Being left behind by your competitors in business and not knowing why is one of the most frustrating situations.
Even if your products are top quality and already give outstanding client service and informative marketing, you still watch your market share decrease.
To gain an in-depth understanding of how you compete with other companies in your field, you need to do a competitive landscape study.
By using your company's strengths, you might gain progress on rivals rather than taking a reactive strategy.
Doing it well requires research and work, but the benefits may be substantial. Let's learn more about the concept of landscape analysis and its importance below!
What Is Competitive Landscape Analysis?
Competitive landscape analysis is a systematic approach to finding and studying competitors.
You can carry up an in-depth evaluation of their product development, marketing, sales, and other important strategies.
By using this study, you can avoid wondering about the causes of your company's failures, and instead create solutions based on accurate and trustworthy data.
When doing a competitive landscape study, here are five main aspects that you should look at:
- Who competes with your business? List every company that exists in the market that offers related services or products.
- Describe the products and services that your rivals provide. Observe what other businesses are giving and compare it against what your company offers.
- The advantages and disadvantages of your competitors: You can take advantage of their benefits and avoid the drawbacks that other businesses encounter by avoiding them in your company.
- Which strategies do rivals use to achieve their goals? You could investigate competitors' sales, marketing, and overall competitive strategies.
- Market outlook: Understand how your industry is changing and how it may affect both your business and your competitors.
One thing you should keep in mind is that the marketplace may shift over time and change based on the metric that is being evaluated.
That's why it is important to do a competitive landscape analysis every once in a while.
What Makes a Landscape Analysis Essential?
Before starting a landscape analysis, you need to make sure of the needs and desires that you want to achieve.
The data that you collect through the competitive landscape will allow you to understand the needs and desires of the neighborhood in depth, ensuring that they remain prioritized when creating a new program and help you create an effective learning system that is accepted by the entire community.
5 Landscape Analysis Frameworks
There are various landscape analysis frameworks that you can use. Each framework will present different insights.
Here are 5 common landscape analysis frameworks and some ideas on the concepts that could be explored:
1. SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is a process to thoroughly examine your business. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Each of these components is described as follows:
- Strengths: Known as advantages, knowledge, and experience are two examples.
- Weakness: This refers to limitations that could make performance tough, such as a lack of resources.
- Opportunities: These are outside variables that can be taken advantage of, like changing client demands.
- Threats: External elements that put the organization or business in danger, e.g. fierce competition.
Doing a SWOT analysis is highly beneficial for business strategy planning as it can unveil multiple thoughts about potential opportunities to take advantage of and risks to reduce.
2. BCG Matrix
The BCG Matrix is a framework that can help you decide how to prioritize different products, services, or aspects of your business.
The matrix was popularized by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and evaluates products based on two factors: growth and market share.
The items are then sorted into four different groups:
- Pets: are things that grow slowly. Usually, these products are not profitable.
- Question Marks: Ttems with a high growth rate but a small market share. Though they need to be invested in to gain a larger market share, these products have the potential to be profitable in the future.
- Stars: Products that have a large market share and quick rate of expansion. These goods usually bring in a great deal of income and need to be invested in to stay in this position.
- Cash Cows: Products with a large market share but a slow growth rate. These products generate stable profits and can be used to finance investments in "question marks" and "stars".
By comparing your products to competitors, the BCG Matrix can help you decide where to invest in terms of product development, line of expansion, and product marketing.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when using the BCG Matrix:
- The matrix is only a decision-making tool and should not be used in isolation.
- The placement of products in the BCG Matrix can change over time.
- It is important to consider factors other than growth and market share, such as profitability, product life cycle, and technology.
3. Strategic Group Analysis
Strategic Group Analysis is a landscape analysis framework that simplifies combining competitors based on their business models or strategies.
Providing a better understanding of the relationships between businesses is the purpose of all this. Here are a few criteria that are used to classify competitors:
- Product diversity.
- Geographic coverage.
- Markets served.
- Distribution channels used.
- Marketing strategies.
- Product quality or pricing.
The benefits of Strategic Group Analysis can help you:
- Identify your main competitors and do the grouping analysis mentioned earlier.
- Find out about the strategies and business plans used by each competitor and how they go up against one another.
- Discover market opportunities that your industry has yet to take advantage of.
- Make better business decisions by using the data that you've learned about your competitors. To stay competitive in the market, you can also create winning strategies.
To obtain a full understanding of your competitive landscape, ensure that you use a range of analytical strategies when conducting a strategic group analysis.
4. Porter’s Five Forces
Porter's Five Forces Analysis is a landscape analysis framework that helps you to evaluate the overall strength of a particular market.
Overall marketplace competitiveness is determined by five forces. The five forces are:
- The intensity of the competitive landscape.
- Level of supplier power.
- Buyer’s entry/exit costs.
- The threat of substitute products.
- Access to the market for new entrants.
The Porter's Five Forces framework can be especially useful if you want to enter a new market, expand a product line, or offer services.
With the help of Porter's Five Forces, you can spot the main obstacles that your business may encounter and create a suitable strategy of action to address them.
5. Perceptual Mapping
You can learn more about how a product or brand is positioned by your competitors with the help of Perceptual Mapping.
Customer feedback plays a critical role in Perceptual Mapping since it helps to understand how the market views a given company or product. This mapping allows you to make decisions about future positioning efforts.
How to Gather Information for a Competitive Analysis
Finding out where to gather information about your competitors is necessary after selecting the appropriate analysis framework to structure your competitive landscape.
Here are some strategies for carrying out a thorough competitive landscape using suitable frameworks. To achieve strategic planning goals, use the following frameworks:
- SWOT Analysis
- Strategic Group
- Porter’s Five Forces
- Strategic Group Analysis
Landscape analysis frameworks that are suggested if you wish to enter a new market include:
- Porter’s Five Forces
- SWOT Analysis
- Strategic Group Analysis
If you want to expand your product line, you can use the following framework:
- Porter’s Five Forces
- BCG Matrix
- Perceptual Mapping
If you want to compare products, you can use the following framework:
- BCG Matrix
- Perceptual Mapping
The following framework can be used to learn about the competition's nature:
- Strategic Group Analysis
Last but not least, the following framework is suitable for analyzing position and brand perception:
- Perceptual Mapping
- Strategic Group Analysis
How Sequence Stat Help You Conduct Landscape Analysis
As mentioned above, doing a competitive landscape analysis is essential for your company to map how competitors work so that you can outrank them.
Equally important to landscape analysis, you must analyze competitors’ domains to dominate the search engine page results.
In this case, Domain Watchlist from Sequence Stat may help you conduct a thorough analysis of competitors’ domains.
Domain Watchlist allows you to get a summary of the SEO indicators in the competitor's domain, including market share, brand position, and average absolute and organic ranking.
Additionally, our innovation offers a list of competing websites and terms that rank highly in search results.
Not only Domain Watchlist, you can also utilize several features on Sequence Stat, including:
- Market Share on targeted keywords.
- Domain Position on targeted keywords.
- Average Ranking on targeted keywords among organic competitors.
- Ranking Monitoring among direct competitors.
To ensure that the analysis's outcomes are relevant and engaging, customize your approach by studying competition profiles, consumer preferences, and market trends.
In this case, Sequence Stat can be one of the best options to make your SEO strategy more effective and simplify your SEO tasks. To enjoy every feature at ease, you can register for Sequence Stat, and let's witness how easy SEO tasks can be!