Conducting a competitive analysis is probably one of the most important reports you should spend time doing for your business. It’s time well spent in knowing your competition.
Why you should know your competition
The main reason is that clients now have quick access to your competitors’ perceived or actual product/service benefits. The second reason is that you may be promoting a specific product feature or an internal human factor like customer service as your key brand differentiation – which, depending on how competitive your industry is, could not be enough to make the sale.
The third reason is that the consumer has changed. We’ve changed. We want choices, and we’ll search online to get them. Even a new advertising or social media campaign can change your customers’ minds, and they move to your competition.
Online tracking makes it easier to know your competition
On the upside of things, as someone in marketing, it has gotten easier to read the competition thanks to the Internet. Granted, you may not know about an upcoming advertising campaign from your competition, but what competitor tracking will do is help you understand the current industry environment. But you’ll need to know what you are looking at to build a marketing plan, and it starts by creating a competitive analysis spreadsheet.
How to analyze and report
What you are looking for is the ability to understand what’s next. You should be asking questions such as, “what will be your competitor’s next move? What type of skill set do they have that I’ll need that will help my company grow?
Take your time to develop these questions as it will in the analysis phase.
The next area to track is how you compare against your direct competitors based on actual product features and clients’ perceptions of your product and your competition. Ideally, create an excel with a list of products and services your competition has and compare with your company’s offering. Look for gaps.
You can discover competitive gaps and opportunities from products, marketing or sales, brand strength, client perceptions and other staff, like finance or operations.
Below are the major factors you should be tracking either weekly, monthly or daily depending on your industry. These factors include financial stability, type of clients, marketing investment, staffing, product and service offering and brand positioning and messaging.
Competitive analysis includes the following:
- Who are your direct and indirect competitors
- Understand the threat of substitution
- What is the ease of market entry
- Supplier Power
- Buyer Power
RESEARCH PROCESS
At the start, create an excel template listing the top 5 to 10 factors, benefits and features your customers believe to be important and are factors for your company’s success.
You’ll need to set at least 10 hours a week to stay on top of your competitive reporting; it comes with a lot of reading competitor’s annual reports, press releases, product brochures, patent applications and much, much more!
Also, you’ll need to travel to trade shows, check out how the competition presents their brand, attend all seminars and speak with the trade show organizers – the good ones will have a vibe on the industry’s outlook based on exhibitors and attendees comments, attendance and promotional programs.
LOOK IN / LOOK OUT TO UNDERSTAND YOUR COMPETITOR
I like doing a competitive analysis. It allows me to understand clearly my company’s position in the industry, as well as my company’s strengths and weakness. During a competitive analysis, you need to remove any bias. You need to think analytical because you won’t be doing your company any favours by listing brand strengths that are still not developed. Also, brand strengths need to be relevant since you’ll be using these strengths to create a truly unique brand message that is relevant to your target market.
REAL BENEFITS IN COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS?
Yes! It will help you formulate the marketing strategy, discover opportunities in new markets or product development and create a unique brand message that will help you stand apart from your competitors.
DEALING WITH UNKNOWNS
My biggest frustration is when I read posts that insist that you can know your competitor’s marketing strategy by reading a press release. By the time you’ve read the press release, it’s too late. You are in reactive move.
However, you can find out a lot from a public company from their annual shareholder report, especially in which product saw growth, which markets they are focusing on and why they’ve spent so much money. Here is a list on how to track your competition:
- Subscribe to their newsletter
- Speak with your salespeople
- Speak with your client/customers
- Track lost sales and find out why they chose to go with the competition.
- Understand your market trends and political environment
- Be curious, don’t accept the status quo.
- Visit trade shows, speak with the competition.
- Follow them on social media.
- Visit their website – often.
- Write up a monthly report. It will help to see changes before it comes to a full-blown problem.
SALES FORECASTING
The second area is sales forecasting. There are two types of sales forecasting, a) when you’ve just launched a business and need to know your cash flow and b) when you’ve been in business for a few years and need to know how much sales you need to stay profitable.
The idea that you can track your competitive and help you with your sales forecast is naïve. It will only help you understand how much work, like marketing, promotion, sales, and product development you need to do if you plan on entering ‘their territory.’
Or, it will help you determine whether you should enter their landscape, or not and go somewhere else.
NOTE: As much I appreciate the importance of a monthly competitive analysis report, I also know that things can happen quickly. You get a big client win, or overnight a competitor enters your niche market, or there a new product introduction that caught you by surprise and changes the market space. It happens. No matter how much competitive tracking you are doing. It what makes the business so exciting.
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The Who, What, Where, When and Why of developing an online brand ambassador program
I come from a background of working with non-profits and charities, helping them to raise brand awareness about their cause. One of the things I loved the most about working with NGOs, is the virtually non-existent ad budgets!
Yes, you read that correctly.
There is a thrill in developing promotional campaigns with next to no funding; it not only breeds creativity but makes buy-in throughout the organisation a breeze. By having a gang of stakeholders rallied to promote the campaign, the resulting word-of-mouth advertising is not just inexpensive – it’s priceless.
I had a wonderful time managing a couple of Brand ambassador programs and here are my top tips to get you started.
1- Why implement a brand ambassador program?
During the Holidays, potential consumers are bombarded with marketing from all sides. Content that comes from brand ambassadors, however, doesn’t look or feel like traditional ad campaigns. The major advantage is that you are connecting a network of people who are already favourably predisposed to your brand with authentic and sincere content – backed by an ambassador to engage their networks with their content and hold a conversation around it.
2- Who are the right people to represent my brand?
The stakeholders who are best positioned to mobilize their networks are your employees, volunteers, brand fans and your customers (or beneficiaries). Select your ambassadors for their natural ability to communicate their genuine enthusiasm for your product, service or cause. A good candidate would be someone who is ideally passionate about your brand, active on their personal social media platforms, and is keen to answer questions and be the public face of your brand to their networks.
Today we have popular bloggers who can also be in your brand ambassador program with services ranging from wiring a blog post to attending an event.
3- What should I expect them to do?
You have chosen your ambassadors for their spunk and eagerness, but they are not necessarily trained public relations professionals! Help them help you by developing clear expectations – the place to start is by getting on the same page with the program’s objectives and messaging. Give them opportunities to practice articulating their passion with sincerity and authenticity – you don’t want them sounding scripted. The next step is to ask them to develop content in the form of blog posts, video testimonials, photos, that are in line with those objectives. This content is the collateral that will make your brand go viral!
You can also ask them to attend your events, speak with the media as well as participate in product development.
4- Where does content get posted?
Now that your ambassadors have pumped out quality content, it’s time for them to share it with their personal networks! Make sure that they are linking back to you, tagging you and mentioning you so that you can share their material in turn. This creates a far vaster web of exposure than any pure ad campaign could reach.
5- When is the best timing for a program?
The Holiday season is a natural time for your brand ambassadors to begin connecting your content to their network. It is a time in which people are getting in touch, and are feeling receptive to cheerful messages. While your campaign would necessarily need to be time-limited (the T in SMART objectives!), and could easily wrap up early in the New Year, the beauty of online campaigns is that the content remains even when the program has ended. Furthermore, you can constantly create new content and tap new networks by recruiting new ambassadors if you are targeting a longer-term program and have a sufficient candidate pool from which to draw from.
Case Study – Girl Guides of Canada
As the head of public relations for Quebec at Girl Guides of Canada, in 2012, I launched a year-long brand ambassador program, Quebec Girls Leading Tomorrow. The campaign objective was to promote girl leadership development by introducing adult members that had grown up as Girl Guides and are considered today’s leaders in various capacities.
The four dynamic women that participated in the Brand Ambassador program provided testimonials, blog posts, interviews, videos, and photos, and also attended events to help promote important brand messages of their wonderful experience, including gaining leadership skills as a Girl Guide! They also shared this same message on their social media platforms and made themselves available to the media for interviews during these events.
The campaign was a rousing success, garnering not only media coverage throughout the year-long program but through tapping the ambassadors’ personal networks – reaching audiences that Girl Guides of Canada had not been able to connect with otherwise.