Performing an analysis of competing products: Advantages and techniques.

Consider the most recent item you bought. What influenced your decision to select that particular product instead of a different one? Was it the appearance? The user-friendliness? The cost?

Customers must consider numerous factors when making a buying decision. Therefore, it is beneficial for your brand and products to distinguish themselves from competitors.

But what does make your offerings stand out? And how can you be “the only choice” against your competitors? This is where a competitive analysis for your products comes in. It’s the best way to understand how to outpace your competitors, and where you may be falling behind.

All of the information you need is at your fingertips—you just need the right tools to access it. We’ll walk you through how to do a competitive product analysis today to inspire your offerings and brand positioning for tomorrow.

• What does a competitive product analysis entail?
• How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?
• What is your approach to evaluating the products of competitors?
• What to look for during a competitor product analysis

What is a competitive product analysis?

An analysis of competing products involves examining and evaluating the products of your rivals to assess their market success, identify any unmet needs they leave, and determine potential risks they present to your own products.

This process enables you to:

• Determine what features competitor products have
• What your target market likes and dislikes about competitor products
• Which items or services are absent from your competitors’ offerings that you have the potential to provide?

This process can be done for any type of product, including physical products (toys, games, tools, appliances, etc.), digital products (digital tools like Sprout Social or applications), experiences (museums, bars or restaurants) and services (cleaning services or moving services).

Conducting a product-focused competitive analysis should be done when you’re creating or considering new offerings, but also to optimize and improve upon what you already offer.

What are the benefits of conducting a competitive analysis for a product in the business world?

It’s competitive out there. And the process of a product competitive analysis helps businesses gather competitive intelligence to stay ahead of the competition and differentiate themselves in the market.

Here are a few actionable ways a product analysis of your competitors’ offerings is integral to your business.

Identify your distinct competitive advantages

Establishing your USPs is a crucial piece of setting your offer apart from competitors’.

Conducting a competitive analysis will help you determine what differentiates your products, which will help you set them apart in marketing materials and beyond.

This could be as simple as differentiating your product by price point or feature. For example, AllBirds and Nike both offer sneakers. But what differentiates AllBirds is their core focus on extra comfort and sustainability, which is a big part of their message and brand.

While Nike differentiates their shoes and products by focusing on sports, activewear and performance—like this video highlighting how their product performs in cold, winter conditions.

Increase market share by filling gaps and solving pain points

Opportunities arise from the areas where your competitors fall short, allowing you to introduce your products to fill those voids. Conducting an analysis of competing products can reveal their weaknesses and present a chance for you to capitalize on them.

Similarly, analyzing conversations customers are having about your competitors can surface pain points they face thanks with their offerings.

Gain market intelligence

Understanding how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors also helps you determine the biggest threats to your business. It reveals if you’re falling behind the competition, and what people prefer about other brands. The truth may hurt, but it’s vital information that you can use to improve your business.

It’s also beneficial to pay attention when your rivals introduce new products. Observe how consumers respond to their latest offerings. What areas need improvement? What aspects do people appreciate that you can incorporate into your own product development?

Add new features

Product analysis isn’t just about looking at what products and features your competitors do have—it’s also identifying what they lack.

Analyzing gaps left by your competitors’ products gives you a major advantage. It helps you identify where there are gaps to fill, and opportunities you can take advantage of by offering a new or updated product that solves pain points your competitors’ customers face.

Inform marketing campaigns

Product analysis and marketing are more closely connected than one might initially think.

Once you identify your strengths in terms of products or product features, it’s important to emphasize this information in your marketing efforts. This can be for promoting a new product release, updates to an existing product, or simply crafting campaigns that showcase your unique selling points.

Learn from competitor mistakes

The online world is a treasure trove of product reviews—regarding both your own products and those of your rivals. Just as you can gain insights from negative comments about your offerings, you can also benefit from negative reviews of your competitors’ products or services.

Feedback in the form of criticism on your rival’s online platforms or reviews can highlight areas where their products fall short. This provides you with a chance to address those issues in your own products to maintain a competitive edge.

Similarly, examining positive reviews of your products alongside the negative feedback against competitors can further inform what sets your products apart.

How do you analyze competitor products?

You can manually sift through individual competitor reviews and the comments section on their social media posts. But that’s an unrealistically time-consuming process.

An effective competitor analysis needs to balance out manual research with automated tools to help you remain agile. Here are a few competitor analysis tools and sources that will help you keep an eye on the competition frequently and efficiently.

Social media listening

To gain an intimate understanding of the conversations surrounding your competitors’ products (as well as your own), it’s essential to become an unseen observer in the digital realm, which is made possible through social media monitoring.

With social listening, you “listen” in the digital space to filter out mentions of your competitors’ products, brand name and keywords—even if your competitors, and you for that matter, aren’t tagged.

With Sprout, you can also use sentiment analysis to compare how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors’.

If you’re interested in exploring social listening for analyzing your product, assessing competitors, and gaining more in-depth insights into social media, contact us to schedule a demonstration.

Schedule a Demo

Online reviews

Reviews written about your competitors are a valuable resource when it comes to competitive product analysis. You likely already have a system for managing online reviews for your business and product—add analyzing competitors’ review into the mix.

Dig into reviews, good and bad, about your competitors and their products—on their site, Google reviews, official review sites (TripAdvisor for experiences, Yelp for the food industry or G2 for tech products and software), Reddit and any other sources you can think of.

Exploring the positive and negative opinions of consumers towards your rival companies’ goods and services can reveal potential prospects and motivate the creation or modification of your own products.

Social media monitoring

Any social media pro knows that customer feedback and questions don’t just come in through reviews. They also show up in the social comments section every single day.

Use your social media monitoring tools to keep track of what people are saying about your products and your competitors’—it’s the perfect way to outpace them, and constantly be improving your offerings at the same time.

It’s best to formally track this type of feedback so you don’t have to dig through hundreds of comments to resurface feedback later. With a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you’re able to manage mentions of your brand—even when you’re not tagged—with keywords and incoming messages across all of your channels in one central hub.

Utilize tags to organize customer feedback on your products by making unique labels such as “Product Feedback: Positive” and “Product Feedback: Negative” to quickly access and analyze this information.

Try competitor products for yourself

This is one of the more hands-on methods. Trying a competitor’s products for yourself is one of the best ways to get an up-close understanding of their product—from functionality and areas of frustration you experience to design triumphs and shortcomings.

Combining personal experience with customer feedback provides a comprehensive evaluation of the situation and allows you to compare your own performance against it.

Third-party research

Competitive research is certainly a large task, especially within industries with saturated markets. You can always employ third-party research to learn more about your competitors, their products and how people feel about them. For example, hiring an outside company to survey your target market. This is a great way to get in-depth, direct information about how your target market feels about your industry, competitors and what they love or hate in a product.

What to look for during a competitor product analysis

We have discussed the reasons and methods for conducting a competitive analysis of a product. Now, let’s delve into the specific metrics you should monitor.

Think about some of the end goals we’ve mentioned for a competitive product analysis. For example, it helps you stay ahead of your competitors by identifying opportunities, finding gaps and weaknesses and unearthing differentiators for your products.

Here are some elements to look for as you conduct your analysis, and to inform competitive benchmarks.

1. Aesthetic or design of your products or services

This can refer to the physical or digital attributes of a product, or the experience of a more experiential-based product (think museums, theme parks, etc.)

How do the physical attributes or appearance of your competitors’ products or services stack up to yours? How do the two compare?

For example, let’s say you have a beauty brand. If you find that consumers love the packaging offered by your competitors’ products, it may be time for a packaging refresh.

Here are a few broad physical attributed to track and explore:

• What’s the packaging for your competitors’ products?
• What do consumers love, or hate, about the look of your competitors’ products?
• Are there certain colors or sizes your competitors don’t offer that you can?
• What are the characteristics of your rivals’ products in terms of their physical features? How do they stack up against your own offerings?
• What effect does their design or choice of color have on the experience of using their product?

Expert advice: Utilizing social listening can help you identify commonly used keywords that individuals use to talk about your competitors or their products and packaging. For instance, Sprout’s word cloud feature can assist in highlighting these popular keywords, allowing you to sort and focus on the most relevant feedback.

2. Pricing model

Sometimes the greatest differentiators aren’t so much about the products themselves, but rather their pricing.

How many times have consumers chosen your product, or your competitors’ products, because they were at a better price level or offered different price options?

During your analysis of competing products, take into account the following questions:

• How do your competitors’ prices compare to yours?
• For software or services, do they offer a free version?
• Are there options for adjustable pricing or deferred payment plans?
• What do they claim their most popular pricing plans are?
• If they’re subscription-based, how often are people charged? What are the pricing tiers?

3. Utility

Look at the functionality of your competitors’ products, or try them out for yourself. This will help you understand how they outpace your offering, or how they fall behind.

Consider:

• What issues do the products of your rivals address?
• What gaps do they leave?
• What customer pain points are your competitor’s products solving, or creating?

4. Product quality

The value of a product is determined by its quality, and the loyalty of your audience depends on it as well.

A major way to pull ahead of the competition is by clearly offering a higher-quality product.

As you conduct your research, while you look through reviews or try your competition’s products for yourself, pay attention to:

• How easy is the product to use and learn? Is it intuitive?
• What is the quality level? Is it prone to breaking easily?
• Is it durable?
• Does it scratch easily?
• For software, is it vulnerable to crashing or slow processing?

 5. Customer service

The quality of the customer service you provide has the power to set you apart from your competitors—or send you falling behind them.

It doesn’t matter how great a product is—if customers can’t get the help they need from a customer service team, the experience with the product and brand is soured.

During your analysis of competing products, assess the level of customer service provided by your competitors. Take into account:

• Are there common customer complaints? What are the themes?
• What do people love about your competitors’ customer service?
• Do they provide tailored responses to customer inquiries, or are their replies generic and careless?
• What is the tone of their customer service voice?
• How helpful are their agents? How often do they appear to miss messages?
• Is their engagement proactive? That is, do they engage with and celebrate positive comments, as well as questions or complaints?

By following this procedure, you will gain a clearer understanding of the areas in which they excel compared to you, as well as the areas where they are lacking.

Leverage social media and AI to conduct an in-depth competitive product analysis

Gone are the days where product analysis always required a lengthy process, customer interviews or focus groups.

All the information you require about your competitors’ products and your own is readily available to you – you just need to learn how to extract it.

Leverage the billions of conversations across social media to gain a better understanding of how people feel about your competitors’ products. And use that information to inspire your own, and understand how to outpace other brands.

Using the capabilities of social media platforms and artificial intelligence tools, discovering these insights is effortless, instantaneous and simple. Test out Sprout Social at no cost for a month, or ask for a tailored demonstration of our social listening service.

The post How to conduct a competitive product analysis, and why you should appeared first on Sprout Social.

Conducting a competitive product analysis is an important part of any business’s success. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ products, you can make informed decisions about how to improve your own products and services. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of conducting a competitive product analysis, as well as some strategies for doing so.

The primary benefit of conducting a competitive product analysis is that it allows you to gain insight into what your competitors are doing right and wrong. By understanding what your competitors are doing well, you can learn from their successes and incorporate those elements into your own product or service. Additionally, by understanding what your competitors are doing wrong, you can avoid making the same mistakes. This can help you create a product or service that is more competitive and attractive to customers.

Another benefit of conducting a competitive product analysis is that it can help you identify potential opportunities in the market. By understanding the needs of your competitors’ customers, you can identify areas where you can offer a better product or service. This can help you gain a competitive edge and increase your market share.

Finally, conducting a competitive product analysis can help you stay ahead of the competition. By understanding what your competitors are doing, you can anticipate their next moves and develop strategies to counter them. This can help you stay one step ahead of the competition and maintain your edge in the market.

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of conducting a competitive product analysis, let’s look at some strategies for doing so. One of the most effective strategies is to conduct customer surveys. Surveys can provide valuable insight into customer preferences and needs, which can help you identify areas where you can improve your own products or services. Additionally, surveys can provide valuable feedback on how customers perceive your competitors’ products and services, which can help you identify potential opportunities in the market.

Another strategy for conducting a competitive product analysis is to monitor your competitors’ marketing efforts. By understanding how your competitors are advertising their products and services, you can gain insight into their strategies and develop counter-strategies to stay ahead of them. Additionally, monitoring your competitors’ marketing efforts can help you identify potential opportunities in the market that they may have overlooked.

Finally, it’s important to stay up-to-date on industry trends and developments. By understanding new technologies and innovations, you can identify potential opportunities in the market and develop strategies to capitalize on them. Additionally, staying up-to-date on industry trends can help you anticipate your competitors’ next moves and develop counter-strategies to stay ahead of them.

In conclusion, conducting a competitive product analysis is an important part of any business’s success. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ products, you can make informed decisions about how to improve your own products and services. Additionally, by understanding customer preferences and needs, monitoring your competitors’ marketing efforts, and staying up-to-date on industry trends, you can gain a competitive edge and increase your market share.

Source: sproutsocial.com