It is famously said “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage.” To gain such an advantage you need to know what your competitors do and what they likely to contemplate in the near future. This is termed as ‘competitor analysis’ and is defines as assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. In the world of Internet where you face competition not only from businesses in your vicinity around the world such an analysis becomes a must. Gathering intelligence on your business rivals helps you fare well in competition.
Advantages of Competitor Analysis
- Know Your Competition – It is very important for you to know your competitors. This allows you to device marketing strategies which help you stay ahead in the race. In depth analysis of your competition can give you the intelligence on the strengths and weaknesses of your competition to device strategies to gain an edge. Competitor analysis provides you with both offensive as well as defensive strategies to neutralize the threat being posed by your rivals. Not knowing your rivals often stall your growth chances.
- Build Knowledge – In the world of web design and development which keeps on changing rapidly you need to constantly build your knowledge. On many occasions your competitors are your best learning source. See the pluses that they have with their design and marketing campaign and find out way so that you can implement such changes in your website to attract more customers and serve them better. This also helps in you posing serious threats to their business.
- Identify Best Practices – Study a group of competitors in detail will allow you to easily identify best practices in the contemporary world. This may be in terms of design, navigation or promotional strategies. This allows you to be in sync with the latest trends in web design and development technologies. Don’t be surprised if you come to know that some of your best marketing strategies are obsolete and new trends have replaced them.
- Delivery Mechanism – Every business has a certain delivery mechanism and competitor analysis lets you know the delivery mechanism which will be used by some of your best performing business rivals. You can streamline your delivery mechanism by tweaking a few processes in your business. This will allow you to easily lock horns with these giants and add to your sales and revenue.
- Cut Costs – One of the best ways to increase profits in any business is to cut costs. Now to do so you need to know exactly how you can increase efficiency of your labor and often studying your competitors would hold the answers to your questions. Study their business model and identify opportunities where you can reduce your input costs. Without knowing what your competitors do often puts you into a situation where you feel your business model is the most efficient.
Competitor Analysis is a very skill demanding job and requires implacable analytical skills. On most occasions you not only analyze which your competitors are doing but also identify things that they are likely to do. On other occasions you need to analyze competition which may not be in picture as yet but poses a challenge to you in the near future. Thus you need the services of a professional web development company which has a team of such analytical minds. Halfhearted analysis and judging the book by its cover won’t do you any good and thus you cannot make any compromises when it comes to hiring people for competitor analysis.
Justin Spenser works at MarkupBox. MarkupBox,one of the leading PSD to HTML and PSD to WordPress service provding comapny