheet template is a valuable tool that helps you compare different businesses efficiently. The template includes two separate tables for a thorough comparison and is enhanced with high-quality 3D illustrations.

Capture essential information like free and paid products, standout features and target market with the simple tables in the template. Its inviting design keeps your task clear and engaging, making complex data easier to handle.

You can personalize it to match your analysis needs and use these insights to enhance your business strategies.

9. Automation Software Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

Stay ahead in the competitive automation software industry using this competitor analysis worksheet template.

The template's bright yellow and black color scheme makes it stand out, and its table structure allows you to quickly compare businesses on various parameters such as value proposition, target market, price and SWOT analysis .

Additionally, the template features high-quality background images that enhance its visual appeal. This efficient and visually appealing template can empower your business analysis procedures and outshine your competitors.

Use Visme's dynamic fields feature to spend less time customizing your competitor analysis documents.

With the dynamic fields, you only need to input your data once, and these fields will automatically fill with the right text, such as your name and company details. This simplifies updates across multiple areas of the document, making your work consistent.

10. Design Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

Breathe new life into your design agency's competitive analysis process with this Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template.

This template is designed with intuitive usability in mind, and its simple yet attractive design makes it easy to read and understand. One of its standout features is the 3D illustration, which gives it a modern touch, while the ample white space ensures clear, effortless readability.

This well-crafted template lets you gain valuable insights and keeps you one step ahead of your competitors in the design industry.

As a design agency or any other organization, finding high-quality graphics to make your content stand out can be a challenge.

But with Visme's AI image generator , you can easily create unique illustrations, images, vector icons and more. Simply provide your prompt, select your graphics style, and let the tool generate exactly what you need.

11. Competitor Analysis Radar Chart Template

Now, let's play some data games. Use this competitive analysis radar chart template to reframe how your business visualizes competitor data and witness your analysis efficiency soar.

A radar chart is well known for its ability to display multiple data points in a single graph, and this template takes full advantage of that feature. The design is simple yet aesthetically appealing, with lots of white space to make your analysis stand out.

Customize this template to use it in your presentations, reports and infographics, or use it as a standalone report.

To learn more, read our comprehensive guide: What is a Radar Chart? A Complete Guide + 10 Editable Radar Chart Templates

Get more radar chart templates from Visme’s template library to create your own.

12. Market Share Bar Graph Template

The market share bar graph template is an extremely versatile and customizable tool to help you make your market share data speak volumes. It clearly presents your company's market share compared to industry rivals.

Whether you’re analyzing a global market or a niche sector, this template can provide valuable insights. Its vibrant design is also attention-grabbing, making it perfect for stakeholder meetings and investor pitches.

You can find various bar graph templates in Visme's library to cater to all your data visualization requirements. Additionally, Visme offers over 20 types of charts and graphs , enabling you to transform your competitive analysis data into visually appealing data representations.

Better yet, choose from over 30 data widgets , such as radial gauges, progress bars and population arrays from Visme to visualize shorter data sets.

13. Business SWOT Analysis Presentation Template

What can be a better competitor analysis than analyzing all the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your competitors?

This SWOT analysis presentation template is designed precisely to serve that purpose. Each slide in this presentation focuses on one SWOT area to help you assess your competition extensively and craft strategies from the insights.

Use this straightforward template to assess internal and external factors as well as current and future potentials that keep you one step ahead of your competitors.

14. Electric Vehicles Whiteboard Template

This elegantly designed template employs Porter's Five Forces analysis as a structured method to brainstorm the competitiveness of the EV industry.

The template aesthetically balances vibrant shades and ample white space, enhancing clarity and readability while eliciting creative thinking. You can quickly jot down your analysis of threats from new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the threat of substitute products, the bargaining power of buyers and competitive rivalry within the EV industry.

Once you’ve successfully edited your competitor analysis template in Visme, it’s time to download or share it.

Visme provides multiple ways to share, download and publish your projects:

For offline use, you can download your projects in PDF, PNG, JPG, and HTML formats.

Share your design using a shareable or password-protected link. And publish your design anywhere on the web using a code snippet from Visme.

RELATED: How to Write a Market Analysis: Guidelines & Templates

Q. What Are the Types of Competitor Analysis?

Multiple types of competitor analysis frameworks help you evaluate and understand competitor businesses. Some of the most common types include:

• SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
• Porter's Five Forces Model
• Market Segmentation Analysis
• Market Share and Growth Rate Comparison
• Benchmarks and KPIs Comparison
• Pricing and Sales Strategy Analysis
• Customer Journey Mapping

Q. What Are the Four Components of Competitor Analysis?

The four main components of competitor analysis are:

• Objectives: This refers to understanding what your competitors aim to achieve regarding growth, profitability or other key metrics. Knowing their objectives can shed light on potential future strategies.
• Assumptions : This component evaluates competitors' decisions by identifying and assessing underlying beliefs, such as market trends, customer behavior, and product performance.
• Strategy: Here, you analyze how your competitors plan to achieve their objectives. It involves looking at their business model, marketing plans, pricing strategies, and other operational tactics.
• Capabilities: This involves analyzing your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, such as their resources, skills, technology, and human capital.

Q3. How Do You Structure a Competitor Analysis?

Structuring a competitor analysis requires several key steps:

• Identify Competitors: The first step is recognizing your direct and indirect competitors, those businesses offering similar products or services.
• Gather Data : This phase involves accumulating data about the competitors' products, sales, marketing strategies and more.
• Critical Evaluation: Next, evaluate your competitors' objectives, assumptions, strategies and capabilities.
• Insight Generation: Using the gathered data, identify their strengths, weaknesses and potential opportunities.
• Report Creation: Document your findings in a clear, concise, structured report for stakeholders.

Use Visme to document your findings in various formats, including reports, charts, graphs, presentations and more.

Q4. How Long Should Competitive Analysis Take?

It is usual for an initial competitor analysis to take several days or even a few weeks. However, the length of the analysis can vary depending on different factors, such as data availability, resources, market size, and the depth of the analysis.

It is important to note that conducting a competitor analysis should be an ongoing process with regular updates. This is because market conditions, competitor strategies and other factors continuously evolve, and you must keep up with the changes to stay ahead.

Document, Plan & Execute Your Analysis with Visme

With the help of our 14 detailed competitor analysis templates, you now have the blueprint to systematically plan, strategize and gain valuable insights into your competition.

And Visme makes your competitive analysis even more efficient and impactful. With our advanced tools, such as the brand wizard, dynamic fields, data visualization tools and collaboration features, you can easily create, edit and visualize your findings, transforming raw data into captivating visuals.

But that's not all! Visme also provides the essential tools to craft various documents, including presentations , infographics , reports and much more.

Sign up for a free account today to maximize your marketing efforts.

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Raja Antony Mandal is a Content Writer at Visme. He can quickly adapt to different writing styles, possess strong research skills, and know SEO fundamentals. Raja wants to share valuable information with his audience by telling captivating stories in his articles. He wants to travel and party a lot on the weekends, but his guitar, drum set, and volleyball court don’t let him.

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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 Build a Competitive Matrix for Market Analysis

Discover how a competitive matrix helps you compare your product to competitors, identify market opportunities, and refine your brand positioning strategy.

As a business owner, you’re constantly competing for your share of the market. Whether you're running a small business, a medium-sized company, or a large enterprise, staying ahead of your competitors is crucial.

One of the best ways to gain a competitive advantage is by comprehensively understanding your market landscape.

That’s where a competitive matrix comes in.

The business world moves fast, and without a clear picture of where your company stands compared to the competition, it’s easy to fall behind. A competitive matrix helps you visualize your position and identifies areas where you can improve or leverage unique opportunities. From pricing strategies to product features, a competitive matrix is a powerful tool for refining your business strategy.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into what a competitive matrix is, the various types, and the steps to help you create your own competitive matrix. Plus, we'll look at how you can use this competitive positioning matrix to enhance your market analysis and gain a clear, competitive edge.

A competitive matrix is a simple yet effective tool for competitor analysis. It allows you to compare your business market position against others in the industry. Think of it as a visual snapshot of the competitive landscape.

Plotting your company and competitors on the same grid allows you to easily assess how you stack up in critical areas such as pricing, product features, market share, and brand reputation.

A competitive matrix's primary goal is to highlight strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to spot opportunities for improvement or differentiation for a stronger market presence.

In the world of competitive analysis, staying ahead means constantly adapting. The competitive landscape is always shifting as new players join the market and existing competitors evolve their strategies. Keeping up with these changes and market position is essential, and a competitive matrix is the perfect tool. 

Getting a bird’s-eye view of the competitive landscape enables you to identify market gaps by comparing critical elements such as pricing, features, and customer service. This process helps you discover areas where your business can excel.

Additionally, a competitive matrix helps you understand competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, giving you the insights to make informed, data-driven business decisions and define strong marketing strategies. 

Finally, a well-structured competitive matrix helps you track market trends over time so you can stay agile and responsive in an ever-changing marketplace.

Competitor matrix types

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to competitive matrices. Depending on your business goals, you can choose from various competitive matrices to use as you conduct a competitive analysis. 

Here are a few commonly competitive matrices:

• SWOT analysis : This is a classic tool for evaluating your company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT). It’s great for assessing the internal and external factors that could impact your business.
• Market Positioning Matrix: This matrix helps you understand how your product or service compares to competitors in terms of price and quality. It helps identify potential market segments and decide how to position your brand.
• Competitive Profile Matrix (CPM): This is a more detailed version of the SWOT matrix, where competitors are rated on factors like product quality, market share, and customer service. It’s highly detailed and offers a robust comparison.
• Price Matrix: Comparing your pricing strategies against competitors is key to ensuring you’re not overpricing or underpricing your products.
• Product Feature and Benefits Matrix: This matrix allows you to map out the features and benefits of your products against your competitors to see where you shine or where you need to catch up.

Key components of a competitive matrix

No matter what type of competitive matrix you decide to use, include these key components:

• Competitors’ strengths and weaknesses : These can be internal (such as the quality of their products or customer service) or external (such as brand perception).
• Market share : Understanding how much of the market your competitors control can give you insight into their influence and customer base.
• Unique selling points (USPs) : Knowing what sets each competitor apart will help you better position your own product or service in the market.
• Pricing strategies : Analyzing how competitors price their products helps you make more informed pricing decisions.

Now that you know what to include in a competitive matrix, let’s explore how you can build one for your business to stay ahead of the competitive landscape.

Creating a competitive matrix for your competitive matrix analysis doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can break the competitive analysis process into manageable steps with the right approach.

Follow the steps below for a baseline model of how to help you get started with your competitive analysis matrix and better understand the competitive landscape.

Dive deeper into the data

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Define objectives

Before you start gathering data, you need to determine the goals of your competitive analysis.

Are you looking to identify market gaps? Do you want to understand competitor strengths and weaknesses? Or are you trying to find opportunities for differentiation?

Having clear objectives will guide your evaluation and help you focus on the most relevant data.

For instance, if your goal is to refine your pricing strategy, your competitive profile matrix will likely focus on pricing, features, and value propositions.

Choose evaluation criteria

Next, you’ll need to decide on the criteria to evaluate your competitors, which will form the backbone of your competitive analysis.

The competitive profile matrix criteria you choose will depend on your industry and business objectives. Here are some common evaluation factors:

• Product features
• Pricing strategies
• Customer service
• Market share
• Brand reputation

These criteria should align with your market context.

For instance, in a tech-heavy industry, product features, innovation, and technological advancements are crucial, while in a service-oriented market, customer satisfaction, response time, and overall service quality take priority.

If you're in a digital-heavy space, factors like brand loyalty and online presence might also play a key role in your competitive analysis.

Collect data

Once you’ve defined your objectives and chosen your criteria, it’s time to start collecting data.

This is perhaps the most time-intensive part of building a competitive matrix but also the most important.

Some effective ways to gather data include:

• Competitor website: Analyze their pricing, features, and product offerings so you can gain a competitive advantage .
• Customer reviews: See what customers are saying about their experiences with competitors.
• Market reports: Leverage industry reports to gain insights into market share, trends, and competitive advantages.
• Surveys and interviews: Conduct direct research to understand customer preferences and pain points.

Identify competitors

You’ll need to identify both direct and indirect competitors as part of gathering competitive intelligence .

Direct competitors provide similar products or services, while indirect competitors offer alternatives that could still attract your target audience. Gathering competitive intelligence helps you keep an eye on these players so you’re not blindsided by shifts in the market.

And don’t forget to consider emerging competitors—startups or businesses that are just entering the market but could quickly become significant players or major competitors. 

Keeping tabs on these potential disruptors is crucial for staying ahead in the competitive landscape.

Analyze results

Once you’ve gathered competitor data, it’s time to evaluate the results.

Use your competitive matrix to map out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis will help identify your competitive advantages—areas where you outperform the competition—and highlight any weaknesses where improvement is needed. 

Incorporating a content gap analysis into this process can be incredibly useful. 

By comparing your content offerings against competitors, you can spot gaps in the market where your business can step in with unique content or messaging. 

This combination of competitive and content gap analysis helps you refine your strategy and capitalize on opportunities your competitors may have overlooked, ensuring you're better positioned for growth.

The real value of a competitive matrix lies in how you apply the insights. Once you've built your matrix, it’s time to put it to work for your business strategy. 

Here are a few ways you can use the competitive matrix to make informed decisions:

• Refine your marketing strategy: Use the matrix to build a marketing plan template to highlight areas where your product or service outshines competitors and emphasize these points in your marketing campaigns.
• Adjust your pricing model: By comparing your pricing to competitors, you can adjust your pricing to attract more customers or increase profitability.
• Improve your product offerings: Identify features your competitors are offering that you’re not, and consider incorporating them into your product roadmap to gain a competitive advantage.

Enhance your market analysis with advanced tools

Building a competitive matrix is just the beginning. With the right tools, you can take your market analysis to the next level. 

Mailchimp offers various features to help you gather and analyze data on your competitors. From automated surveys to advanced content marketing analytics , Mailchimp can be a powerful ally in refining your competitive strategy.

To really get the most out of a competitive matrix, it’s essential to think of it as an evolving tool rather than something you create once and just forget about. The market never stays the same—new competitors pop up, existing ones change tactics, and customer needs shift. Your competitive matrix should change with the times, too.

By regularly updating it, you’ll stay on top of market changes, uncover fresh opportunities, and ensure that you're not caught off guard by new developments.

You can use a competitive matrix to fine-tune your product development, sharpen your marketing strategies, or spot potential partnerships aligning with your business goals. The more you keep it updated, the more valuable it becomes as a tool to drive your success.

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Free Competitive Analysis Templates for Google Sheets

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

September 25, 2024

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Competition in business can be ruthless, and whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, staying ahead of your rivals is key.

Ever wonder how the pros do it? They have a secret weapon—competitive analysis!

Imagine having a simple, easy-to-use tool that lets you spot the strengths and weaknesses of your direct competitors while also helping you fine-tune your own business strategy. That’s where competitor analysis tools come into play.

Competitive analysis templates take the guesswork out of marketing strategy, letting you identify market trends, improve your offerings, and create smarter marketing plans—all with just a few clicks.

In this blog, we’ll explore the best Google Sheets templates for competitive analysis and show you how they can give you that all-important edge to thrive in the long run.

Ready to get started? Let’s go!

What Are Competitive Analysis Templates?

What makes a good competitive analysis template, 1.  competitor feature comparison template by coefficient, 2.  product competitive analysis template by coefficient, 3.  competitive matrix template by coefficient, 4.  competitor research template by coefficient, 5.  social media competitive analysis template by coefficient, 1.  clickup competitive analysis whiteboard template, 2.  clickup competitive analysis pricing template , 3.  clickup competitor tracking template, 4. clickup competitive market analysis template, 5.  clickup seo competitor analysis template, 6.  clickup comparative market analysis template , 7.  clickup comparison matrix template, 8.  clickup product features matrix template  , boost competitor analysis efficiency with clickup.

A competitive analysis template is a structured tool that helps you evaluate your competition and understand your business’s position in the market.

These templates enable you to:

• Identify competitors and their offerings
• Benchmark your products or services against competitors
• Gain insights from competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
• Track industry trends and uncover opportunities
• Use data for informed strategic planning
• Create strategies to grow market share

Typically available in formats like Google Sheets, these templates allow you to input and organize key data on competitors’ strategies, market positions, and overall performance.

Common sections within a competitive analysis template often include:

• SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
• Competitor research
• Market analysis
• Strategic planning

The primary goal of using these templates is to provide a clear framework for analyzing the competitive landscape, identifying emerging trends, and using insights to shape your product and marketing strategies effectively.

Read More: 10 Product Strategy Templates For Product Teams

A good competitive analysis report template efficiently organizes data to provide comprehensive insights into the competitive landscape.

Here are the key features that define a great template:

• Comprehensive sections: The template should clearly define sections for competitor profiling, market analysis, SWOT analysis, and strategic planning , ensuring all aspects of competitive analysis are covered
• Comparative elements: A top-tier template goes beyond simple data entry, offering tools like competitive metrics and side-by-side comparisons to clarify market positioning and competitor strengths
• Customizability: The template must be adaptable, allowing users to modify fields and categories to suit specific industry analysis needs or focused analysis, maintaining flexibility for various business scenarios
• Ease of use: A well-designed template promotes user engagement with a straightforward layout that simplifies data entry and ongoing updates, enhancing user experience and accuracy in data handling
• Integration capabilities: It should integrate smoothly with other tools and platforms for efficient data import and export, streamlining the analysis process and ensuring consistency across data sources
• Visual components: Effective templates use visual aids—such as charts, graphs, and tables—to make complex information more digestible, helping users quickly grasp trends and insights
• Actionable Insights : The template should be designed to surface actionable insights and strategic opportunities, enabling users to make informed decisions that enhance their competitive edge

Bonus Tip: Wondering how to take your competitive analysis to the next level? Incorporating a SWOT analysis template can help you clearly identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will make it easier to focus on strategic improvements and outshine competitors.

5 Free Competitor Analysis Templates for Google Sheets

Analyzing your competition can be tough, but with the right tools, you can do it better and faster.

Competitor analysis templates for Google Sheets simplify the process, helping you collect, analyze, and leverage key competitive insights with ease.

Let’s take a look:

The Competitor Feature Comparison Template by Coefficient is specifically designed to assist product managers in evaluating product features across multiple aspects. This template facilitates the process of creating data-driven pricing strategies that effectively compete in the market.

Key features

• Structured interface for easy feature comparison
• Data-driven analysis for pricing and positioning strategies
• Streamlined for informed decision-making

Ideal for: Product managers who need to assess and compare product features across multiple competitors find this template helpful. It’s also ideal for teams aiming to refine their product offerings and pricing strategies with clear, data-driven insights.

The Product Competitive Analysis Template by Coefficient allows users to efficiently organize and dissect vital information about rival products, providing a clear snapshot of competitive dynamics . The template’s structured format ensures that you capture every crucial detail necessary for a thorough competitive assessment.

• Comprehensive layout for evaluating pricing, features, market presence, and customer feedback
• Easy-to-use interface for streamlined data entry and updates
• Customizable fields to tailor the analysis to specific market needs

Ideal for: Product managers, marketing teams, and business strategists who need to analyze competitor products and gain valuable insights to inform their own strategies and decisions.

The Competitive Matrix Template for Google Sheets by Coefficient simplifies the process of comparing your company against competitors across multiple dimensions , such as market share, product features, and customer satisfaction.

• Structured format for comprehensive visualization of competitive positioning
• Easy data entry process for ongoing assessments
• Customizable categories to align with specific competitive metrics

Ideal for: Marketing teams and strategic planners who need to track and compare various aspects of their competition.

Coefficient’s Competitor Research Template for Google Sheets lets you systematically collect and analyze crucial data about your competitors—from business strategies and market performance to product details and customer feedback.

• Detailed sections for marketing strategies, financial overview, and other crucial aspects
• Customizable fields to suit specific industries or focus areas
• Integration capabilities for importing data from external sources

Ideal for: Market analysts and business strategists who need to gather and analyze detailed competitor data find this template useful.

Read More: 10 Best Research Management Software

The Social Media Competitive Analysis Template provides marketers with a powerful tool for evaluating their social media strategies in relation to key competitors. It offers a streamlined approach for collecting and comparing key performance indicators (KPIs) across various social media platforms .

• Automated data import from major social media platforms
• Comparative analysis of engagement rates, follower growth, and content performance
• Tools for identifying strengths and weaknesses in your social media strategy
• Collaboration features for team-based strategy development

Ideal for: Marketing teams aiming to enhance their social media impact through data-driven insights and collaborative planning.

Alternative Competitive Analysis Templates

The least exciting part of competitor analysis is all that manual data you need to enter into the templates. Some AI-powered assistance can make all the difference here.

AI tools for competitor analysis like ClickUp stand out in this regard, offering a diverse range of templates designed to enhance your competitive analysis efforts. 

Whether you need to track market trends, compare product features, or analyze social media performance, these templates can cater to different aspects of your competitive strategy.

Best part? You can automate the data entry side of things with ClickUp Automations and ClickUp Brain , taking the tedious bits out of your competitive analysis process.

Here are the top ClickUp templates to consider:

ClickUp’s Competitive Analysis Whiteboard Template leverages ClickUp’s Whiteboard feature, which allows you to visually map out competitive elements and assess them against set metrics.

Its interactive nature ensures that you can dynamically adjust your analysis, track progress, and refine your strategies in response to the latest market developments.

• Visualize competitive dynamics interactively
• Get real-time updates and customize fields to fit your needs
• Use drag-and-drop functionality for easy element management
• View changes and adjustments dynamically as they happen

Ideal for: Marketing teams looking for an interactive and up-to-date view of their competitive field. It’s especially useful for businesses needing to monitor and adjust their competitive strategies continuously.

ClickUp’s Competitive Analysis Pricing Template offers a structured approach to evaluating and comparing competitor pricing strategies, product costs, and market offerings. It’s designed to help businesses make informed pricing decisions that enhance profitability while staying competitive.

• Helps build your understanding of the competitive landscape and market dynamics
• Aids in identifying pricing strategies that can provide a competitive advantage
• Supports informed decision-making regarding the pricing of your products or services

Ideal for: Pricing analysts, product managers, and strategic planners who need a flexible tool for making strategic pricing decisions and collaborating across teams.

ClickUp’s Competitor Tracking Template offers a unified approach to gathering, organizing, and accessing detailed information about competitors ‘ products, features, pricing, and marketing efforts .

It features customizable statuses, detailed custom fields, and various views tailored to different product categories. This setup enhances your ability to manage and visualize data effectively, whether you’re tracking the latest smartwatch releases or analyzing broader market trends.

• Access multiple views tailored to different product categories
• Systematically track product features, pricing, and marketing efforts
• Use a centralized repository for easy access to competitor information

Ideal for: Product managers and marketing analysts who need a comprehensive tool for tracking and analyzing competitor activities find this template helpful. It is especially useful for staying informed about new product releases and marketing strategies.

ClickUp’s Market Analysis Template helps identify key market trends, customer preferences, and competitor strategies, providing a solid foundation for informed decision-making.

It comes with custom statuses for tracking different phases of analysis, custom fields for detailed data points, and diverse views for easy data access and organization. With functionalities like trend tracking, competitor monitoring, and market forecasting, you can effectively navigate market complexities.

Key features:

• The Price vs. Quality View to compare various products to identify the best option
• The Advertisements View to gather insights into how other companies are promoting their products
• The Competitors View  to track your rivals’ market share and performance
• The Growth Share View  to monitor the growth of different products and services

Ideal for: Both small and large marketing teams seeking to deepen their market insights. Small teams can improve research and decision-making, while larger teams can efficiently manage and coordinate extensive data across departments.

ClickUp’s SEO Competitor Analysis Template allows you to analyze their competitors’ SEO tactics, from keyword usage to backlink profiles, helping you identify valuable SEO opportunities and adjust your strategies accordingly.

This template offers a systematic approach to SEO project management , helping you stay ahead and adapt to your rivals’ strategies effectively.

• Use the various views to compare your website’s accessibility, traffic, progress in competitor analysis, and content quality against those of your competitor
• Leverage real-time metrics to track SEO performance across multiple teams
• Conduct gap analysis to identify areas for improvement and ensure alignment with SEO goals

Ideal for: Digital marketing teams and SEO professionals who want to fine-tune their SEO strategies or conduct in-depth competitor analysis.

ClickUp’s Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) Template provides a powerful tool for real estate professionals and market analysts to gauge property values and understand market dynamics . It comes with custom statuses for task progress, detailed custom fields for property attributes, and various views for different analysis angles.

• Compare and analyze property features and pricing to identify market trends
• Assess the strengths and weaknesses of properties in specific neighborhoods
• Visualize data with customizable views and fields for enhanced understanding and reporting
• Streamline workflow from data collection to presentation for efficient market analysis

Ideal for: Real estate agents and market analysts who need to deliver in-depth property assessments and market insights. It’s particularly useful for those looking to present comprehensive evaluations to clients or stakeholders.

Read More: 11 Best Reporting Tools & Software

ClickUp’s Comparison Matrix Template simplifies the process of comparing multiple options, helping you make informed decisions efficiently. This visually rich template offers a clear snapshot of each competitor. It allows you to evaluate various criteria and alternatives side-by-side, ensuring that all factors are considered before making a choice.

• Evaluate multiple options against set criteria in a single, comprehensive view
• Quickly compare features, benefits, and costs of different products or services
• Make informed decisions with an organized, data-driven approach
• Optimize the decision-making process for teams

Ideal for: Teams and individuals comparing products or services, such as project managers and procurement specialists, who need an organized and efficient evaluation method.

ClickUp’s Product Features Matrix Template is an excellent tool for marketing teams that want to  evaluate and compare the features of multiple products systematically . It helps break down complex feature sets into manageable comparisons, enabling informed strategic decisions on product development and enhancements.

• Identify high-value features that align with customer needs and business goals
• Prioritize and allocate resources more effectively to key product features
• Streamline collaboration across teams by providing a clear, visual representation of product comparisons

Ideal for : Product managers and development teams who need to compare product features to make data-driven decisions and streamline product development.

Managing and analyzing competitive data is crucial for staying ahead in the marketing field. Competitive analysis tools and templates help streamline this process by efficiently collecting, organizing, and interpreting key information.

ClickUp takes this a step further. With its diverse range of customizable templates, you can tailor each one to meet your specific needs. Whether you’re dissecting product features, tracking pricing strategies, or mapping out market trends, ClickUp’s templates offer the flexibility and functionality you need to excel and thrive in the long run.

Sign up on ClickUp and start using these powerful templates to gain valuable insights and stay ahead in the market.

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