Conduct a competitive analysis with actionable insights
Understanding where your product and services fall within a competitive landscape is important in identifying risks and uncovering opportunities to successfully grow your business.
Knowing your customers' needs helps define and refine your unique value proposition. Understanding your competitors helps you keep a pulse on the market, identify gaps, and prioritize your efforts strategically to grow your business.
All the work you’ve done to define your customer and problem space will help you narrow in on the highest priority competitors to research and compare, rather than focusing on indirect competitors or a broader group.
Start by focusing on businesses that are working to solve a similar need. Learn what they’re doing right, what they are leaving on the table, and what their customers are saying about the solution.
One exercise that we recommend in doing competitive research is a SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis framework helps you hone in on specific variables to be compared vs. a general overview. This helps to draw conclusions and synthesize insights into actionable next steps later on.
We suggest a variety of tactics when doing a SWOT analysis. Online tools like Crunchbase can give you business insights, and reviewing competitors' websites and social media accounts can help you understand their content strategy.
To understand the product itself, it may make sense to set up a sales demo, free trial, or work to connect with customers of the product. The more detailed and granular your findings, the easier it will be to draw conclusions and identify opportunities.
Once you’ve gained insights into the competitive landscape, build an actionable roadmap of long-term strategic goals and short-term tactical goals that help you create market share, acquire new customers, and continuously evolve your business and offerings to remain meaningful to customers.
Make sure that the goals you set are measurable. Do this by first defining what success looks like, then mapping each step that it will take to get there.
Check out how we prepared a startup, Distribute, for fundraising and further customer research