The Best-Kept Secrets Of Doing A Competitive Analysis

The Best-Kept Secrets Of Doing A Competitive Analysis: From Scott Gerber:
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship and resources that support each stage of a business's development and growth.

When recently asked about their best-kept secrets to performing a competitive analysis for their brands, YEC members had the following to say.

1. Have an undercover ambassador

Performing your own market research for a competitive analysis, especially when you are publicly known among your competition, just doesn't work. Identify people who can act as an undercover ambassador on your behalf and go into the market to get firsthand feedback on how your brand is perceived and insight on your competition and how they are doing. Organic data points provide the most value.

—Lauren Maillian Bias, Luxury Market Branding



2. Look to product review sites

One thing that we commonly do is look to product review sites like Amazon.com or eBay and search for user reviews. What are customers saying about the product? What do they want to see? What did they like/dislike? Do this for both your product and that of your competition and you will be really surprised by what you see. Plus, it gives you an action list of things to do to make your products better.

—Greg Rollett, The ProductPros

3. Use compete.com

Competitor analysis is imperative to any business in order to improve products/services in order to gain an edge over the competition. Utilize a service like compete.com to understand how your competitors are driving traffic and acquiring customers online. This information will help you devise a more comprehensive marketing strategy.

—Anthony Saladino, Kitchen Cabinet Kings

4. Don't stare down the competition

While it's important to keep an eye on what other's in your field are up to, it's equally—if not more—important to ignore the competition. Don't let what everyone else is doing drive you to change your values and direction as a company. Focus not on being better than everyone else, but instead on being your very best.

—Matt Cheuvront, Proof Branding

5. Conduct a survey

When I was building the coaching arm of my business, I released a survey to my already-existing audience in order to get a feel for where my readers were hanging out, who loomed large in the industry, and what affected their purchasing decisions. It helped me pinpoint my primary competition and find ways to distinguish myself.

—Steph Auteri, Word Nerd Pro

6. Do a mini analysis on social media

The best way to perform a competitive analysis for your brand is to do a mini social media analysis to see how you compare to your competition in terms of followers, fans and type of content posted. You also want to measure level of engagement with their fans versus your own fan base to see how you compare to the competition!

—Kris Ruby, Ruby Media Group

7. Use BoardReader

I use BoardReader whenever I'm doing market research, be it for a current project or a new idea. It's a nice way to assess the world of forums, specifically, which is often overlooked despite it being the original manifestation of niche communities online.

—Derek Shanahan, Foodtree

8. Test your customer loyalty

There are many companies that boast about massive mailing lists and thousands of users, but what makes a company valuable is the level of interest and loyalty your customers demonstrate towards your brand. This can be converted to monetary equity and rapid growth quite easily. Ask your customers for a favor and objectively track the number of customers who follow through. Then share your results.

—Kent Healy, Healo Capital

9. Use an objective eye

Coming from the bar and restaurant industry, I can't go to my venues to conduct an analysis about my brand because my staff acts differently when I'm there. So instead I go to my competitors and simply act like a customer. I then send secret shoppers to my venues and compare my feedback of the competitors with the spotters' feedback of my venues.

—Michael Sinensky, Village Pourhouse

10. Use OpenSiteExplorer.org

SEOMoz's tool, Opensiteexplorer.org, allows you to see links linking to your competitors, so you get a better idea of how they've been able to market their brand, which media outlets are talking about them and how much work you need to do to catch up and overtake them.

—Danny Wong, Blank Label Group

11. "SizeUp" your competition for free

SizeUp.com is a free business intelligence tool that will rock your entrepreneurial world. It instantly develops interactive charts to illustrate how your business compares to competitors, identifies best places to advertise and maps competitors, customers and suppliers. It's a great tool to utilize for investment pitches, business plan enhancements or overall business development tactics.

—Erica Nicole, YFS Magazine

12. Buy from your competitors

It always amazes me how few people don't go beyond looking at what's publicly available on a competitors website; going through the entire sales process (and yes, that includes submitting credit card information) will give you much more useful information. We've even done usability studies which include our top three competitors to see how customers perceive our brand versus theirs.

—Matt Mickiewicz, 99designs

13. Check out what YC and 500 Startups are investing in

Y Combinator, 500 Startups and Tech Stars are investment groups/incubators that are constantly carving out the tech landscape. If you are in the tech space and researching the competition in your space, you can be almost 100 percent sure that some of the most promising up-and-comers in your vertical are part of one of those groups

—Brenton Gieser, JoynIn