competitive analysis is the process of identifying and researching your competitors so you can uncover their core strategies. hopefully, you have a decent understanding of your main competitors in the market. you should try to leverage your strengths and take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses, so that will inform some of your company’s opportunities. while there will likely be some overlap between your icp and those of your competitors, you probably are situated in your own niche within the market. overall, if you observe their website and other owned channels, it’ll give you a sense of what your competitors do and how they try to position themselves.

our competitor analysis template is a valuable tool that helps companies analyze and understand the competitive landscape in their industry. once the vision and the mission of a product or a service have been established, it becomes mandatory to get to know other companies operating in the same market. conducting this type of analysis will allow you to evaluate other businesses activating in the same field, so you can quickly pinpoint their weaknesses or strengths. competitor analysis helps identify a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, comparing them to the business of reference so that key departments in the company can refine their strategy and curb competition.

a competitive analysis helps to identify the main market players, determine what strategies they use to succeed and identify resources your company could use to dominate the market. analyzing these forces will give you a better understanding of the target markets and prepare for launch. for example, you cannot “copy” skullcandy’s brand and ecommerce experience and “paste” it on your store to get the same results. direct competition is an ecommerce business providing similar products to the same target market (both geographically and demographically) at a similar price point. finally, there’s replacement competition — a business with the potential to replace your product with something different altogether.

third, draw the map by plotting on a graph the position of every product in the market you’ve selected according to its price and its level of primary benefit, and draw a line that runs through the middle of the points. one way to do that is to track the relationship between prices and a product’s key benefit over time. in its simplest form, a price-benefit positioning map shows the relationship between the primary benefit that a product provides to customers and the prices of all the products in a given market. to determine that value, you must first draw up a list of the benefits offered by all the different products or brands in the market and gather data on how customers perceive those benefits. when you have identified the primary benefit, you are ready to draw a positioning map by plotting the position of every company’s product (or brand) in the marketplace according to its price and its level of primary benefit. let me illustrate the process and purposes of drawing a positioning map by returning for a moment to the challenges that motorola faced in launching the razr2. plotting prices against the primary benefit products offer in a market makes it easy to see how that market looks to customers.

but what if it’s you who is making a mistake, while your competitors are off to the races? the thing you copy is a hypothesis—and you need to test it. ask participants to evaluate your website as well as the websites of your top two competitors. ask them to use the words they would naturally use when looking for a product or service you offer. after each experience, ask: for me, it’s incredibly interesting to see what the users like and dislike about the sites of my client’s competitors.