What?
So you may be wondering what exactly is a competitor analysis? Well, simply put, a competitive analysis is used evaluate your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses; it also plays an important role in your marketing strategy.
Why?
The main reason companies do a competitive analysis is to assess their competitors and find out their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. By learning more about your competitors you can also learn from them; you can gain insight on why customers may be choosing your competitor over you or what your competitors are doing right and wrong. A competitive analysis helps you figure out your competitors’ weaknesses and you could use that to your advantage.
How?
While I’m sure everyone will have different ways of doing it, this here’s how I did a competitive analysis for The Techy Hub.
Identifying Competitors
First, I had to identify The Techy Hub’s competitors. Because I had no knowledge about any other web or app development companies in Malaysia I did what any smart person would and turned to Uncle Google for help. I just typed in ‘web development Malaysia’ and ‘web design Malaysia’ and ta-da, a bunch of results popped up but I only choose the first few companies on the long list.
Getting Info
After choosing the companies, I tried to get as much information as I could on each of the companies. I tried to get as much info as I could on their company which I managed to find after some digging. Honestly, with Google, you can find just about anything about most companies especially if the company is quite well-known, there’ll usually be a lot of information online.
I went through their website to see the list services they offer. I also took a look at their portfolio to see which companies they’ve worked with and what they’ve done. I had to even look at how their Facebook Pages were doing. That somehow shows how healthy they are on social media.
Compile & Analyse
With the help of Uncle Google, finding information was a breeze; I even managed to find the number of employees each company has as well as their client retention rate. Now, just what did I do with all that info? Well, it’s simple—compile it and started doing the analysis.
Using all that information I’ve gotten on our competitors, I compared it to The Techy Hub. For example, I compared the list of services as well as the content on their social media account(s). I found out their strengths (what they’re doing well or doing better than us) and their weaknesses (what they’re lacking or doing wrong). Also, it’s important to point out what competitors are doing differently. What are they doing that sets them apart from your own company?
Conclusion
In conclusion, a competitive analysis can help you assess your competitors as well as the current market. It was my first time doing a competitive analysis and I’ve never been one who was good at researching but the steps on how to do it are pretty straightforward and with the help of Uncle Google I was able to get a lot of relevant information and did an alright analysis. With competitors analysis done, next up, Big Data analysis!