When conducting a competitor analysis, it is important for managers to take the viewpoint of

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Reporting on your competitor analysis, presenting it to your manager, is a vital part of the process. To show you how great your reports can look - download three simulated Talkwalker reporting templates.

While Burger King peaked with a positive tweet from someone you may have heard of.

Words & phrases associated with your market

Taking a deeper dive into sentiment analysis to findout what’s driving consumer emotions. Look at the key topics of the conversations to identify what consumers are saying about your brand, product, or services. This brand intelligence will reveal the words and phrases that consumers are using, giving you a better understanding of where your brand fits. It will also open up opportunities where you can position your brand and join conversations, previously unheard.

Words & phrases associated with your market - Quick Search competitor analysis

First past the chequered flag - Red Bull!

Looking at the top themes - mentions over 13 months - surrounding our five brands, remembering who’s the king of fizz, Red Bull beat Coca-Cola - 99.6% to 99%.

As leader of the pack, Coca-Cola has to identify why it’s lost out to Red Bull and what’s missing from its marketing strategy.

Hmmmm, sponsor a Formula One team, maybe?

Demographic of customers

Who are your competitors' customers? Are they the same as yours? The same demographic?

Refocus and target to increase your customer base. For instance... your existing customer base is made up of young people, whereas your competitors have an older demographic. Can you target this older group and introduce new consumers to your product? Are you missing out on countries? Locations you’re failing to target with your marketing, and where your competitors are doing well?

Demographic of customers - Quick Search competitor analysis

Quick Search competitor analysis of Nike, adidas, and Reebok, to show share of countries.

Nike leads the sports footwear industry. Snapping at its heels are adidas and Reebok. The Quick Search result show the share of countries/regions for the brands is close. But, should adidas and Reebok target the 5M+ audience in South Korea, in their future marketing campaigns?

Audience interests

Find out what your audience is interested in and you’ll have the secret to keeping them engaged. Social media analytics can show you your audience’s interests and those of your competitors. This will give you insights in how to appeal to your competitors’ fans. You can also segment the audiences to fine tune.

Audience interests - competitor analysis with Quick Search

Coca-Cola v Red Bull - audience interests

May not be a surprise, that the Red Bull audience is interested in sports, despite also being a popular mixer in bars. Red Bull being a main competitor of Coca-Cola, the king of fizz's marketing strategy to target sports lovers to increase its market share.

SWOT analysis

I'm assuming/hoping that you've done a SWOT analysis of your brand, and filed it in your marketing strategy. Now you need to do one for your competitors.

SWOT - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s an audit that identifies the internal and external factors affecting a team’s future performance. Internal factors are strengths and weaknesses, while external factors are opportunities and threats.

By looking at your competitors' SWOT, from a customer’s point of view, you’re analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. It’ll help you understand their business better. What are their assets? How could your business exploit them? Find their weaknesses and work out how your company would address them. Take a customer journey and ask...

  • What made me choose that brand?
  • Is it just because they’re different, better, cheaper, local, more choices?
  • Why would I choose them over another brand?
  • Would I be prepared to swap brands, if changes were made?
  • Is my loyalty so strong, I'd pay a premium price?

SWOT analysis - competitor analysis

SWOT analysis - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

PEST analysis

While doing your competitor analysis, SWOT results should be taken into consideration. For this to be effective, external factors should also be assessed. This is where PEST should be brought into play. PEST analysis is an element of risk/crisis management that ensures a company is prepared for a change in external factors - listed below.

Will a change be considered an opportunity to do better, or will it be seen as a threat? How will they handle a change?

Answers to these kind of questions will demonstrate how your competitors operate, and this can become part of your marketing strategy. Supposing there’s a change and your main competitor can’t handle it. But, your company can rock it and come out on top.

Politics - government regulations that will affect the market - political stability, tax laws, trade restrictions, safety regulations, and employment laws.

Economic - issues that will impact your industry - inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, economic growth, unemployment rate, policy changes.

Social - analyze the socio-economic environment of your industry - customer demographics, culture and lifestyle attitudes, languages, and education levels. Recognize consumer behavior and what motivates them to purchase.

Here're examples of brands that failed to do their homework. Potentially, jeopardizing sales and inviting lawsuits.

  • US brewery, Coors translated its slogan - “turn it loose” - for a Spanish audience. Unfortunately, it meant - “diarrhea”.
  • Pepsi used its slogan - “Come Alive” - in China. Translated, it means, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead!”
  • When KFC opened in China, “finger lickin’ good” translated as “eat your fingers off.”

Technological - how tech impacts the launch of a new product or service. This would include technological advancements, lifecycle of technologies, and money spent on R&D by the government.

If you don’t keep up with modern digital marketing techniques - optimizing your site for mobile devices, etc. - you’ll lose customers to your competitors.

PEST analysis - competitor analysis

PEST analysis - Political, Economical, Social, Technological.

Best competitor analysis tools

Check out these tools! I've used them all, and I can honestly say, that without them you're going to struggle to perform a comprehensive competitor analysis. This is just a handful, check out the Top 14 competitor analysis tools for more.

Quick Search | Social media search engine

Get an instant overview of your brand online. This search engine provides extensive coverage of social networks, news sites, blogs, and forums. You can enter multiple competitors brands and compare sentiment @ 90% accuracy, engagement, audience demographics, mentions, and more.

Quick Search - data visualization tool - Coke and Pepsi - Talkwalker's Quick Search - competitor analysis share of regions

Quick Search - Coca-Cola & Pepsi share of countries/regions.

Moz | SEO audit & crawl diagnostics

SEO competitive analysis provides data about what tactics are working in the industry. Recognizing your competitors’ strong and weak areas, means you’ll have an understanding of how hard it’ll be to outrank them. Backlink analysis will reveal which websites are linking to your competitors, and not you. Moz SEO tools include Keyword Explorer, Open Site Explorer, MozRank, MozBar, link building, site audits, page optimization insights. Moz also offers a suite of free SEO tools for link building and analysis, keyword research, webpage performance, local listing audits, and a whole lot more!

Moz SEO tool for competitor analysis - Free tools

Perform an SEO audit of your competitors' websites with Moz.

Day Digital | Boost website SERP ranking

Day Digital offers many services, including SEO strategies to boost the ranking of your website, on all search engines. You'll find information on link building, on-page optimization, PPC, and social media outreach. While there is no guarantee with SEO, Day Digital works towards improving SERP rankings and increasing traffic using social media.

SEO Tool - competitor analysis

Boost your website's page ranking and rise above the competition.

Screaming Frog | Crawl competitor websites

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler - with perhaps the coolest name ever. Use this tool to crawl competitor sites for key onsite SEO elements. Including, canonicals, page titles, meta descriptions, and headings. You’ll find insights into their optimization, plus learn of potential keywords that your site can target.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider - competitor analysis

Crawl your competitors' websites to identify their SEO strategies.

Talkwalker Alerts | Google Alerts competitor

Like Google Alerts, but better. Set up alerts to receive mentions of your brand and those of your competitors - from websites, blogs, forums, and Twitter. Yep, I said Twitter. You’ll easily see what content your competitors are tweeting and what people are saying about them.

Talkwalker Alerts - competitor analysis tools

BTW - this one’s a freebie.

For the best results, choose specific keywords for you, your competitors, and your industry...

Your brand

  • Your company name
  • Your company tagline
  • Your company name AND product name
  • Your company AND news
  • Common misspellings of your brand name

Your competitors

  • Competitor’s name AND news
  • Competitor’s name AND review
  • Competitor’s name AND product name

Your industry

  • Industry AND updates
  • Industry AND (merger OR acquisitions)
  • Industry AND IPO
  • Industry AND launch
  • Industry AND patent
  • Industry AND “government policy”

SEMrush | Single source of competitive intelligence online

SEMrush provides a competitive research solution for your entire company. With a full set of tools, marketing managers will have an overview of any industry’s competitive landscape and break down a typical marketing mix in the market. Available data will create a foundation for tactical decisions in SEO, advertising, content and social media marketing, affiliate and partnership management, PR, and media buying.

At a strategic level, SEMrush can help business development teams and business owners to research new market opportunities and prepare for business expansion.

Semrush - competitor analysis tool - single source of competitive intelligence online

Competitive research solution for the entire company.

Majestic is a link intelligence database that’ll give you detailed analysis of external links and anchor text used by your competitors. Analyze backlinks and domain link counts so you can understand what your competitors are doing to track performance.

Majestic: intelligence database - competitor analysis tool

Detailed analysis of your competitors' external links and anchor text.

Competitor analysis template

To help with your competitor analysis, I’ve created a competitive analysis template. Click below and fill it with the results of your competitor audit.

Download my competitor analysis template

You can tailor the template to suit your business.

  • Competitor profileIdentify your main competitors and fill in a template for each.
  • Competitive advantageWhat makes your company unique, different from your competitors?
  • Target marketYou know your target market - don’t you dare say you don’t. Identify your competitors’ target market. If you’ve followed my guide, you’ll have this data at your fingertips.
  • SEO strategyKeywords your competitors are ranking for. Backlink strategy. SERPS. Which trending keywords are they jumping on?
  • Marketing strategiesAdd your current/future marketing campaigns, and those of your competitors. Familiarize yourself with their strategies.
  • Product & service Rate your company’s products and services against those of your competitors. Whose is best? What features are you missing that are working for the competition?
  • Pricing & costsCheap and cheerful? Targeting consumers with disposable income?
  • Social media presenceWhich channels are they using? Images, video, text? Frequency of posting? What are the demographics of their followers?
  • SWOT You’ve already done this for your own brand, right? Now do it for each of your competitors.
  • PESTPerform PEST analysis for each of your competitors, and compare with your own.

Free social media report template

It won’t happen overnight, it’s an ongoing process. Performing regular competitor analysis will give your company the advantage it needs to outsmart the competition. Watch and learn. Monitor your progress by installing tracking - Google Analytics, SEMrush, Moz, Webmaster Tools. Watch your competitors and industry with Quick Search and Talkwalker Alerts. See what’s working and what isn’t.

Don't forget to download your free social media reporting templates!

CTA social media report examples