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Simple Method to Analyze your Competition

Hello everyone,

I recently wrote an article about competition analysis that you can read entirely here

I hope this little guide will prove helpful to you, but in case it is too dense to read, I thought it would be a good idea to write a little summary here.
Put simply, a competitive analysis is an evaluation of your market environment. Its main aims are to make you understand how your competitors work and to identify trends and opportunities in the market. Once you studied your market sizing (I’ll write an article on this point within the next few weeks), and your business is either already in the arena, or just got validated (and you’ll find my last article on the topic here: https://insights.corepo.org/how-to-validate-b2b-idea/ , you can start analyzing your competition environment by following these 4 steps:

1. Understand who is part of your competition
Find out who your competitors are, and what products are in competition with yours. Collect as much relevant information as possible about these companies (size, geographical and online presence, different product lines…). This allows you to see how competitive the market is.

2. Analyze your competitors’ sales and marketing strategy
Study each step of the selling process: channels, pricing, content marketing. You can see overall what works well and what doesn’t, and get inspired to adapt your own strategy.

3. Examine the results of your competitors’ strategy
Have a thorough look at the results they get in terms of engagement on their online platforms, but also at their sales.

4. Run a SWOT analysis
This final step consists of analyzing and classifying what has potential to make each competitor more or less powerful within their own characteristics (Strengths and Weaknesses), as well as within the environment itself (Opportunities and Threats). Repeat the operation for each competitor, and for yourself. This will show you on which aspects your brand can improve, and what element you have to take in consideration outside of your company.


To help you building your competitive landscape, several tools exist for different purposes. I gathered some data with corepo.org to make a few lists. These will help you for each step of your analysis:
Tools for finding how big a company is → makes step 1 easier
Tools for assessing how strong a companies online profile is with respect to backlinks and mentions in pagerank or estimated monthly traffic → useful when doing step 3
Tools for finding out the funding of a company → practical for step 4
Tools for LinkedIn automation → particularly useful when I want to know more about a company and reach out to former employees -- sales people in particular are quite good to talk to
Tools to find people’s email address → useful for reaching out

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