You obviously want your brand to stand out from the crowd. And that crowd is an ever-growing mix of competitors, alternatives, and even aggregators. As a product or service, you try to be relevant, useful, and viable. From a brand perspective, you fight with the competitors or alternatives for space. You try and carve out a zone for your brand in the minds and hearts of your target customers. So, where do you begin? The easiest way to start differentiating your brand is by conducting brand marketing competitor research.
What is brand marketing competitor research?
Competitor research and analysis help you get a “leg up” on the other brands vying for your target audience. In some cases, you may be offering the same or similar products and services to them. So, how do you stand out? With offers? discounts? Innovation? Now, the differentiation methods have evolved into something more far-reaching. The focus has shifted from the competition to the one thing you do have control over: YOUR BRAND
Brand marketing competitor research is about how you can uniquely garner the attention of your audience. You do this by focusing on your own strengths and attributes but need to know what your competitors are up to, so you can do things differently. How you differentiate your brand and its communications can ultimately imprint a memorable brand recall in the minds of your customers and prospects.
You are uncovering opportunities for your brand to really stand out by conducting brand marketing competitor research. That’s your goal. But why do you need to?
Why is brand marketing competitor research necessary?
Identifying the right opportunities that fit your brand depends more on your audience research and your own capabilities and attributes. But brand marketing competitor research can help you:
- Outline your brand identity
- Develop your unique sales/value proposition
- Enlighten your team about ideas for future marketing efforts
- Develop your offering based on what requirements are unfulfilled
- Identify new avenues to explore with marketing campaigns and an effective marketing mix
- Understand what is common in the industry so you can strive to think and be different
How do you go about this? By asking the right questions!
Questions to ask for brand marketing competitor research
- What’s the look and feel of their brand?
- What common text and themes do they use across channels?
- Why would they win business over you?
- What do they leverage in case studies and reviews?
- What services do they list first on their website/channels?
- Are there things they do differently? Why?
- What do they do better than you?
- Why do you consider them a competitor?
Answering these questions isn’t always easy. You are working with your own perceptions that may be biased. That’s why conducting independent research and surveys with target audiences may help. But this is a resource-intensive task, isnt it?
I don’t seem to think it is anymore. Use your network, and create a google form. Circulate it aggressively and focus on the qualitative responses you get. Even with third-party research conducted by shelling out thousands of dollars, your data is only as good as you know how to use it to your advantage.
So if you have a small sample size, then try and incorporate elements and test it out with your content strategy for a fixed duration, and optimize on the go till you find the right balance! The trial-and-error method can work, especially if you’re working with limited resources! But it does pay off to get specific with your own efforts. This serves as a reference for your research.
But don’t limit yourself to these questions, think about anything that gives them an edge or helps them operate. Are they choosing the right channels? Can you adapt what they do to you? These become valid considerations in the right scenario.
How to get specific with brand marketing competitor research?
The answer is simple here: Look at your own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
In broader competitor analysis, you might look at revenue or sales numbers, or product features and service costs. In social media competitor analysis, you might look at followers, hashtags, and performance. With brand marketing, you need to cast a wider net:
- Presence: Look at SEO metrics like user traffic, search volumes, and authority scores to start
- Customer acquisition: You can look at metrics such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or conversion rate
- Customer retention: You can look at loyalty and return customers, or calculate their customer-lifetime-value (CLV)
- Reputation: Qualitative reviews, recommendations, complaints, and customer satisfaction or NPS scores can reflect these elements. Add in social listening metrics like social mentions and hashtag analysis to round it out.
By tracking and measuring these metrics, you can set a baseline for performance and understand how your brand marketing competitor research can be utilized to affect those scores and numbers. Here is a great article on 7 metrics to measure for better competitor analysis on Mention.com
Use a competitor array to rank your brand
Now that you have your KPIs established and have identified your competitors. The qualitative analysis and questions may have shed a lot of light on how you compare to them. But using a competitor array is a great way to get some quantitative reference to the entire analysis. Follow these simple steps to conduct one:
Firstly, Step 1: Enter your KPIs in columns and competitors along with your own brand in rows in a table.
Onto Step 2: Assign a weightage for each of the KPIs reflecting their importance towards your goals.
Step 3: Enter the scores for each brand based on your research and assessment.
and Step 4: Calculate the Weighted score to get a clear picture of where your brand stands in relation to the competition. The overall score may be deceptive of the truth. Your weighted score helps you understand your position in relation to the goals and KPIs that matter to you the most.
Check out the example below as a reference:
| Brand | KPI 1 | KPI 2 | KPI 3 | KPI 4 | Overall | Weighted Score |
| Weightage | 30% | 40% | 20% | 10% | Score | 0.3x KPI1 + 0.4x KPI2 + 0.2x KPI3 + 0.1x KPI4 |
| Your Brand | 6 | 5 | 8 | 7 | 26 | 1.8+2+1.6+0.7= 6.1 |
| Competitor A | 5 | 9 | 8 | 6 | 28 | 1.5+3.6+1.6+0.6= 7.3 |
| Competitor B | 8 | 6 | 7 | 9 | 30 | 2.4+2.4+1.4+0.9= 7.1 |
| Competitor C | 8 | 8 | 9 | 6 | 31 | 2.4+3.2+1.8+0.6= 8.0 |
Conclusion
Now that you have a qualitative and quantitative analysis to understand where your brand stands in relation to the competition, you can use your strengths to offset any weaknesses and create new opportunities for growth to meet your goals. A good SWOT analysis can help you get there.
The critical component of competitor research and analysis is the repetition of the efforts periodically to ensure that you review and optimize your marketing efforts based on your findings.
