Welcome back. Now let’s talk about what a competitive analysis actually consists of. A good competitive analysis typically covers on or more of the following areas:
1. Competitive Landscape & Positioning: Who are the competitors and how do they position themselves in the market?
The goal is to identify a broad set of the different competitors in your industry. This type of analysis is useful early on to understand the competitive dynamics and where potential white space is. Here’s how to do it:
Identify direct and indirect competitors relevant to your company
Review positioning statements and messaging on their web site and figure out the key areas or value propositions that they differentiate on (ex. price, quality, volume, etc.)
Map out market and target customers in a visual format based on differentiators (see examples on the next page)
Identify potential gaps and white spaces
2. UI/UX Breakdown: What are the common design / customer experience patterns?
A UX breakdown analyzes and compares the user interfaces and customer experience flows across top competitors. This is most useful when you’re looking to generate design ideas, improve your own product's UI/UX, or if you want to benchmark against others. Here’s what to do:
Select key user flows to analyze (e.g. signup, checkout)
Document user steps through each flow
Capture screenshots and annotations
Identify patterns and best practices
Call out major differences between competitors
3. Feature Comparison: What are the key features offered by each?
A feature comparison goes deeper to compare the features and capabilities of a few key competitor's products. It is helpful when looking to build a minimum viable product or figuring out a new feature and you want to see what competitors are missing. Here’s what to do:
List all major features of each product or competitor
Create comparison table or matrix
Highlight unique or differentiated features
Identify any missing must-have features
Summarize key insights and opportunities
4. Business Model & Pricing: What is the business model and price points of each?
This research compares the business and revenue models of competitors as well as their pricing strategies. it is most relevant when evaluating your own product’s monetization approaches and pricing. Here’s what to do (this could also be part of your feature comparison table):
Determine revenue models across competitors (ads, subscriptions, etc)
Document pricing pages and options
Outline free plans, discounts, incentives
Benchmark pricing across tiers
Identify potential opportunities
A good start is to your competitor analysis is use google and to identify potential competitors, then review research and industry reports, and visit their sites individually to get a feel for where each one is focusing. Start with a quick scan to figure out all the different companies for the competitive landscape and then pick the most relevant few to do deeper dives for a UX breakdown, feature comparison, or business model and pricing.
In the next section, we’ll see some examples of each type of competitive analysis.
