Competitive Analysis Template
The competitive analysis template allows you to examine your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses so you can find market opportunities to grow your business. By analyzing the competitive market share and monitoring your direct competition on an ongoing basis, you’ll be able to:
- Quickly identify market trends and adapt your campaigns, marketing strategies and customer support to outperform the competition.
- Define your competitors’ (and your own) strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities to define your competitive advantage.
- Understand high-level market opportunities and threats to reduce risks by creating data-backed solutions that highlight your unique value.
- Competitively build your brand by taking advantage of the gaps in the market.
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The competitive analysis template allows you to examine your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses so you can find market opportunities to grow your business. By analyzing the competitive market share and monitoring your direct competition on an ongoing basis, you’ll be able to:
- Quickly identify market trends and adapt your campaigns, marketing strategies and customer support to outperform the competition.
- Define your competitors’ (and your own) strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities to define your competitive advantage.
- Understand high-level market opportunities and threats to reduce risks by creating data-backed solutions that highlight your unique value.
- Competitively build your brand by taking advantage of the gaps in the market.
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Competitive analysis reports examples you can customize
How to create a competitive analysis report with Xtensio
- Click and start editing, no account or credit card required.
Follow along with the competitor analysis template instructional copy. Add charts, graphs, images, and videos to customize your competitive analysis. Drag & drop. Resize. It’s the easiest editor ever.
- Customize everything in the analysis to match your brand guidelines.
Define your style guide. Add your (or your client’s) brand fonts and colors. You can even pull colors directly from a website to easily brand your analysis.
- Work on key details of your competitor analysis report together on the cloud.
Add colleagues (or clients) to collaborate on your competitive analysis report. Changes automatically save and sync across all devices, in real-time.
- Share a link. Present a slideshow. Embed. Download a PDF/PNG.
The living competitive analysis report seamlessly adapts to your workflow. No more jumping from tool-to-tool to create different types of deliverables.
- Reuse and repurpose.
Save your own custom case study templates. Or copy and merge into other documents.
What is a competitive analysis framework?
The Competitive Analysis Template is a model for understanding the competitive landscape. Competitor research is crucial to the success of your business and this framework analyzes the market competition and allows you to quickly adapt to changes to stay ahead of the trends.
An effective competitor analysis will help you:
- Identify market trends and anticipate changes to adapt your business’s campaigns and marketing strategies.
- Define your competitors’ (and your own) strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities to define your competitive advantage.
- Understand your competitive advantage and market opportunities which you can use to position your business for success.
- Identify and adapt to the current competitive market trends.
- Reduce risks and threats by quickly adapting to changes in the industry.
What information do I need to create a competitive analysis?
The first step in competitor research is identifying who the competition is. There are many ways to identify competitors, but the easiest is just Googling yourself – seriously! Start with a simple web search and relevant social media platforms for your business name, product ideas and overarching business idea. From there you can explore the competition’s digital footprint as deep as you need to get a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape. Search the competition’s website content and social media presence, news mentions, support threads, reviews and online communities – to name a few!
As you’re documenting your competitors track the basics:
- Name of the business
- Location
- Mission statement
- Product offering
- Messaging
- Pricing
When analyzing each competitor’s products or services, make sure you take a close look at the customer experience on their website, their content marketing, social media, and digital footprint.
- How solid is their product photography and copywriting? How do they display their offering and communicate value?
- Where are their calls to action on the website? Are they obvious or do they get lost?
- How long does it take them to respond to email, live chat and contact form submissions?
- What information is included in their marketing banners and callouts? How about their email campaigns?
- What is the frequency of their promotions? What benefits do those promotions provide to their customers and potential shoppers, as well as their business?
- How many people follow them on social media? What is the engagement rate of their audience?
How do you write a competitive analysis?
Writing a competitor analysis is the easy part. Once you’ve done a deep dive into the competitive landscape, you’re ready to create a side-by-side comparison of your business and the competition to help your team strategize better, plan business growth, content marketing, customer success, social media and other communication strategies to provide a clearer vision for the organization. Get started with Xtensio’s competitive analysis template.
Step #1: Describe your competitors
Introduce your competitor analysis with your target audience in mind and outline the general market landscape. You’ll list your three main competitors and their basic information: product, mission, location, company size, web presence, social media channels and tagline.
Step #2 Analyze the competition’s strengths and weaknesses
It’s easy to notice what your competition is doing wrong, but what about the things they’re doing right? In order to compete, dissect all aspects of your competition by completing a SWOT analysis (Strength, Weakness, opportunities and Threat Analysis) for each competitor. What are their customers happy about? What are they complaining about? Use this opportunity to dive into some qualitative competitor analysis.
Go online and collect YouTube and Facebook comments, as well as Twitter chats. Go out and chat with your competitors’ customers if you can interact with them face to face. You can use all of this information to find your strengths, weaknesses and your competitive advantage.
Step #3 Create your target market breakdown and outline actionable steps
After summarizing your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, it’s time to look at the bigger picture as to how this fits in with your marketing strategies. It’s time to figure out where every major competitor currently fits into the competitive landscape. What’s each competitor’s position in respect to the market landscape criteria? Add new data pieces to compare across the board. Surely, this will help your audience understand the market and where your competitors stand concerning one another.
A competitive analysis will allow you to plan effective strategies to battle the competition and establish yourself in your target market. Remember, the competitive analysis is meant to help your team plan and strategize to stay ahead of the competition. A report that communicates the findings of your competitive analysis will ensure stakeholders are on board and in the know. Add your team to collaborate or share a link so you can analyze your report together. Check out Xtensio’s competitive analysis template how-to guide for more tips. Take advantage of other strategic frameworks to review the broader picture:
Pair your Competitive Analysis with other strategic planning tools such as the SWOT Analysis and its alternatives, and Ecosystem Mapping. Findings from this analysis will also inform your Business Model and Brand Positioning.
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By comparing your competition, you’ll be able to visualize the market by competitor, dive into each company’s strengths and weaknesses and elaborate on products and services so you can quickly adapt to market changes to stay ahead of the competition.
Yes! We have a couple of competitive analysis examples above that you can use as a starting point for your own. If you find a style you like, use it for your inspiration. Just click on one of the examples further up on this page to save it as a folio and start editing with your own content.
The living documents such as a competitive analysis allows you to instantly sync your entire team throughout the process. The document can easily be updated as your product or service evolves, and as your team optimizes the strategic process.
You can add collaborators to work in real-time. And you can share the customizable link to keep internal and external colleagues up-to-date as the project progresses.
Yes! You can invite as many people as you’d like to collaborate on your competitive analysis, ensuring your whole team is aligned in real-time. Here’s more on real-time collaboration.
When you’re ready to share your competitive analysis, choose between presenting it as a full-screen digital slideshow, sending it as a responsive web link or exporting your analysis as a PDF or PNG (premium feature). All of your share options are located at the top right of your edit screen. Learn more about the different ways to share your folios in this tutorial video.
We do! There are a number of different business strategy templates, examples and resources to guide you through the process of establishing and growing your business. Check out our Strategy toolbox to find more tools and resources.
