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Blog Marketing How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

Written by: Midori Nediger Nov 09, 2023

Your business will always have competition.

And if you don’t know what that competition is up to, you could be missing out on huge opportunities.

That’s why a competitive analysis is so crucial to your success as a business. It gives you the tools to quickly adapt to any changes in the competitive landscape and potentially capitalize on industry trends that your competitors haven’t even noticed.

So let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is a competitive analysis report?

A competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors compared to those of your own business.

Typically, a competitive analysis report will contain:

• A description of your business’s target market
• Details about the features of your product compared to your competitors’ products
• A breakdown of current and projected market share, sales, and revenues
• Comparisons of pricing models
• An analysis of marketing strategy and social media strategy
• A description of customer ratings of the features of each competitor

Whether you’re a startup trying to break into the marketplace , a consultant trying to get results for your client, or an established company looking to cement your foothold against the competition, a well-researched competitive analysis gives you the tools you need to make strategic decisions.

Your competitive analysis should inform your marketing plan , your business plan , your consultant report and every part of your high-level business strategy.

But how do you actually create a competitive analysis report?

How to make competitor analysis report :

• Start with a competitor overview
• Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends
• Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix
• Summarize your strengths and weaknesses with a SWOT analysis
• Show where you fit in the competitive landscape
• Use a competitor analysis template for a professional look and feel

The level of detail you include in each section of your competitive analysis report will vary depending on the stage of your business growth and your goals. For example, a startup might create a report that focuses on market research, while an established business might dive into detail on an emerging competitor.

But let’s talk about the parts of a competitive analysis that every report should include.

1. Start with a competitor overview

A strong report shows exactly what a company must out-compete to be successful.

Meaning you must audit any product or service that currently solves the problem your business is trying to solve for customers and write a quick profile for each competitor.

Like the template below, each competitor profile might include:

• The company’s revenue and market share
• The company’s size and information about their management team
• A broad description of the company’s strengths and weaknesses
• An overview of how the company is perceived by customers

This overview will help your readers get a big-picture view of the market landscape.

2. Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends

You can’t create a competitive analysis report without doing extensive market research , which is all about gathering information to understand your customers, identify opportunities to grow, and recognize trends in the industry.

This research can help you put together the customer personas that will guide business and marketing decisions down the line, and allow you to plan for any shifts that might disrupt the marketplace.

You can conduct primary market research, with:

• Customer interviews
• Online surveys or questionnaires
• In-person focus groups
• Purchasing a competitor product to study packaging and delivery experience

Or secondary market research, by:

• Reading company records
• Examining the current economic conditions
• Researching relevant technological developments

When assembling your market research you may just want provide a high-level summary of the industry trends, like this competitor analysis example shows:

Or you may want to dive into detail on the demographics of a particular consumer segment, like this:

But if you’re a consultant or advisor struggling to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, the report below would be ideal. Covering everything from market forecasts to consumer profiles, it can help you get clients and decision-makers on board.

3. Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix

The feature comparison is arguably the most important part of the competitive analysis. Breaking down your product and your competitors’ products feature-by-feature will allow you to see what really sets everyone apart.

In addition to specific product features, here are some attributes that you might include in a feature comparison matrix:

• Product quality
• Number of features
• Ease of use
• Customer support
• Brand/style/image

The most common format for a features analysis is a simple matrix with you and your competitors along one side and all of the relevant features along the other. You can check off or rate how you perform in each area:

But these tables can get pretty long. Another approach is to focus on the things that provide the most value to the user, like in this competitor analysis example from Mint. It only includes ease of use, costs, and benefits:

If you want to visualize your comparisons in an engaging way, you could use a comparison infographic . 

Great resources for this section of your competitive analysis report are product rating sites like Capterra and G2Crowd . They’ll give you an unbiased view of your company and your competitors.

And as with any market research, it’s critical that you speak with real people who use your product and your competitors’ products. That’s the only way to get an accurate picture of how your target customers rate the competition .

4. Summarize your strengths and weaknesses in a SWOT analysis

When you’re conducting research for your competitive analysis, it’s going to be messy. You’ll have a lot of data and it’ll be hard for an outsider to understand.

That’s what makes the SWOT analysis so essential.

A SWOT analysis is a framework for evaluating your competitive position by listing your key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It can act like a short summary of the rest of your competitive analysis report for anyone who doesn’t have time to dig into the details.

Click the template above to enter our online SWOT analysis maker tool. Customize the template to your liking–no design no-how required.

Here are some questions to kickstart your SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: What are we doing really well (in terms of marketing, products, sales, branding, technology, etc.)?
• Weaknesses: What are we struggling with? What’s holding us back?
• Opportunities: What’s the weakest area for our biggest competitor? Are there any gaps in the market that aren’t current being addressed? What has recently changed in our business or the market?
• Threats: What is our biggest competitor doing much better than us? What new products/features are they working on? What problems aren’t we currently addressing?

In your report, you could arrange your SWOT analysis in a simple list, but it can be helpful to use color-coded quadrants, like the competitor analysis example below. Note how each quadrant is paired with an icon:

5. Show where you fit in the competitive landscape

After summarizing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it’s time to look at the bigger picture. It’s time to figure out where every major competitor currently fits into the competitive landscape.

The most popular way of doing this is to identify the two dimensions that are most important for being competitive in your industry and plot them on a matrix, like this one from the Boston Consulting Group:

And this one from G2 Crowd (which looks at market presence and customer satisfaction):

You may want to focus on where you fit in the market landscape based on your own biggest strengths and weaknesses, or the biggest threats and opportunities you identified in the SWOT analysis.

Or, it may be enough just to summarize in words the features and benefits that set your apart from your competitors (which is a great way to end your report on a high note).

Competitor analysis examples for strategic planning

Let’s delve into some competitor analysis examples that can empower your organization to navigate the market effectively.

1. Competitor analysis example for marketing specialists

Imagine this: You are a Marketing Specialist and your goal is to establish a strong online presence and attract a diverse user base. However, you face stiff competition from established players in the market. Here are some things you should look into when doing your competitor analysis:

Competitor analysis focus:

• SEO strategies: Analyze competitors’ websites to understand their SEO strategies. Identify high-ranking keywords, backlink strategies, and content optimization techniques . Alternatively, if you’re running a local business, you might want to analyze and scrape Google Maps listings to better assess how companies are optimizing Google My Business to generate leads.
• Social media engagement: Examine competitors’ social media presence. Evaluate the type of content that garners engagement, the frequency of posts, and audience interactions.
• Online advertising: Investigate competitors’ online advertising campaigns. Are they leveraging Google Ads, social media ads, or other platforms? Assess the messaging, visuals, and targeting criteria.
• Content marketing: Scrutinize competitors’ content marketing efforts. Identify the topics that resonate with their audience, the formats they use (blogs, videos, infographics), and the platforms they prioritize.

Here’s a SWOT analysis template to help you get started:

2. Competitor analysis example for SME business development managers

Imagine this: As the business development manager for a medium sized start up, you are tasked with expanding the client base. The market is crowded with similar service providers, and differentiation is key. When doing your competitor analysis report, look into:

• Client testimonials and case studies: Explore competitors’ websites for client testimonials and case studies. Identify success stories and areas where clients express satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
• Service offerings: Analyze the range of services offered by competitors. Identify gaps in their offerings or areas where you can provide additional value to clients.
• Pricing models: Investigate competitors’ pricing structures. Are they offering packages, subscription models, or customized solutions? Determine whether there’s room for a more competitive pricing strategy .
• Partnerships and collaborations: Explore potential partnerships or collaborations that competitors have formed. This can provide insights into untapped markets or innovative service delivery methods.

Here’s a competitor analysis comparison chart template that you could use:

3. Competitor analysis example for product managers

Imagine this: You are a Product Manager for a consumer electronics company tasked with improving your company’s products and services. The market is buzzing with innovation, and staying ahead requires a deep understanding of competitor products.

• Feature comparison: Conduct a detailed feature-by-feature comparison of your product with competitors. Identify unique features that set your product apart and areas where you can enhance or differentiate.
• User experience (UX): Evaluate the user experience of competitors’ products. Analyze customer reviews, app ratings, and usability feedback to understand pain points and areas for improvement.
• Technological advancements: Investigate the technological capabilities of competitors. Are they integrating AI, IoT, or other cutting-edge technologies? Assess whether there are emerging technologies you can leverage.
• Product lifecycle management: Examine competitors’ product release cycles. Identify patterns in their product launches and assess whether there are opportunities for strategic timing or gap exploitation.

To help you get started, use this competitive analysis report template to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the product or service

How to present a competitor analysis

Presenting a competitor analysis effectively involves organizing and communicating information about your competitors in a clear and concise manner. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to present a competitor analysis:

• Introduction: Start with a brief introduction to set the stage. Outline the purpose of the competitor analysis and its significance in the current market context.
• Competitor identification: Clearly list and identify the main competitors. Include both direct and indirect competitors. Briefly describe each competitor’s core business and market presence.
• Key metrics and performance: Present key metrics and performance indicators for each competitor. This may include market share, revenue, growth rate, and any other relevant quantitative data.
• SWOT analysis: Conduct a concise SWOT analysis for each competitor. Summarize their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use a simple visual representation if possible.
• Market positioning: Discuss how each competitor is positioned in the market. This could include their target audience, unique selling propositions, and any specific market niches they occupy. Also, focus on finding keywords , as your competitor’s targeted keywords are the main source of information on their online market performance.
• Strategic moves: Highlight recent strategic moves made by your competitors. This could include product launches, partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, or changes in pricing strategy. Discuss how these moves impact the competitive landscape.
• Recommendations and implications: Based on the analysis, provide recommendations and implications for your company. Identify opportunities to capitalize on competitors’ weaknesses and outline potential threats that need to be addressed. Discuss any adjustments to your own strategy that may be necessary in response to the competitive landscape.

3 tips to improve your competitive analysis report design

How you design your competitive analysis report can have a significant impact on your business success. The right report design can inspire stakeholders to take action based on your findings, while a mediocre design may reflect poorly on your hard work.

Here are a few report design best practices to keep in mind when designing your competitive analysis report:

• Start with a competitive analysis report template
• Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent
• Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

1. Start with a competitor analysis template

The quickest way to lose the confidence of your stakeholders is to present a messy, amateur report design. Besides distracting from the content of the report, it might even put your credibility at risk.

Starting with a pre-designed competitor analysis template, like the one below, takes almost all of the design work out of the mix so you can focus on the content (while still impressing your stakeholders).

And if you’re a consultant competing for a project, a pre-designed template may just give you the edge you need to land that client.

Click on any of our templates; you’ll enter our online drag and drop report maker tool. No design know-how required.

2. Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent

If you take a look at the competitor analysis template below, you might notice that the designer has switched up the layout from page to page, but many of the other design elements are kept consistent.

That consistency helps the report design feel cohesive while making it easier for readers to quickly skim for key pieces of information.

Here are a few quick guidelines for keeping important design elements consistent:

• Use the same color scheme throughout your report (with one highlight color to draw attention to key takeaways and important numbers)
• Use the same font styles for your headers, subheaders, and body text (with no more than 2-3 font styles per report)
• Use the same style of visuals throughout your report (like flat icons or illustrated icons… but not both)

3. Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

The challenge with a competitive analysis report is that you collect heaps of background research, and you have to condense it into a brief report that your client will actually read.

And written summaries will only get you so far.

Visuals like charts and tables are a much better way to communicate a lot of research quickly and concisely, as seen in the market research summary below.

Even lists can be made more engaging and informative by spacing out list items and giving more emphasis to headers:

The more you can replace descriptive paragraphs and long lists with thoughtful visuals, the more your readers will thank you.

A competitive analysis will allow you to think up effective strategies to battle your competition and establish yourself in your target market.

And a report that communicates the findings of your competitive analysis will ensure stakeholders are on board and in the know.

Now that you know how to design a competitive analysis report, you’re ready to get started:

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How to Perform a Competitor Analysis (Examples & Templates)

Written by: Masooma Memon

Thorough competitor analysis is a crucial aspect of any marketing plan .

It helps you understand how challenging it could be to crack a market, what strategies could work, and how you can best position your brand.

It can also tell you what strategies won’t work, what the customer’s expectations are and how much they’re willing to pay.

Without it, you likely won’t survive a day in a new market.

You need to study your competition not only when you’re starting out but also periodically after cementing your feet in the market. This way, you can stay on top of your game, consistently growing your market share.

Not sure where to start?

We’ve got an easy, 6-step competitor analysis template for you in this guide. We’ll also share templates to help you document your findings.

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Table of Contents

What is a competitor analysis, the benefits of competitor analysis for businesses, how to conduct a competitor analysis (step-by-step), 10 competitor analysis templates to use right away, ready to try out this competitor analysis template.

Competitor analysis is the strategic research of your competitors to study their strengths and weaknesses.

By taking the time to analyze your current and potential competitors, you can identify areas for improvement. You want to look out for things like their value proposition, product, marketing and sales tactics.

Besides helping you find gaps in the market, studying your competition helps in the following ways:

• Identify ways to outperform your competitors.
• Understand market trends so you can make sure your business is consistently meeting and even exceeding industry standards.
• Learn what your competitors are doing right. This is important for staying relevant in your market and growing your market share.
• Find out how your product is different from other similar products. This helps you improve brand positioning and informs your marketing copy.

A competitor analysis seeks to study all available information on your competitors, including their pricing, differentiators, positioning, product portfolio, strengths and weaknesses.

The steps below will help you uncover all this and more.

Step 1: Create a List of Your Competitors

Chances are you can recall who your competitors are in a breath.

But if you’re new, identifying who your direct and indirect competitors are will take some time.

Keep in mind that direct competitors offer products and services similar to yours, positioning them as a substitute for your business. They also mostly target the same audience.

On the flip side, indirect competitors are businesses that don’t necessarily offer the same product or service. However, their offering can solve the same customer problem that your business solves.

An easy, cost-effective way to identify competitors is by typing in your product type into the Google search bar.

Let’s suppose you have a project management software . A quick Google search on this will turn up names of companies offering the same type of software.

For creating a comprehensive list of competitors, make sure you google synonyms too. This could be a “project management tool” for the example above.

Another useful tactic is to conduct the same research on social media .

Type in what your business does and you’ll see similar business names pop up.

You can also surf hashtags to learn how other companies are using them.

Lastly, if you’re conducting market research interviews , pay attention to the brand names that target buyers mention in their interviews.

Step 2: Study Competitors’ Product Offerings and Market Share

Once you know who your competitors are, start studying them one by one.

Go through their product portfolio. Look at the products they offer, how they position and price them. Record your findings in a worksheet so you can track and analyze the data you’re gathering. Visme allows you to do this quickly and easily.

You can also grab a template from Visme’s template gallery and create a product and pricing sketch for each competitor. This will make it easy for you to visualize individual competitors.

To determine competitors’ market share, use Statista or a similar resource to get your hands on the numbers.

Track and visualize your findings in this template.

Step 3: Perform a SWOT Analysis

A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis helps you study what competitors are doing to win customers. You can also use it to identify gaps in your market .

For example, let's say a competitor’s customer support team takes pretty long to get back to customers. You can use the information to provide faster customer support and a better experience for customers.

As you hunt for competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, study the following areas:

• Sales strategy
• Brand positioning
• Marketing plan
• Discounts strategy
• Website experience
• Customer support and experience

Running an ecommerce business? Study competitors’ shipping and product return strategies as well.

An effective way to jump-start studying competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and more is through social listening. The goal? To identify what customers are saying about brands on social media channels they use, including chat forums and groups they are a part of.

A similar approach is to study customer reviews. This will help you understand what your competitors’ customers are saying about them.

Are they satisfied with the product quality? Or are they put off by their onboarding process? Do their support requests take long to get answered?

As you go about researching, record your findings in a SWOT analysis template like this one:

If you’re a Visme user, you have the benefit of coordinating your SWOT research efforts with your team.

If you and your business partner are working together on the research work, you can both access and edit the worksheet in Visme at the same time.

To do this, use the Share option from the top right side of your project dashboard in Visme. Select "Share Privately" and add your partner to the project.

From there, you two can collaborate on design , leaving comments for each other.

Step 4: Dig Deeper Into Competitors’ Pricing Strategy

We’ve already mentioned that you need to make notes on how your competitors price their products. But studying their pricing strategy goes deeper.

First, review what discounts competitors offer. Then look at how often they offer discounts.

Studying your competitors’ promo strategies will help you understand how they’re attracting customers and growing sales. It will also give you a good idea of how much the target market is willing to pay and what their expectations are in terms of discounts.

In addition to the manual research to uncover individual competitor pricing, use the same research tools mentioned above — social listening and customer reviews. They'll help identify what customers are saying. Pay attention to how customers respond to the discounts and promotions that competitors run.

Some businesses tend to offer discounts shortly after they launch new products. This can be a turn-off for shoppers who like to shop for the latest collections to stand out from their peers.

Similarly, other businesses extend product deals now and then despite telling customers it’s their last chance to buy.

See if and how that annoys customers and if there’s an opportunity for you to offer something more relevant and unique to the target market.

Step 5: Analyze Competitors’ Marketing Strategy

It’s important to study how competitors are raising brand awareness and moving leads down their marketing funnel .

Begin by identifying where your leading competitors are funneling their resources. Is it PPC they’re investing in? Or are they taking the community-building approach to attract, engage and nurture customers?

Chances are your competitors are big on educating customers, so they’re investing in content marketing .

Also, look at which channels competitors are focusing on. Is it Twitter or Reddit? Or do they have a strong presence on Instagram ?

The answer to this will help you understand where your target audience is present and which marketing channels you should focus on.

Take Clearscope , an SEO content optimization tool, for example. They take an educational approach to their marketing by creating lots of webinar content.

Ahrefs , another SEO tool, on the other hand, is also big on the educational approach. But they create blog content, not webinars.

Step 6: Document Your Research

In this last step, compile all your research in written format.

Create an action plan that includes a tactical list of steps to take. This way, you can discuss and prioritize steps to take with your team. Aim to be concise as you create this competitor analysis document.

If you create a wordy report, nobody will read it. But if you create a document that summarizes your findings and visualizes data in the form of charts and graphs, more people will read and appreciate your hard work.

Want some good news? Visme makes it uber-simple to create easy-to-read graphs and charts . It can help you create an easily shareable and visually engaging analysis document.

Design graphs using templates like the one below:

Alternatively, create new charts in your presentation or report .

All you have to do is to head to Charts & Graphs on the left side of your design dashboard and choose the type of chart you want to create.

From there, Visme gives you a chart to enter data so it can create a custom graph for your project. You can resize the graph you create, tweak its color, animate it and add other interacgive effects.

When you are done designing your document you can easily share it with the rest of your team . Head to the Share button at the top right corner of your design dashboard.

Now select Share Privately from the left side and give permission to team members. Choose whether they can view your work, comment on it, or edit it.

If you prefer to get a link for the work you’ve created, simply grab it from the bottom of the page and share it with your team.

By going into Advanced Settings on the left side, followed by Privacy . You can also allow your team to download the competitor analysis report as a PDF.

And, finally, for the templates that we promised:

1. Retail Store Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

Use this infographic template to record your competitors’ pricing, unique selling proposition (USP), revenue and more.

Since the information is arranged in a table format, you can easily study how each competitor stands against another and how they compare to business.

2. Competitor Analysis Interactive Presentation Template

If you’re looking to pitch some growth ideas to your executive team, this interactive competitor analysis template is for you.

It’s neatly designed so that all information is easy to read.

There are a handful of slides in the template that use tables to compare competitors. You can also always add more slides or remove some to suit your needs.

3. Logistics Firm Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

This is the perfect template for studying and comparing two competitors.

If you prefer, you can also use the beautifully designed template to analyze your business against your leading competitor.

And if need be, you can add another row for comparing another competitor.

4. Edtech Company Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

This is another competitor analysis template to pitch two competitors against one another.

What makes it different from the template above is that it arranges all the comparative pointers at the center. This way, you won’t need to keep looking to the left side to see which pointer you’re studying.

5. Sales Consultant Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This is a great template to record findings on each competitor.

By using it, you can easily get a snapshot of each of your competitor’s free and paid products, USP, features, target market and the marketing channels they use.

6. Media and Marketing Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This template is perfect for recording not just your competitors’ products, features and pricing but also their SWOT analysis.

Consequently, this competitor analysis template can serve as your readable database with all your research findings.

7. Nonprofit SWOT Analysis Infographic Template

If you’re looking to record your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, then this template is perfect.

And if you’re conducting several competitors’ SWOT analyses, make sure you use this template for each one of them.

8. TrackFast Technologies Sales Battlecard Template

This competitor analysis template is useful for comparing your business with your leading competition.

As well as a comparative table, it also features space to record other essential details such as company overview, key differentiators, customer pain points and benefits.

9. Design Agency Competitor Analysis Worksheet Template

This one is a simple, minimally-designed competitor analysis template for comparing various competitors.

If you need to add another column, you can easily do so by editing the template in Visme.

10. Design Tool Competitor Analysis Infographic Template

Lastly, we’ve got this competitor analysis template.

Its best feature is that the template divides each column into sub-categories, which makes it easy to analyze each aspect.

For example, within the product column, you can easily learn about a competitor’s product features, pricing and USP.

So you see, competitor analysis is critical for tapping into and growing in a market.

But remember, analyzing your competitors and their moves is only part of the task. The other part involves documenting your findings in an easy-to-read and understandable way. This is key to making sure your team implements the findings from the research.

Want to start recording your findings? Sign up for Visme’s document creator for free today and start documenting actionable takeaways.

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About the Author

Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer by day and a novel nerd by night. She crafts research-backed, actionable blog posts for SaaS and marketing brands who aim to employ quality content to educate and engage with their audience.

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How to Perform a Best-in-Class Competitor Analysis (w/ Template)

Get a full competitive analysis framework that's been real-world tested, and learn the tips and tricks for capturing competitor data and conducting research

You will learn

• The value of running a competitor analysis and how to get your stakeholders on board
• Clear and actionable steps for figuring out who your competitors are
• An easy-to-follow playbook for creating a competitor analysis steeped in research and data

Competitor analysis can be hard .

It’s particularly hard (and confusing and incredibly time-consuming) if you’re relatively new in business . Most of the data is ridiculously difficult to get. Even if you manage to dig something up, you always seem to be left with more questions than answers.

How did they manage to get $10M in funding?

Did that absurdly expensive ad campaign pay off?

Did their CEO leave because things aren’t going well at the company?

What does it all mean?

At least that’s what I felt when I was just getting started with competitive analysis. Whether you’re facing a similar struggle or just aren’t sure where to start, I hope this article will help you navigate through every step of the process.

In this article, I will share the competitive analysis framework my team and I have developed (through weeks of research and dozens of iterations), and give you some tips on where to look for data that isn’t publicly available so you can have a competitive advantage .

But before we start…

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your direct competitors’ companies, products, and marketing strategies.

To make your analysis truly useful, it’s important to:

• Pick the right competitors to analyze
• Know which aspects of your competitors’ business are worth analyzing
• Know where to look for the data
• Understand how you can use the insights to improve your own business.

Which brings us to why competitor analysis is worth doing in the first place.

Who can benefit from an analysis framework?

This framework will work well for entrepreneurs , business owners , startup founders , product managers , creators , and marketers .

It covers business metrics, a product analysis, and a marketing assessment, with the marketing bit being a little more in-depth. Feel free to skip certain parts if you’re only interested in one aspect, or better yet, delegate some steps to respective teams if you can.

It doesn’t matter much what kind of product you’re selling or how mature your business is. To use this framework, you may already have a fully functional product, an MVP, or even just a product idea. I’ll be using certain analysis tools to facilitate and automate certain bits of the process. Most of them are either freemium or have a free trial available, so all that you’ll need to invest into the analysis is your own time.

Done properly, competitive analysis will give you plenty of quantitative and qualitative data to back your own business decisions and business strategy (and no, I’m not talking about cloning your competitors’ strategies to come up with a second best product, although this can sometimes work ).

Namely, it can help you:

• Develop (or validate) your Unique Value Proposition
• Prioritize your product development by focusing on the aspects of competitors’ products customers value the most
• Improve your product by capitalizing on competitors’ weaknesses customers complain about
• Find your competitors' strengths to get benchmarks to measure your growth against
• Uncover market segments that aren’t fully served by competitors
• Create a new product category by identifying gaps between what your competitors offer and what the customers need

Who even are your competitors?

I can sense you rolling your eyes at me, but hear me out.

If you’re serious about competitive analysis, it’s not enough to just evaluate the two Industry Leaders everyone’s talking about (that kind of analysis will likely get you depressed real quick).

The competitors you pick for the analysis determine the insights you’ll get at the end, and the decisions you’ll make, based in part on those insights. That’s why including different kinds of competitors (big and small, direct and indirect) into the analysis is critical if you want the results to be comprehensive.

Here’s a handy way to think about your competition that’s based off of Myk Pono’s classification :

It’s best to include at least one competitor from each category into your analysis to make it truly comprehensive.

Whether you can instantly think of over a dozen competitors or can barely recall five, it’s a good idea to turn to Google or a different a search engine ( DuckDuckGo , anyone?) and look up your product category. Examine the products within the top 50 results, along with the ads that are displayed in response to your query — more likely than not, you’ll come across companies you’ve forgotten about, or maybe even learn about a few newcomers.

To give you an example, I’m going to imagine I’m launching a vacation rental website — an alternative to AirBnB. Here’s what my list of competitors may look like broken down by categories:

Now that you have a comprehensive list of your competitors with similar products, it’s time to start the actual analysis.

As you go through the process, feel free to use this Google Sheets template I’ve created.

In the spreadsheet, I like to divide the factors into collapsable sections (yes, these do get pretty lengthy). I also tend to add comments under each aspect with details or links that provide more info. Depending on the stage you’re at with your business, you can also add in a column for your own product to quickly see how it compares to competitors.

What’s included in a competitor analysis framework

• Business & Company metrics 1.1. Company overview 1.2. Funding 1.3. Revenue & customers
• Product 2.1. Product features 2.2. Pricing 2.3. Perks 2.4. Technology
• Customers & awareness 3.1. Share of Voice 3.2. Sentiment 3.3. Key topics 3.4. Geography 3.5. Social media platforms
• Marketing 4.1. SEO 4.2. Social media 4.3. Advertising 4.4. Influencers and other partners 4.5. Content Marketing 4.6. Customer acquisition 4.7. Sales 4.8. Customer service 4.9. Unique strengths

I’ll go into depth about each section below, and again feel free to grab this competitor analysis template to follow along .

1. Business & Company metrics

1.1. company overview.

Your analysis should start with digging up the basic info about your competitors: things like the company’s founding year, the names of the CEO and other key people, locations of the company’s offices, how many employees work there, etc.

You’ll usually find bits of this information on competitors’ websites.

The company’s LinkedIn profile is often useful, particularly for employee counts.

And for info on key people, offices, and founding date, CrunchBase is a great resource.

Your competitors’ job openings can also be found on their websites, LinkedIn, and job search sites like Glassdoor and Indeed . Knowing who they are hiring and which teams they are expanding will give you an idea of what steps they’re about to take, both product- and marketing-wise. Are they about to hire their first sales rep or content marketer? Are they looking for a developer with a specific skill set? Combined with what you know about your industry, your competition’s job openings will tell you a lot about where they are going with their business.

You could also take things one step further and see if you can get an understanding of competitors’ corporate culture. The best place to dig through employee reviews is Glassdoor . There, you can find out what employees think about the culture, the team, the pay, the management – and those are often honest opinions because a lot of the feedback is anonymous.

1.2. Funding

Knowing when, how much, and from whom your competitors received funding can also be important, particularly if you plan on raising capital yourself. It will give you a solid idea on how much funding you can expect to get.

On top of that, venture capitalists (VCs) tend to invest in only one company in a given category so as not to cannibalize their own investments. If an VCs’ name is missing from your competitors’ funding history, they might be a good candidate for you: they missed out on the chance to work with a successful competitor, but now they have the opportunity to invest into a promising startup in the industry (you!).

1.3. Revenue & customers

Your competitors’ revenue and number of customers deserve a separate section in your spreadsheet. For some companies, you’ll be able to find estimates on Owler , but those will often be very rough. A Google search for the name of your competitor combined with the words “revenue,” “customers,” etc. might lead you to interviews or press releases where the companies share this information (because, well, everyone likes to brag).

That said, I bet you won’t be able to find every competitor’s revenue figures this way. To help you dig deeper, I have two hacks to share that go beyond a simple Google search:

Hack #1: Set up alerts for competitors’ interviews and conference presentations.

This one requires some time, but it’s very effective in the long run: you’ll be surprised at just how much your competitors give away at event presentations and in interviews, without being aware of you listening. All you need to do is sign up for Awario (there’s a free 14-day trial available), create an alert for the names of your competitors’ CEOs or other key figures (don’t forget to put the names in double quotes to search for an exact match), and select YouTube as the source for the search. And that’s it! You can now binge-watch those videos right in Awario, without having to leave the tool for a minute, noting your findings along the way.

Hack #2: Use this revenue formula

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr offers a simple formula you can use to calculate a competitor’s revenue estimate, provided you know how many people work there. Take the number of employees the company has listed on its LinkedIn profile and multiply that by $150,000 if well-funded ($200,000 if modestly funded). This should give you an estimate you can work with.

Employee count * $150,000 = Revenue estimate

These details, combined with company info like founding year and employee counts, are important so you can use them as a benchmark against your own growth. How much time did it take each of your competitors to get to the revenue figures they have today? Are you doing as well as a current market leader back when it was an early-stage business?

It’s time to evaluate your competitors’ products or services, the actual things they’re selling. What kind of technology are they using to build it? What is their core selling point? Are there any perks that come with the product: a freemium version, complementary free tools, or services?

2.1. Product features

Let’s get down to the core of your competitors’ business – their product and its key features. A word of caution: this will likely be the longest bit of your spreadsheet.

It’s a good idea to divide the features into groups of related ones to keep things organized.

2.2. Pricing

Assessing competitors’ pricing pages is another crucial step in your analysis (if pricing isn’t available on their website, try reaching out to their sales team).

Here are some questions to consider:

• Can you uncover a segment of the market that doesn’t seem to be fully served by competitors’ plans?
• Say, do they have an affordable plan for startups or small businesses? Discounts for students or non-profits?
• Are there data-heavy options available for agencies and big brands, with Enterprise features like an API or white-label options?

Another thing you can draw from competitors’ pricing strategies is great ideas for A/B testing . Do they offer monthly or annual plans? (If it’s both, what is the default option?) How many packages have they got? Identify the opportunities for your experiments, and prioritize the ones that are common for several competitors.

Dig through your competitors’ websites to see if they offer something complimentary with their product. Do they have a free trial or a freemium version? Are there any “free” tools their customers get access to, or perhaps a perks program in partnership with other tools?

2.4. Technology

Competitors’ technology is an important aspect to assess for tech companies. BuiltWith is a great (and free) tool to figure out the tech stack that a competitor uses. Just type in the URL, and you’ll be able to see what technology the website runs on, along with any third-party scripts and plugins it uses, everything from analytics systems, email marketing services, to A/B testing tools, and CRMs.

A lean alternative to BuiltWith is What Runs , which is a browser extension that analyzes any webpage you’re on.

On top of that, looking at competitors’ job postings (yes, again) is a great way to see what kind of technology stack they’re using by analyzing the skills they require from candidates. To look for job openings, check your competitors’ websites and job search sites like Glassdoor and Indeed .

3. Customers & awareness

Your next big step in analyzing the competition is looking at what their customers have to say about them. In this section, you’ll look at each brand’s Share of Voice, the sentiment behind their mentions, the key topics customers bring up when they talk about your competitors, and more. To measure these, you’ll need a social listening tool like Awario or Mention .

3.1. Share of Voice

Ideally, you’d want to measure the market share for each of your competitors. But alas, it’s nearly impossible. One substitute metric you could use is Share of Voice – the volume of mentions your competitors get on social media and the web compared to each other.

To measure share of voice , create an alert for each competitor’s brand in Awario, give the tool some time to collect the mentions, and jump to the Alert Comparison report to see how much each competitor is talked about on social and the web.

It’s a good idea to keep these alerts running for the long-term (as opposed to just looking at Share of Voice once). This way, you’ll be able to see spikes in their volume of mentions, track what their customers are saying, and see how their (and your own) Share of Voice evolves over time.

3.2. Sentiment

The caveat of measuring the level of awareness a competitor has is that awareness isn’t always a good thing. What if there’s been a data scandal one of the competitors is involved in? What if their customer service is horrible, causing an influx of negative mentions?

That’s not the only reason why measuring the sentiment behind the mentions of your competitors is important. It will also help you understand what these companies’ customers love and hate about their product the most.

On top of that, it can also serve as a benchmark when you analyze the sentiment behind the mentions of your own brand and product. Let’s say, 40% of your mentions are positive, 20% are negative, and the rest are neutral. How do you know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing without a benchmark?

3.3. Key topics

What do your customers focus on when they mention your competitors’ products or write customer reviews?

What do they love and hate the most?

Identifying the key topics within your competitors’ mentions will give quick answers to these questions so you don’t have to dig through mentions by hand. You can find these topic clouds in a social listening dashboard. From there, you can click on any topic to explore the mentions in-depth.

Interestingly, these topic clouds can also offer insight into various aspects of your competitors’ business – and they may help you fill the gaps in other sections in your competitor analysis spreadsheet. Here’s one example: those are the key topics for Loom, a screen recording app, from which you can learn a few useful things if you look closely.

Looks like the company a) has just raised some money, b) offers remote jobs, and c) has just announced a new feature they’re building. And you discovered all that at a glance! Of course, you can further explore any topic by clicking on it to see all the mentions that contain the word/phrase.

3.4. Geography

Looking at the geography and demographics of your competitors’ mentions will let you figure out which markets they are focusing on the most (and, with any luck, find an area that isn’t too saturated yet). You’ll find a map of each brand’s mentions in Awario’s dashboard and reports, along with the breakdown of mentions by language.

Try adjusting the date range in the report to see if there’s been any changes in languages/countries recently. This could mean that your competitors are focusing on a new emerging market – an opportunity you might be interested to explore.

3.5. Social media platforms

Just like with geography, this one will give you an idea on where your competitors’ audience hangs out so you can use these findings in your own marketing strategy and social media strategy. On top of that, if you see platforms that appear to be heavily underused (but do look relevant), those may also be worth experimenting with. Just like with the previous factors, you can compare the platforms side-by-side using Awario’s Alert Comparison report.

4. Marketing

From the SEO perspective, there are two most important things about competition you should focus on: the keywords they rank for and the backlinks they’ve got. The former will give you a solid idea on what type of search terms bring them traffic and sales (so you can shape your own keyword strategy), and the latter will show what authoritative websites in your niche link to them (those will likely be relevant to your website too).

For both tasks, you can use SEO PowerSuite (you can get the free version here ). The toolkit includes 4 apps for different aspects of SEO, but we’ll only need 2 of those to analyze competitors.

Rank Tracker will help you with the keywords. Navigate to the tool’s Ranking Keywords module and type in a competitor’s URL. You’ll see a list of terms they rank for, along with the search volume for each term in your country of choice. It’s a good idea to move the most popular terms to Target Keywords right away so you can keep them for your records. Repeat the process for every competitor, noting their estimated search traffic and top keywords they rank for.

For backlink analysis, you’ll need SEO SpyGlass. Launch the tool and create a project for one of your competitors. Next, jump to Domain Comparison . One by one, specify your competitors’ websites and take a look at how they compare.

Next, jump to Link Intersection – a module that shows you the domains that link to more than one of your competitors. You can sort them by InLink Rank to see the most authoritative websites on your list. Those are likely relevant industry websites that will make a great addition to your backlink profile – make sure to save them so you can reach out and see if you can get a backlink from there.

4.2. Social media

The next step is analyzing what, when, and how your competitors are doing on social media. Rival IQ is a useful tool for this task, and they have a 14-day free trial available. Once you’ve signed up for the tool, specify your competitors’ websites, and the platform will automatically pull their social media profiles.

From there, you’ll be able to see which social networks they’re active on, how many followers they have, how much engagement their posts get, etc. Those insights will be handy to benchmark your own strategy against. The tool will also show you the best times and days of the week to post, based on the engagement competitors’ posts get.

On top of that, it may be a good idea to research if your competitors have a community on social media – a Facebook group or a subreddit dedicated to their product. How big is the community? Are the users engaged?

4.3. Advertising

To get an idea of your competitors’ ad strategy, SimilarWeb is a great (and free) starting point. Enter the URL of a competitor’s website and navigate to the Search section – it will show you if your competitors have any search ads running, and, if they do, what their target keywords are.

The Display section below will show you whether a competitor is running any display ads, and, if they are, which platforms bring them the most traffic.

For Facebook ads, simply open a competitor’s Facebook page and click on Info and ads .

Alternatively, you can use Facebook’s Ad Library to search for your competitors’ ads. Unfortunately, these tools won’t reveal targeting rules your competitors use, but you’ll still get a solid idea of how many ads they’re running, and perhaps get inspiration for your own advertising efforts.

If native ads or other kinds of paid content are a thing in your niche, you can also try searching for “sponsored by [competitor]”, “author” “[competitor]”, etc. in a search engine of your choice (the quotes will make sure you’re looking for an exact match, and all of the words in the query are taken into account). Take note of authoritative platforms you come across and try reaching out to them to inquire about sponsored posts.

4.4. Influencers and other partners

At this point, we’re interested in exploring the partnerships your competitors have that help spread the word about their products. We’ll look at influencers endorsing your competition, publishers they work with, and media platforms they guest blog on, if any.

For the analysis, you’ll need the same social media monitoring alerts for your competitors’ brand you’ve already created in Awario. In your feed, make sure to group the mentions by Authors and sort them by Reach to see the most influential posts first (Reach is calculated based on the number of followers and engagements on social media, and based on the site’s estimated traffic for results from news, blogs, and the web).

This will let you see the most influential posts that mention your competition, including social media posts and blog articles from around the web. Take note of the influencers or publishers they work with – chances are they will be happy to work with you as well.

On top of that, you can also turn to SimilarWeb to see what referral sources are bringing the most visits to your competitors’ websites. Chances are you’ll also find a bunch of blogs and media platforms that generate substantial traffic to their sites.

4.5. Content Marketing

If content is part of your competitors’ strategy, it’s important that you analyze their blog and what they tend to write about. Are the readers engaged? Do the posts get shared around social media a lot? Does the competitor accept guest posts?

BuzzSumo is a great tool to help you out. It will show you the most shared posts on any blog within the past year, so you can get inspiration for your own posts and a better idea of what kind of content resonates with your target audience the best.

4.6. Customer acquisition

I know, a lot of the points above were actually customer acquisition techniques; but this section is reserved for the ones that weren’t outlined before. Do your competitors have a referral strategy? Do they have an affiliate program? Do they sponsor or exhibit at industry conferences? Do they acquire customers in any other creative way?

If applicable, it’s also important to analyze your competitors’ sales strategy. Do they do product demos? What does contacting a rep look like? Is there a phone number you can call?

The best thing to do is try and book a demo (or a call) with every company yourself, taking careful note of every step. Do they require filling out dozens of fields for you to talk to sales? Will they refuse to hold a demo just because your company is “too small”? Is their time zone convenient? How long does it take them to reply?

All of this will help you spot strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ sales strategy to help you shape your own.

4.8. Customer service

Does every competitor offer Customer Support for all customers, or does it start with a particular plan? What channels do they provide support on: is it email, live chat, phone, social media, or all of the above? What is their response time? Do they offer Account Management for Enterprise customers?

Analyzing your competitors’ customer service will help you improve your own. The truth is, in large companies, customer care is often almost non-existent; for a new business in the industry, that’s a great area to capitalize on. If that’s true in your case, make sure to highlight the quality of your customer service on your website.

4.9. Unique strengths

Is there anything else that gives a competitor on your list an unfair advantage over everyone else? For example, is their CEO or somebody else on the team an industry influencer? Does the company publish amazing books that are also free? Have the founders launched successful products before? Make note of each competitor’s unique strengths that are hard to emulate.

What’s next?

Once you’re done with every step of competitive analysis, I’m sure you’ve got a clear understanding of the market and more than a handful of ideas on how to improve your own product. While the research is still fresh in your mind, one bonus step I’d highly recommend to everyone performing the analysis is to map your competitors on a Strategy Canvas (from the book Blue Ocean Strategy ).

A Strategy Canvas is a chart that breaks down your competitors by various aspects of their businesses and products (the pricing and other aspects specific to your product category).

The easiest way to plot this is a line chart, with each factor assigned a score depending on how well it is executed.

Here’s an example from the book: a Strategy Canvas for Southwest, one of the first low-cost airlines in the US, compared to the 2 categories that could be considered its competitors: air travel at the time and car travel.

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy

Depending on the kind of competitors you’ve analyzed, you’ll likely see that most of them follow one or two distinct patterns: those will be the major categories you’re competing with (though they may not be as different as cars and airplanes). It’s time to plot your own product on the canvas and see how it compares to the competitors.

Finally, think of ways to make your product stand out. From your research, recall the things your audience needs more and less of. Blue Ocean Strategy offers a nice way to think about the factors on the canvas in terms of applying them to your own product, called the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid.

• Think of features you could eliminate to lower the cost of your solution : the ones that seem superfluous, are rarely mentioned by customers, and are particularly costly. For Southwest vs. traditional airlines, those were seating class choices and hub connectivity.
• Think of the factors you can reduce way below the industry standard : the ones that need to be there, but can be leveled down significantly. It’s great if price is going to be one of them! For Southwest, those were the prices, meals, and lounges.
• Time to think about the aspects you’ll raise well above the industry standard , especially if they won’t cost you a fortune. What do customers wish they’d get more of? For Southwest, that was the friendliness of the service and the speed of travel.
• Lastly, try and create new features that your closest competitors don’t offer (or borrow them from another product category). With Southwest, it was the frequent departures that traditional airlines didn’t have – but car travel did.

Remember: the idea of a competitive analysis isn’t to steal what they’re doing, it is to understand where your business falls in the market and find new opportunities to make your product stand out.

Eventually, focusing on your customers and gaps between supply and demand will serve you much better than focusing on the competition. And that’s what competitor analysis is for – finding ways to serve the customer better.

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Free Competitive Analysis Templates: Learn about Customers and Competitors to Grow Your Business

By Joe Weller | March 19, 2018

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When engaging in competitive analysis, you can use a template to consider and capture details of the marketing landscape in which your business exists in order to improve your marketing decisions. More importantly, these templates help you focus on gathering information on your competitive landscape and deducing business lessons from that data, rather than mulling over which factors you should study.

In this article, we cover what competitive analysis is, what a competitive analysis template should include, and where to look for information in your analysis. We also offer free, downloadable templates in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Docs formats — all of these templates are customizable so you can include the particular information that’s relevant to your organization and analysis exercise. Find templates for the web, social media, small and general business analysis, and the presentation of your findings.

Competitive Analysis Templates for Web and Social Media Analysis

Competitive analysis report.

If you are reviewing websites to understand usability and structure, you want to know what content sites have in common, what content is unique and interesting, and what common navigational features appear. Use this report to capture features of competitor websites, or adapt it to perform competitive analyses on other aspects of businesses.This template proves space to record details of search functionality and any other pertinent features.

‌ Download Competitive Analysis Report - WORD

Online Social Media Analysis Template

To study social media strategy, you want a template that allows you to look for all the social media channels you and your competitors are engaged with. This template also helps you see how many followers each competitor garners, and prompts you to consider who the product target market includes and what the product branding entails.

Download Online Strategy Competitive Analysis Template

Excel  |  PDF

Competitive Analysis Template for Small Business

Small business competitive analysis template.

When creating a competitive analysis for your small business, you want to conduct a thorough review of all facets of marketing. Start by determining who your competitors are, what you think you already know about them, and what you know about your own business. Next, describe target markets, products and pricing, media strategies, and perform a SWOT analysis.

Download Small Business Competitive Analysis Template

Word  |  PDF

Competitive Analysis Landscape Template

In addition to the usual queries about business factors, you may also want a template that reminds you why you are conducting the analysis. Complete this template for your own company and then for your competitors.

Download Competitive Analysis Landscape Template

Excel  |  Word  |  PDF

Competitive Analysis Template for Evaluating Results vs. Unique Value Propositions

By grading competitors on value proposition, content strategy, and funnel efficiency, you can derive an idea of how successful companies are in their marketing strategies. Use Excel formulas and your scores will automatically total and appear on a heat graph.

‌ Download Value Proposition Comparative Analysis

Approaches to the Presentation of Competitive Analysis Template Data

Particularly if you must present your findings to stakeholders throughout your company, certain additions can expedite conveying your message:

• Define Your Target Audience for the Analysis Presentation: You can also create multiple presentations aimed at different audiences, such as a summary for executives and a PowerPoint for marketing, sales, and development.
• Add Each Competitor’s Logo: This helps to differentiate among companies in the document and can convey significant information about each brand.
• Show the Product: If you can, add images of the competitor’s products or images that convey the nature of their services.
• Use High-Resolution Graphics: They heighten impact.
• Consider the Company Description: Include the tagline, slogan, mission statement, and value proposition. In addition, discuss how companies position and describe themselves.
• Keep Information Consistent: All competitors should be described with the same type of information and level of detail to avoid bias.
• Look at the Good They Do: When reviewing competitor strengths and weaknesses, don’t just consider the weaknesses; think about what makes their customers happy.

Competitive Analysis Presentation Template

Try the following PowerPoint template for company presentations. The template provides tips for explaining the purpose of an analysis to non-marketing team members and leaves room to discuss factors in the competitive landscape, environmental pressures, and much more.

‌ Download Competitive Analysis Presentation Template

Why Use Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis (CA) — sometimes called competitor analysis — is a vital process to help businesses stay on the cutting edge and anticipate market changes that they can use to their advantage. Competitive analyses, which should be conducted periodically, can help you strategize and plan for company growth by discovering opportunities and threats. From a media strategy perspective, the analysis of competitor collateral is essential for launching effective SEO-driven campaigns. SEO analysis reveals what keywords and approaches work, both for you and your competitors, and which campaigns should receive focus. Analyses also offer you a view into your company’s position in the competitive landscape.

Although in the context of marketing, the word “competitive” suggests focus on “the other” (i.e., the rival), many marketing gurus believe that the heart of any marketing activity begins with the customer. An analysis of competitors helps you to better serve customers. By understanding what customers think competitors do well, you can craft a value proposition for your own company that allows you to shine in the marketplace.

Jeffrey Wilke is the CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon.com Inc. He  advocates , “First of all, I’m focused on customers and not competitors. Competitors’ strategy changes all the time. We don’t want to distract ourselves from customers by obsessing over what competitors are doing or not doing.”

Competitive analysis puts a spotlight on the strengths and weaknesses of competing organizations as well as your own. A detailed review helps uncover potential opportunities. Most significantly, though, you must actually use the collected data in your new campaign to reap the benefits. Otherwise, competitive analysis is just an exercise.

To summarize, competitive analysis enables your organization to do the following:

• Reveal your company’s and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
• Identify the path to opportunities for increased competitive advantage
• Help the entire company to understand the competitive landscape
• Contribute to defining your value proposition (that is, help you differentiate from competitors)
• Inform strategic planning

The Parts of a Competitive Analysis Template

• A competitive analysis template helps ensure that you store captured information. It can also ensure that analysis is consistent from year to year. Above all, using a template guarantees that your primary efforts are put toward gathering and evaluating information, not into deciding what criteria to study and how to format notes.

Templates may have a specific focus. For example, for online and social media strategy, a template may list all social media platforms and each company’s number of followers. CA templates generally include the following sections:

1. Company Information:

• The overview and profile provide general information about your company and its competitors.
• Profiled competitors are usually direct competitors: those who offer a comparable product or service in the same area. A review of indirect competitors (those who offer a slightly different product or service that could substitute for yours) provides clues to potential direct competition or new opportunities for your business.
• Background information on a competitor may include the location of their head office, the number of employees, recent acquisitions, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and the names of key staff members.
• This section also includes the company’s mission statement, slogan, tagline, and main value proposition.

2. Product Information:

• The product and service portion of this section describes the products and services offered.
• Pricing details include list prices for key products and services.
• Distribution channel details include information about affiliates, retailers, and wholesalers.

3. Market Information:

The target market (personas) area of this section looks at collateral and social media to determine the competitor’s target audience. You can combine this information into customer personas . Target audience information prepares you for when customers leave your competitors.

• Reviewing online presence is key today. Note all of your competitors’ social media channels and web pages. Also, document any other web pages where competitors are referenced.
• Understanding the context of social media channels can help you grasp the essence of a target market. For example, LinkedIn is aimed at professionals.
• Consider the brand messaging and tone on social media. Cultivate your company’s own voice.
• Market share is expressed as a percentage of the business that the company owns. Some marketing specialists think that knowing competitor market share is unnecessary. They believe you should focus on your own market share.

4. SWOT Analysis :

• SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Perform a SWOT analysis to identify what competitors are doing right, and what customers are complaining about. Also, you can assess how well a competitor is achieving their goals based on their apparent positioning. Use a competitor’s weaknesses to understand how you can fill gaps to make their customers your customers.

5. Competitive Advantage:

• Competitive advantage boils down to why a customer likes them better. In other words, what’s unique about the product or service that draws customers?

How to Find Market Information to Complete Competitive Analysis Templates

Today’s digital world makes much of competitive analysis easier. Nevertheless, don’t discount the value of other paths to help you learn about your industry and niche. Visit competitor locations, talk to their customers, look at printed collateral (such as brochures, form mailers, trade shows, newsletters, and bulletins), and talk to your competitors. The following list includes some of the main methods for finding company information:

• Google: Search with pertinent keywords.
• LinkedIn: This site offers information on company size, locations, hiring, and key personnel.
• Yahoo Finance: Check this for financial background on organizations.
• AngelList: This resource lists startups, investors, and job openings at startups.
• Crunchbase : This outlines new products and companies and their investments.
• Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Other Online Tools: Use web search tools to find the traffic on keywords, backlinks, and more.
• Hoover and Manta: Find organization financial and structural information.
• SEC Filings: Peruse SEC corporate filings for key information about a company’s financial endeavors and financial health.
• Purchased Data: Buy database collections of consumer and corporate data.
• Website , YouTube, and Facebook Comments: Discover what users and customers really think about your products and services as well as those of your competitors.

Social Media and Web Research

Very few, if any, businesses can excel today without some social media presence. Consider these tips when reviewing social media strategy:

• Brick-and-mortar establishments may be different from online competition.
• Backlinks are pages that link to other businesses’ pages, but not yours. Backlink analysis helps you gain links to your page from important sites.
• Keyword gap analysis highlights keywords you don’t currently have on your site that rank well for other competitors.
• Consider the brand story, and note which social media channels the site supports.
• Keep in mind that your actual product or service competitors may differ from your SEO competitors because of paid ads. It’s possible that the brick-and-mortar competitor is less important than the online competitor. For SEO research, survey domain authority, the keywords that attract traffic, and the amount of traffic for each of those keywords.

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How to Write Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan (w/ Examples)

Free Competitive Analysis Kit

• Vinay Kevadia
• January 9, 2024

14 Min Read

Every business wants to outperform its competitors, but do you know the right approach to gather information and analyze your competitors?

That’s where competitive analysis steps in. It’s the tool that helps you know your competition’s pricing strategies, strengths, product details, marketing strategies, target audience, and more.

If you want to know more about competitor analysis, this guide is all you need. It spills all the details on how to conduct and write a competitor analysis in a business plan, with examples.

Let’s get started and first understand the meaning of competitive analysis.

What is Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis involves collecting information about what other businesses in your industry are doing with their products, sales, and marketing.

Businesses use this data to find out what they are good at, where they can do better, and what opportunities they might have. It is like checking out the competition to see how and where you can improve.

This kind of analysis helps you get a clear picture of the market, allowing you to make smart decisions to make your business stand out and do well in the industry.

Competitive analysis is a section of utmost value for your business plan. The analysis in this section will form the basis upon which you will frame your marketing, sales, and product-related strategies. So make sure it’s thorough, insightful, and in line with your strategic objectives.

Let’s now understand how you can conduct a competitive analysis for your own business and leverage all its varied benefits.

How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Let’s break down the process of conducting a competitive analysis for your business plan in these easy-to-follow steps.

It will help you prepare a solid competitor analysis section in your business plan that actually highlights your strengths and opens room for better discussions (and funding).

Let’s begin.

1. Identify Your Direct and Indirect Competitors

First things first — identify all your business competitors and list them down. You can have a final, detailed list later, but right now an elementary list that mentions your primary competitors (the ones you know and are actively competing with) can suffice.

As you conduct more research, you can keep adding to it.

Explore your competitors using Google, social media platforms, or local markets. Then differentiate them into direct or indirect competitors.

Direct competitors

Businesses offering the same products or services, and targeting a similar target market are your direct competitors.

These competitors operate in the same industry and are often competing for the same market share.

Indirect competitors

On the other hand, indirect competitors are businesses that offer different products or services but cater to the same target customers as yours.

While they may not offer identical solutions, they compete for the same customer budget or attention. Indirect competitors can pose a threat by providing alternatives that customers might consider instead of your offerings.

2. Study the Overall Market

Now that you know your business competitors, deep dive into market research. Market research should involve a combination of both primary and secondary research methods.

Primary research

Primary research involves collecting market information directly from the source or subjects.  Some examples of primary market research methods include:

• Purchasing competitors’ products or services
• Conducting interviews with their customers
• Administering online surveys to gather customer insights

Secondary research

Secondary research involves utilizing pre-existing gathered information from some relevant sources. Some of its examples include:

• Scrutinizing competitors’ websites
• Assessing the current economic landscape
• Referring to online market databases of the competitors.

Have a good understanding of the market at this point to write your market analysis section effectively.

3. Prepare a Competitive Framework

Now that you have a thorough understanding of your competitors’ market, it is time to create a competitive framework that enables comparison between two businesses.

Factors like market share, product offering, pricing, distribution channel, target markets, marketing strategies, and customer service offer essential metrics and information to chart your competitive framework.

These factors will form the basis of comparison for your competitive analysis. Depending on the type of your business, choose the factors that are relevant to you.

4. Take Note of Your Competitor’s Strategies

Now that you have an established framework, use that as a base to analyze your competitor’s strategies. Such analysis will help you understand what the customers like and dislike about your competitors.

Start by analyzing the marketing strategies, sales and marketing channels, promotional activities, and branding strategies of your competitors. Understand how they position themselves in the market and what USPs they emphasize.

Evaluate, analyze their pricing strategies and keep an eye on their distribution channel to understand your competitor’s business model in detail.

This information allows you to make informed decisions about your strategies, helping you identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement.

5. Perform a SWOT Analysis of Your Competitors

A SWOT analysis is a method of analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business in the competitive marketplace.

While strengths and weaknesses focus on internal aspects of your company, opportunities and threats examine the external factors related to the industry and market.

It’s an important tool that will help determine the company’s competitive edge quite efficiently.

It includes the positive features of your internal business operations. For example, a strong brand, skilled workforce, innovative products/services, or a loyal customer base.

It includes all the hindrances of your internal business operations. For example, limited resources, outdated technology, weak brand recognition, or inefficient processes.

Opportunities

It outlines several opportunities that will come your way in the near or far future. Opportunities can arise as the industry or market trend changes or by leveraging the weaknesses of your competitors.

For example, details about emerging markets, technological advancements, changing consumer trends, profitable partnerships in the future, etc.

Threats define any external factor that poses a challenge or any risk for your business in this section. For example, intense competition, economic downturns, regulatory changes, or any advanced technology disruption.

This section will form the basis for your business strategies and product offerings. So make sure it’s detailed and offers the right representation of your business.

And that is all you need to create a comprehensive competitive analysis for your business plan.

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How to Write Competitive Analysis in a Business Plan

The section on competitor analysis is the most crucial part of your business plan. Making this section informative and engaging gets easier when you have all the essential data to form this section.

Now, let’s learn an effective way of writing your competitive analysis.

1. Determine who your readers are

Know your audience first, because that will change the whole context of your competitor analysis business plan.

The competitive analysis section will vary depending on the intended audience is the team or investors.

Consider the following things about your audience before you start writing this section:

Internal competitor plan (employees or partners)

Objective: The internal competitor plan is to provide your team with an understanding of the competitive landscape.

Focus: The focus should be on the comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors to boost strategic discussions within your team.

Use: It is to leverage the above information to develop strategies that highlight your strengths and address your weaknesses.

Competitor plan for funding (bank or investors)

Objective: Here, the objective is to reassure the potential and viability of your business to investors or lenders.

Focus: This section should focus on awareness and deep understanding of the competitive landscape to persuade the readers about the future of your business.

Use: It is to showcase your market position and the opportunities that are on the way to your business.

This differentiation is solely to ensure that the competitive analysis serves its purpose effectively based on the specific needs and expectations of the respective audience.

2. Describe and Visualise Competitive Advantage

Remember how we determined our competitive advantage at the time of research. It is now time to present that advantage in your competitive analysis.

Highlight your edge over other market players in terms of innovation, product quality, features, pricing, or marketing strategy. Understanding your products’ competitive advantage will also help you write the products and services section effectively.

However, don’t limit the edge to your service and market segment. Highlight every area where you excel even if it is better customer service or enhanced brand reputation.

Now, you can explain your analysis through textual blocks. However, a more effective method would be using a positioning map or competitive matrix to offer a visual representation of your company’s competitive advantage.

3. Explain your strategies

Your competitor analysis section should not only highlight the opportunities or threats of your business. It should also mention the strategies you will implement to overcome those threats or capitalize on the opportunities.

Such strategies may include crafting top-notch quality for your products or services, exploring the unexplored market segment, or having creative marketing strategies.

Elaborate on these strategies later in their respective business plan sections.

4. Know the pricing strategy

To understand the pricing strategy of your competitors, there are various aspects you need to have information about. It involves knowing their pricing model, evaluating their price points, and considering the additional costs, if any.

One way to understand this in a better way is to compare features and value offered at different price points and identify the gaps in competitors’ offerings.

Once you know the pricing structure of your competitors, compare it with yours and get to know the competitive advantage of your business from a pricing point of view.

Let us now get a more practical insight by checking an example of competitive analysis.

Competitive Analysis Example in a Business Plan

Here’s a business plan example highlighting the barber shop’s competitive analysis.

1. List of competitors

Direct & indirect competitors.

The following retailers are located within a 5-mile radius of J&S, thus providing either direct or indirect competition for customers:

Joe’s Beauty Salon

Joe’s Beauty Salon is the town’s most popular beauty salon and has been in business for 32 years. Joe’s offers a wide array of services that you would expect from a beauty salon.

Besides offering haircuts, Joe’s also offers nail services such as manicures and pedicures. In fact, over 60% of Joe’s revenue comes from services targeted at women outside of hair services. In addition, Joe’s does not offer its customers premium salon products.

For example, they only offer 2 types of regular hair gels and 4 types of shampoos. This puts Joe’s in direct competition with the local pharmacy and grocery stores that also carry these mainstream products. J&S, on the other hand, offers numerous options for exclusive products that are not yet available in West Palm Beach, Florida.

LUX CUTS has been in business for 5 years. LUX CUTS offers an extremely high-end hair service, with introductory prices of $120 per haircut.

However, LUX CUTS will primarily be targeting a different customer segment from J&S, focusing on households with an income in the top 10% of the city.

Furthermore, J&S offers many of the services and products that LUX CUTS offers, but at a fraction of the price, such as:

• Hairstyle suggestions & hair care consultation
• Hair extensions & coloring
• Premium hair products from industry leaders

Freddie’s Fast Hair Salon

Freddie’s Fast Hair Salon is located four stores down the road from J&S. Freddy’s has been in business for the past 3 years and enjoys great success, primarily due to its prime location.

Freddy’s business offers inexpensive haircuts and focuses on volume over quality. It also has a large customer base comprised of children between the ages of 5 to 13.

J&S has several advantages over Freddy’s Fast Hair Salon including:

• An entertainment-focused waiting room, with TVs and board games to make the wait for service more pleasurable. Especially great for parents who bring their children.
• A focus on service quality rather than speed alone to ensure repeat visits. J&S will spend on average 20 more minutes with its clients than Freddy’s.

While we expect that Freddy’s Fast Hair Salon will continue to thrive based on its location and customer relationships, we expect that more and more customers will frequent J&S based on the high-quality service it provides.

2. Competitive Pricing

John and Sons Barbing Salon will work towards ensuring that all our services are offered at highly competitive prices compared to what is obtainable in The United States of America.

We know the importance of gaining entrance into the market by lowering our pricing to attract all and sundry that is why we have consulted with experts and they have given us the best insights on how to do this and effectively gain more clients soon.

Our pricing system is going to be based on what is obtainable in the industry, we don’t intend to charge more (except for premium and customized services) and we don’t intend to charge less than our competitors are offering in West Palm Beach – Florida.

3. Our pricing

• Payment by cash
• Payment via Point of Sale (POS) Machine
• Payment via online bank transfer (online payment portal)
• Payment via Mobile money
• Check (only from loyal customers)

Given the above, we have chosen banking platforms that will help us achieve our payment plans without any itches.

4. Competitive advantage

5. SWOT analysis

Why is a Competitive Environment helpful?

Somewhere we all think, “What if we had no competition?” “What if we were the monopoly?” It would be great, right? Well, this is not the reality, and have to accept the competition sooner or later.

However, competition is healthy for businesses to thrive and survive, let’s see how:

1. Competition validates your idea

When people are developing similar products like you, it is a sign that you are on the right path. Having healthy competition proves that your idea is valid and there is a potential target market for your product and service offerings.

2. Innovation and Efficiency

Businesses competing with each other are motivated to innovate consistently, thereby, increasing their scope and market of product offerings. Moreover, when you are operating in a cutthroat environment, you simply cannot afford to be inefficient.

Be it in terms of costs, production, pricing, or marketing—you will ensure efficiency in all aspects to attract more business.

3. Market Responsiveness

Companies in a competitive environment tend to stay relevant and longer in business since they are adaptive to the changing environment. In the absence of competition, you would start getting redundant which will throw you out of the market, sooner or later.

4. Eases Consumer Education

Since your target market is already aware of the problem and existing market solutions, it would be much easier to introduce your business to them. Rather than focusing on educating, you would be more focused on branding and positioning your brand as an ideal customer solution.

Being the first one in the market is exciting. However, having healthy competition has these proven advantages which are hard to ignore.

A way forward

Whether you are starting a new business or have an already established unit, having a practical and realistic understanding of your competitive landscape is essential to developing efficient business strategies.

While getting to know your competition is essential, don’t get too hung up in the research. Research your competitors to improve your business plan and strategies, not to copy their ideas.

Create your unique strategies, offer the best possible services, and add value to your offerings—that will make you stand out.

While it’s a long, tough road, a comprehensive business plan can be your guide. Using modern business planning software is probably the easiest way to draft your plan.

Use Upmetrics. Simply enter your business details, answer the strategic questions, and see your business plan come together in front of your eyes.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is swot analysis a competitive analysis.

SWOT analysis is just a component of a competitive analysis and not the whole competitive analysis. It helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business and determine the emerging opportunities and threats faced by the external environment.

Competitive analysis in reality is a broad spectrum topic wherein you identify your competitors, analyze them on different metrics, and identify your competitive advantage to form competitive business strategies.

What tools can i use for competitor analysis?

For a thorough competitor analysis, you will require a range of tools that can help in collecting, analyzing, and presenting data. While SEMrush, Google Alerts, Google Trends, and Ahrefs can help in collecting adequate competitor data, Business planning tools like Upmetrics can help in writing the competitors section of your business plan quite efficiently.

What are the 5 parts of a competitive analysis?

The main five components to keep in mind while having a competitor analysis are:

• Identifying the competitors
• Analyzing competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
• Assessing market share and trends
• Examining competitors’ strategies and market positioning
• Performing SWOT analysis

What is the difference between market analysis and competitive analysis?

Market analysis involves a comprehensive examination of the overall market dynamics, industry trends, and factors influencing a business’s operating environment.

On the other hand, competitive analysis narrows the focus to specific competitors within the market, delving into their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.

About the Author

Vinay Kevadiya

Vinay Kevadiya is the founder and CEO of Upmetrics, the #1 business planning software. His ultimate goal with Upmetrics is to revolutionize how entrepreneurs create, manage, and execute their business plans. He enjoys sharing his insights on business planning and other relevant topics through his articles and blog posts. Read more

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How to Write a Competitor Analysis for a Business Plan (with AI in 2023)

Competitor analysis is a critical component of any business plan. It helps you understand the landscape of your industry, identify opportunities for growth and differentiation, and craft strategies that take advantage of your competitors' weaknesses.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a comprehensive competitor analysis, including how to leverage AI tools like Bizway to make the process more efficient and effective.

Step-by-Step Guide to Performing a Competitor Analysis

1. identify your competitors.

Understanding your competitive landscape begins with pinpointing who your direct and indirect competitors are.

Points to Consider

• Direct Competitors : Those who offer similar products/services in the same market.
• Indirect Competitors : Businesses targeting your customer base with different offerings.
• Utilize market research and customer feedback to list competitors.
• Identify geographical considerations - local, regional, or global competitors.

2. Analyze Their Products/Services

A thorough examination of competitors’ offerings unveils potential areas for differentiation and enhancement in your product/service line.

• Feature comparisons.
• Pricing structures.
• Unique Selling Propositions (USPs).
• Adopt a customer-centric approach to understand how consumers perceive competitors’ offerings.
• Identify gaps in their product/service lines that you could explore.

3. Assess Their Marketing Strategy

Understanding competitors’ marketing approaches aids in crafting a superior, data-driven marketing strategy.

• Target audience.
• Key messages and value propositions.
• Channel effectiveness and presence.
• Use social listening tools to gauge their social media effectiveness.
• Analyze the SEO performance of competitors’ websites.

4. Examine Their Sales Strategy

Investigating sales channels and tactics employed by competitors reveals market penetration strategies and potential areas for diversification.

• Distribution channels.
• Pricing and sales tactics.
• Customer relationship management.
• Secret shop to observe sales tactics and customer experiences.
• Review customer feedback on their purchasing experience.

5. Analyze Their Strengths and Weaknesses

Identifying what competitors excel in and fall short on enables strategic decision-making in exploiting market opportunities.

• Operational efficiency.
• Customer service quality.
• Brand reputation and loyalty.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for each competitor.
• Leverage customer reviews and testimonials to gauge reputation.

Using AI for Competitor Analysis

Automated data collection.

AI automates the harvesting of data from myriad sources, ensuring robust research while saving time.

• Use AI tools to scrape and aggregate data from competitors' websites, social media, and customer review platforms.
• Ensure the data is categorized and stored systematically for easy analysis.

Real-Time Updates

AI provides a competitive edge by monitoring and reporting real-time updates on competitor activities.

• Set up AI monitoring for specific competitor activity: product launches, PR releases, or marketing campaigns.
• Ensure to leverage real-time data to inform swift strategic adjustments.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics via AI deciphers patterns and anticipates future competitor moves, positioning your business proactively.

• Leverage AI to analyze historical data for predicting future trends.
• Utilize these insights to anticipate and formulate preemptive strategies.

Using Bizway for Competitor Analysis and Business Planning

One such AI tool that can revolutionize your competitor analysis process is Bizway . Bizway is an AI-powered business planning and research app that can help you research your competitors and write your entire competitor analysis with just a few clicks. Moreover, Bizway can assist you in writing your entire business plan, saving you time and providing you with expert-level planning documents.

With Bizway, you can automate the process of generating clear, concise planning docs across all areas of business, from an SEO Content Plan to User Onboarding Plan. It also helps fill knowledge gaps in areas of business you're not well-versed in.

So, whether you're a solopreneur, a small business owner, or an aspiring entrepreneur still in school, Bizway is the AI assistant you need to take your business planning to the next level.

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How to Write a Competitive Analysis for Your Business Plan

11 min. read

Updated January 3, 2024

Do you know who your competitors are? If you do, have you taken the time to conduct a thorough competitor analysis?

Knowing your competitors, how they operate, and the necessary benchmarks you need to hit are crucial to positioning your business for success. Investors will also want to see an analysis of the competition in your business plan.

In this guide, we’ll explore the significance of competitive analysis and guide you through the essential steps to conduct and write your own. 

You’ll learn how to identify and evaluate competitors to better understand the opportunities and threats to your business. And you’ll be given a four-step process to describe and visualize how your business fits within the competitive landscape.

• What is a competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is the process of gathering information about your competitors and using it to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This information can then be used to develop strategies to improve your own business and gain a competitive advantage.

• How to conduct a competitive analysis

Before you start writing about the competition, you need to conduct your analysis. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Identify your competitors

The first step in conducting a comprehensive competitive analysis is to identify your competitors. 

Start by creating a list of both direct and indirect competitors within your industry or market segment. Direct competitors offer similar products or services, while indirect competitors solve the same problems your company does, but with different products or services.

Keep in mind that this list may change over time. It’s crucial to revisit it regularly to keep track of any new entrants or changes to your current competitors. For instance, a new competitor may enter the market, or an existing competitor may change their product offerings.

2. Analyze the market

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you need to study the overall market. 

This includes the market size , growth rate, trends, and customer preferences. Be sure that you understand the key drivers of demand, demographic and psychographic profiles of your target audience , and any potential market gaps or opportunities.

Conducting a market analysis can require a significant amount of research and data collection. Luckily, if you’re writing a business plan you’ll follow this process to complete the market analysis section . So, doing this research has value for multiple parts of your plan.

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3. Create a competitive framework

You’ll need to establish criteria for comparing your business with competitors. You want the metrics and information you choose to provide answers to specific questions. (“Do we have the same customers?” “What features are offered?” “How many customers are being served?”)

Here are some common factors to consider including: 

• Market share
• Product/service offerings or features
• Distribution channels
• Target markets
• Marketing strategies
• Customer service

4. Research your competitors

You can now begin gathering information about your competitors. Because you spent the time to explore the market and set up a comparison framework—your research will be far more focused and easier to complete.

There’s no perfect research process, so start by exploring sources such as competitor websites, social media, customer reviews, industry reports, press releases, and public financial statements. You may also want to conduct primary research by interviewing customers, suppliers, or industry experts.

You can check out our full guide on conducting market research for more specific steps.

5. Assess their strengths and weaknesses

Evaluate each competitor based on the criteria you’ve established in the competitive framework. Identify their key strengths (competitive advantages) and weaknesses (areas where they underperform).

6. Identify opportunities and threats

Based on the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, identify opportunities (areas where you can outperform them) and threats (areas where they may outperform you) for your business. 

You can check out our full guide to conducting a SWOT analysis for more specific questions that you should ask as part of each step. 

• How to write your competitive analysis

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to present your findings in your business plan. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Determine who your audience is

Who you are writing a business plan for (investors, partners, employees, etc.) may require you to format your competitive analysis differently. 

For an internal business plan you’ll use with your team, the competition section should help them better understand the competition. You and your team will use it to look at comparative strengths and weaknesses to help you develop strategies to gain a competitive advantage.

For fundraising, your plan will be shared with potential investors or as part of a bank loan. In this case, you’re describing the competition to reassure your target reader. You are showing awareness and a firm understanding of the competition, and are positioned to take advantage of opportunities while avoiding the pitfalls.

2. Describe your competitive position

You need to know how your business stacks up, based on the values it offers to your chosen target market. To run this comparison, you’ll be using the same criteria from the competitive framework you completed earlier. You need to identify your competitive advantages and weaknesses, and any areas where you can improve.

The goal is positioning (setting your business up against the background of other offerings), and making that position clear to the target market. Here are a few questions to ask yourself in order to define your competitive position:

• How are you going to take advantage of your distinctive differences, in your customers’ eyes? 
• What are you doing better? 
• How do you work toward strengths and away from weaknesses?
• What do you want the world to think and say about you and how you compare to others?

3. Visualize your competitive position

There are a few different ways to present your competitive framework in your business plan. The first is a “positioning map” and the second is a “competitive matrix”. Depending on your needs, you can use one or both of these to communicate the information that you gathered during your competitive analysis:

Positioning map

The positioning map plots two product or business benefits across a horizontal and vertical axis. The furthest points of each represent opposite extremes (Hot and cold for example) that intersect in the middle. With this simple chart, you can drop your own business and the competition into the zone that best represents the combination of both factors.

I often refer to marketing expert Philip Kohler’s simple strategic positioning map of breakfast, shown here. You can easily draw your own map with any two factors of competition to see how a market stacks up.

It’s quite common to see the price on one axis and some important qualitative factor on the other, with the assumption that there should be a rough relationship between price and quality.

Competitive matrix

It’s pretty common for most business plans to also include a competitive matrix. It shows how different competitors stack up according to the factors identified in your competitive framework. 

How do you stack up against the others? Here’s what a typical competitive matrix looks like:

For the record, I’ve seen dozens of competitive matrices in plans and pitches. I’ve never seen a single one that didn’t show that this company does more of what the market wants than all others. So maybe that tells you something about credibility and how to increase it. Still, the ones I see are all in the context of seeking investment, so maybe that’s the nature of the game.

4. Explain your strategies for gaining a competitive edge

Your business plan should also explain the strategies your business will use to capitalize on the opportunities you’ve identified while mitigating any threats from competition. This may involve improving your product/service offerings, targeting underserved market segments, offering more attractive price points, focusing on better customer service, or developing innovative marketing strategies.

While you should cover these strategies in the competition section, this information should be expanded on further in other areas of your business plan. 

For example, based on your competitive analysis you show that most competitors have the same feature set. As part of your strategy, you see a few obvious ways to better serve your target market with additional product features. This information should be referenced within your products and services section to back up your problem and solution statement. 

• Why competition is a good thing

Business owners often wish that they had no competition. They think that with no competition, the entire market for their product or service will be theirs. That is simply not the case—especially for new startups that have truly innovative products and services. Here’s why:

Competition validates your idea

You know you have a good idea when other people are coming up with similar products or services. Competition validates the market and the fact that there are most likely customers for your new product. This also means that the costs of marketing and educating your market go down (see my next point).

Competition helps educate your target market

Being first-to-market can be a huge advantage. It also means that you will have to spend way more than the next player to educate customers about your new widget, your new solution to a problem, and your new approach to services. 

This is especially true for businesses that are extremely innovative. These first-to-market businesses will be facing customers that didn’t know that there was a solution to their problem . These potential customers might not even know that they have a problem that can be solved in a better way. 

If you’re a first-to-market company, you will have an uphill battle to educate consumers—an often expensive and time-consuming process. The 2nd-to-market will enjoy all the benefits of an educated marketplace without the large marketing expense.

Competition pushes you

Businesses that have little or no competition become stagnant. Customers have few alternatives to choose from, so there is no incentive to innovate. Constant competition ensures that your marketplace continues to evolve and that your product offering continues to evolve with it.

Competition forces focus & differentiation

Without competition, it’s easy to lose focus on your core business and your core customers and start expanding into areas that don’t serve your best customers. Competition forces you and your business to figure out how to be different than your competition while focusing on your customers. In the long term, competition will help you build a better business.

• What if there is no competition?

One mistake many new businesses make is thinking that just because nobody else is doing exactly what they’re doing, their business is a sure thing. If you’re struggling to find competitors, ask yourself these questions.

Is there a good reason why no one else is doing it?

The smart thing to do is ask yourself,  “Why isn’t anyone else doing it?”

It’s possible that nobody’s selling cod-liver frozen yogurt in your area because there’s simply no market for it. Ask around, talk to people, and do your market research. If you determine that you’ve got customers out there, you’re in good shape.

But that still doesn’t mean there’s no competition.

How are customers getting their needs met?

There may not be another cod-liver frozen yogurt shop within 500 miles. But maybe an online distributor sells cod-liver oil to do-it-yourselfers who make their own fro-yo at home. Or maybe your potential customers are eating frozen salmon pops right now. 

Are there any businesses that are indirect competitors?

Don’t think of competition as only other businesses that do exactly what you do. Think about what currently exists on the market that your product would displace.

It’s the difference between direct competition and indirect competition. When Henry Ford started successfully mass-producing automobiles in the U.S., he didn’t have other automakers to compete with. His competition was horse-and-buggy makers, bicycles, and railroads.

Do a competitive analysis, but don’t let it derail your planning

While it’s important that you know the competition, don’t get too caught up in the research. 

If all you do is track your competition and do endless competitive analyses, you won’t be able to come up with original ideas. You will end up looking and acting just like your competition. Instead, make a habit of NOT visiting your competition’s website, NOT going into their store, and NOT calling their sales office. 

Focus instead on how you can provide the best service possible and spend your time talking to your customers. Figure out how you can better serve the next person that walks in the door so that they become a lifetime customer, a reference, or a referral source.

If you focus too much on the competition, you will become a copycat. When that happens, it won’t matter to a customer if they walk into your store or the competition’s because you will both be the same.

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software , a co-founder of Borland International, and a recognized expert in business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching and evangelizing for business planning.

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Competitive analysis template

The more you know about your competitors, the better your strategy will be. Competitive analysis templates use a data-driven approach to see exactly how your business, products, and features compare to your competition.

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[Whether you’re getting ready to launch a new business or want to improve your company’s current market share, a competitive analysis template is something you can turn to again and again to understand the competition. Here, we’ll show you what a competitive analysis template is and how to create your own custom version.

What is a competitive analysis template?

Why it’s important to use a competitive analysis template.

By reviewing logistical items (for example, product features and pricing) and more qualitative notes (competitors’ strengths and weaknesses), you can identify what your direct competitors are offering. Then you can compare these with your own features, strengths, and weaknesses to build a better business strategy directed at your target audience.

Competitive analysis templates also allow you to:

Stay current on industry trends and opportunities.

Understand your competition.

Reduce work about work by allowing you to use the same template for every new project planning and review session.

When to use a competitive analysis template

While it’s always good to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry, this is when it’s more helpful to use your competitive analysis template:

For strategic planning . Use your template to incorporate competitors' information into your strategy during larger project planning sessions or long-term goal setting sessions, such as annual planning. 

With launches. If a new competitor comes on the scene or your own company is gearing up for a new product launch, a competitive analysis shows you how to position yourself to improve your launch strategy.

When developing a marketing strategy . Backlinks, content marketing, and brand messaging need customer support to be successful. Find out what your customers are responding to (and rejecting) by reviewing your competitors' approach.

To identify your target market. Know who you want in your customer base by looking at who buys from your competition. Your customers may not be the same, but this is also a great way to identify gaps in your competitor’s marketing strategy where they may be missing key markets.

To determine if a startup, product, or business idea is viable. Your competitor analysis template can help you see if you have a unique value proposition as compared to what’s already on the market.

How to create a competitive analysis template

Your competitive analysis template should consist of all the sections you need when you run through your competitive analysis workflow. 

You can tailor the sections to your specific needs, but here are some ideas to start with:

Competitor profile: Include company size (number of employees), the competitor’s website, and social media accounts for reference points.

Market research data and metrics: Include numbers such as revenue, pricing, and current market position.

Competitors’ product features: This can be a specific feature you want to compare to one of your company’s products, or a full list of features if you’re doing a broader analysis of the whole company.

Competitors’ product marketing: Include social media engagement and notable product marketing launches.

SWOT analysis results: Run a SWOT analysis to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your competitors.

For each section, include space for both competitors' information and your company’s information. This side-by-side comparison is an important part of the analysis framework, because you can see where you’re performing well, and when there are opportunities to improve. Be sure to include both to get the most out of your analysis.

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What’s the difference between a market analysis and competitive analysis template? .css-i4fobf{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform 200ms ease-in-out;transition:transform 200ms ease-in-out;-webkit-transform:rotateZ(0);-moz-transform:rotateZ(0);-ms-transform:rotateZ(0);transform:rotateZ(0);}

Your competitive analysis is a subset of your market analysis. Use a market analysis template to run an analysis on everything that impacts your business in the full market landscape. Alternatively, use a competitive analysis template solely to gauge how you compare to competitors. 

How do I create a competitor analysis template?

Create a competitor analysis template with sections for every aspect of your competitive research, including a competitor overview, market research data and metrics, product features, marketing, and a SWOT analysis . 

What are the steps to run a competitive analysis with your template?

To run a competitive analysis with your template, research and fill in the blanks on the following: the market research numbers for product features, product marketing, SWOT analyses , and pricing. This helps you create a full comparison of your business and your competitors.

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40 Free Competitor Analysis Templates (Excel & Word)

Big businesses often employ people assigned to conduct a competitor analysis regularly. The main objective of this process and filling out a competitor research template is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and pinpoint any gaps in the marketplace. This analysis will help your company improve your services or products so you can serve your customers better. It could also lead to an increase in profits, Most of the successful companies know the importance of analyzing their competitors at different stages of their businesses.

• 1 Competitor Analysis Templates
• 2 What is competitive analysis?
• 3 Competitive Matrix Templates
• 4.1 Direct competitors
• 4.2 Indirect competitors
• 4.3 Substitute competitors
• 5 Competitor Research Templates
• 6.1 Understand the market
• 6.2 Spot the trends in the industry
• 6.3 Set benchmarks for your company’s growth in the future
• 7 Competitor Analysis Examples
• 8 How do you write a competitor analysis?

Competitor Analysis Templates

What is competitive analysis.

Competitor analysis is a business plan that entails comprehensive research of your main competitors for the purpose of gaining insights into their sales, marketing strategies, and products. Based on this analysis, you can develop and implement better business strategies, ward off your competitors, and capture a bigger share of the market. This analysis will also help your company:

• Learn how your competitors work and pinpoint potential opportunities for you to outdo them.
• Be always be on top of the market trends to ensure that your service or product is consistently meeting or even exceeding the standards.
• Identify the unique value proposition of your service or product and what makes it stand out from the competitors. This is very helpful for your marketing efforts in the future.
• Identify what your competitors do well so you can keep staying relevant while ensuring that both your marketing campaigns and product outperform the market standards.
• Pinpoint where your competitors fall short. This will help you pinpoint the areas of opportunities in the marketplace so you can test out new marketing strategies that your competitors haven’t tried yet.
• Learn through customer reviews what’s missing in the product of your competitors and think about how you can add those missing features to your product.
• Provide your company with a benchmark against which you can measure your company’s growth.

Competitive Matrix Templates

Why do you need a competitor analysis template.

The main purpose of conducting a competitor analysis and creating a competitive matrix template is to learn about and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, then compare them with your own. You need to do this study for several reasons:

• To help you recognize how to improve your business strategy.
• To tell you how to outperform your competitors in areas that will attract the attention of your customers.
• To give you a competitive edge over your competitors.

Before conducting this analysis, you need to understand your competitors first. You can do this by answering these questions:

• What service do they provide or what product do they offer?
• Do you share the same or similar target audiences?
• Do they operate close to your business?

Remember that the competitors in your locale aren’t your only competitors. Remember that the competitors you choose for your analysis will determine the insights you will gain and that you will base the decisions you will make partly on those insights. This is one reason why including the different types of competitors is essential:

Direct competitors

These competitors offer the same services or products as you. They’re also aimed at the same customer base and market with the same goals of market share growth and profit. Direct competitors target the same audience, sell the same products, and have the same distribution model.

Indirect competitors

These competitors belong to another company that offers the same services or products as direct competitors. But the difference is that your end goals aren’t the same.

Substitute competitors

These competitors also belong to another company that offers services or products to your customers that you provide too.

After determining the type of competitors you will compare your business with, it’s time to conduct the analysis.

Competitor Research Templates

How to conduct a competitor analysis.

As a small business owner, you might find yourself juggling several tasks all at once. But even with such a busy schedule, it’s always worth sparing some time to do a retail competitor analysis or any other analysis depending on the nature of your business. Following are steps you may want to consider when conducting the process.

With this analysis, you can draw conclusions about your product’s weaknesses and strengths if you learn more about your competitors. You need to know your company’s strengths to determine your position in the market. Therefore, it’s necessary to communicate clearly to your customers why the service or product you offer is the best choice available.

Knowing your weaknesses is also important in the growth of your company. If you can understand where you fall short, you can identify the areas where you want to invest more resources and time. This is why you need to study your competitors to find out what they’re doing right and see if you can improve your business through the insights you gain.  Here is the process for conducting this analysis:

Understand the market

Before identifying your competitors, you might discover that there are companies that you’ve never heard of before so you didn’t consider them competitors. If you want to do better than the competition, you must know all of them first. You need to conduct a thorough evaluation of what your competitors offer as this could help you identify the areas where you aren’t performing well.

You might also discover gaps between your competitors’ offerings and your customer’s needs. If you do, make this your first move when expanding your offerings so that you can satisfy those unmet needs.

Spot the trends in the industry

You need to find out which way the industry leans towards. But you shouldn’t just do it because your competitors do it too. Copying your competition without considering your place in the market rarely leads to success.

Don’t just replicate what your competitors offer either. A better alternative is to evaluate the needs of your customers and think of how you can create something of value for them. It’s better to do something on your own than copy what everyone else does.

Set benchmarks for your company’s growth in the future

It’s a good idea to include companies that are both smaller and bigger than your own. Take a close look at the well-established companies as they will provide you with a model of what success is all about and a reference point against which you can compare your advancements in the future. Researching newer companies in the industry is also a good idea to learn about which companies might threaten your market share in the future.

Competitor Analysis Examples

How do you write a competitor analysis.

How many details you want to include in your eCommerce competitor analysis example will depend on your goals and the stage of your business growth. For instance, if you own a start-up business, you can create a report that mainly focuses on market research. If your company is well-established, you may have to include details on emerging competitors. Here are the steps to follow when writing a competitor analysis report:

Begin by creating an overview of your competitors

To create a solid report, you need to show exactly what your company should beat to find success. You need to audit any service or product that is currently solving the issue your business is also trying to solve. Also, you must write a brief profile for each competitor including details like:

• The market share and revenue of each competitor.
• The size of each competitor and details about their management teams.
• A general description of their weaknesses and strengths.
• An overview of how the customers perceive each company.

This overview will help you get a big-picture view of the market.

Begin your market research to discover industry trends and customer personas

Creating this report requires comprehensive market research. This involves gathering relevant information that will help you understand your customers while identifying opportunities for growth and recognizing industry trends.

This research will also help you put together customer personas that will serve as your guides to your marketing and business decisions. It will also help you plan for any changes that might cause marketplace disruptions. You can conduct market research using the following:

• Online questionnaires or surveys
• Customer interviews
• Focus groups conducted in person
• By purchasing a product of your competitor to examine their delivery and packaging experience
• Reading the records of your company
• Examining the existing economic conditions
• Researching significant technological developments

When putting market research together, consider providing a high-level summary of the current industry trends. You can even include details about the demographics of specific segments. But if you’re working with an adviser or consultant who has difficulties convincing skeptical stakeholders, you will need a good competitor report. Make sure to cover everything from consumer profiles to market forecasts, as these will help you get decision-makers and clients on board.

Use a feature comparison matrix to compare product features

Here, you will compare your product with other products and this is a very important part of the competitor analysis. You need to break down your product and your competitor’s product one feature at a time. You will find out what sets all companies apart. Aside from specific product features, include attributes like:

• Product quality
• Ease of use
• Number of features
• Customer support
• Brand, style, or image

The most used format for a features analysis is a simple matrix where you place all businesses on one side and the relevant features on the other. With such a format, you can rate or check how well you perform. Often, the matrix can become very long, and working on it could be very tedious.

If you want to focus on only the things that provide the most value to your customers, you can present your comparisons in a more engaging way by using infographics. It’s recommended to talk to real people who have used your product and the products of your competitors. This will give you a more accurate picture of how your customers perceive the competition.

Summarize using a SWOT analysis

Expect things to get a bit challenging when conducting research for your competitor analysis. First, you will handle volumes of data that many people won’t even understand. This is where SWOT analysis comes in. It’s a framework that will help you evaluate your competitive position by writing down your key Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

It will also serve as a summary of your competitive analysis report for those who don’t want to read all the details. Download a competitor analysis template and use an online SWOT analysis tool to customize your template. Here are the things you need for your SWOT analysis:

• To find out your strengths, learn about what you’re doing really well in terms of products, marketing, sales, technology, branding, and more.
• To find out your weaknesses, learn about the things you’re struggling with and what’s holding you back.
• To find out your opportunities, learn about the weakest area of your biggest competitor, gaps in the existing market that still exist, and any changes that have recently happened to your business or the market.
• To find out your threats, learn about what your biggest competitor does better than you, the new products or features they’re working on, and the issues you aren’t addressing.

You can arrange your SWOT analysis in a list although using color-coded quadrants can be very helpful too.

Find out where your business fits in the competitive market

After the SWOT analysis, the next step is to look at the bigger picture. Based on the analysis, you need to figure out where each of your biggest competitors currently fits into the competitive market. The most common way to do this is by first identifying the dimensions that are most important for significant competitiveness, then plotting those on a matrix.

Focus on where your business fits in the market based on your biggest weaknesses and strengths or the biggest opportunities and threats you identified in your SWOT analysis. You can also summarize in words, the benefits, and features that set your product apart from the competition. This is a good way to end your report on a high note.

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Template Highlights

• Download this competitive analysis template as an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, or a PDF.
• Complete the top row with the names of your top competitors.
• Now, complete the second column by adding information about your company. Be honest about your weaknesses!
• Complete the column for each of your competitors, finding the information online, by calling a colleague, or through your personal experience in the market.
• By comparing across the columns, you can get a better sense of how your company compares to your competition.

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Competitive analysis template.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

OUR COMPANY

COMPETING COMPANY 1

COMPETING COMPANY 2

COMPETING COMPANY 3

COMPETING COMPANY 4

COMPANY NAME

TARGET CUSTOMER

BRAND PERSONALITY

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Competitor Analysis Template

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• Business Strategy
• Competitor Analysis

Our competitor analysis template is a valuable tool that helps companies analyze and understand the competitive landscape in their industry. It is also a vital component in any business plan. Once the vision and the mission of a product or a service have been established, it becomes mandatory to get to know other companies operating in the same market.

What is a competitor analysis?

A competitor analysis will reveal critical insights into an industry’s competitive landscape. Conducting this type of analysis will allow you to evaluate other businesses activating in the same field, so you can quickly pinpoint their weaknesses or strengths. This way, you can identify the strategies they use to provide value to the target buyers. Once this phase is completed, it will be easier to find alternative strategies you can use to attract additional prospective customers.

Why should you do competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis helps identify a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, comparing them to the business of reference so that key departments in the company can refine their strategy and curb competition.

On the side, by using our competitor analysis template, you will learn new things such as:

• How your current and future customers rate competitors?
• How to develop strategies that are effective for your market?
• What are the advantages your company brings over your competitors?
• What exactly do customers need?
• How to expand in a new market?

Benefits of using the competitor analysis template with Moqups

You can build your competitor analysis template while working in real-time with team members from all over the world. There’s no need to be in the same office to complete this project. Moqups provides a ready-to-use template you can easily edit to match your needs and brings you one step closer to the successful completion of your project.

Moqups is an online real-time collaboration platform and, as such, it offers its users key features that support and facilitate online communication. When editing this template, you will be able to add comments, callouts, sticky notes, or annotations to share and analyze new ideas with other team members.

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Marketing competitor analysis templates

How do marketing teams maintain dominance? Analyzing market competition is a vital component of your marketing strategy . You need to closely monitor the other companies that are trying to attract your target buyers — so you can determine how to engage and convert those potential customers more effectively than they can.

Your research should consider all of the alternatives available to your prospective customers (including direct and indirect competitors), the marketing tactics your competitors use, and how they communicate the benefits of their offering. This research helps you define superior go-to-market strategies that can create competitive advantages.

The free competitor analysis templates provided here are purpose-built for marketing teams. Each one includes a wide range of examples to capture important research about who your competitors are, what products and services they offer, and their strengths and weaknesses. These templates are also useful for analyzing the messages and channels other companies in your market use, so you can better understand their market presence and determine how to establish a competitive advantage.

Jump ahead here:

What is a competitive marketing strategy?

What are the types of marketing competitor analysis, competitor analysis templates.

A competitive marketing strategy is critical to ensure that your campaigns and programs capture more customers than your competitor. Running creative marketing campaigns that resonate with customers, more effectively targeting customers with digital advertisements, and establishing a lower price point are all examples of ways marketing teams create a competitive advantage over other products.

Consider these questions when assessing your competitive marketing strategy:

Who are the other companies competing in your space?

What products or services do they offer?

What is each competitor’s market share?

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

What channels do they use?

How can your messaging differentiate your products and services?

Competitive analysis is one tool marketers use to better understand how to formulate the right strategy. It is important to perform competitive analyses on a regular basis because the market landscape can shift quickly as competitors raise funding, shift priorities, or develop new features. You will want to know when these changes happen so you can adjust your marketing tactics accordingly.

There are many types of competitor analysis. Choosing the right type depends on the information you want to capture and how you will use your findings. Teams typically start with a high-level analysis and then move into more detailed views of specific channels.

Listed below are the prebuilt examples included in this guide:

Spreadsheets and static presentations are easily available to marketing teams. Mature marketing organizations use a collaborative web-based tool to capture competitive research. Try Aha! free for 30 days. It is perfect for marketing teams that want to set strategy, build plans, and mange programs and campaigns — all in one place.

Not ready for purpose-built software? You can download our competitor analysis templates below for free and tailor each one to your specific needs.

Competitive landscape

Visualize all of your competitors in a single view using this template. See how the position of your company compares to other competitors in the market. This type of high-level analysis is helpful when you want to present a summary view to marketing and product leadership teams. You can easily change the quadrant titles and the x and y axis labels to reflect your assessment of the market.

Competitor profile

Create a detailed profile for each of your key competitors using this customizable template. Capture essential information about their organization, customers, products, as well as strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. This helps your marketing team form a clear understanding of who they are competing against. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor helps the team acquire, keep, and grow customers more effectively.

Competitor overview

This template is a useful way to organize competitive research about all of your rivals in a single location. It includes two sections — company and marketing. Use the company section to summarize details about each company and their products and services. Capture what keywords they rank well for, what collateral they produce, or what events they hold in the marketing section. Gathering information about your competition using a consistent format helps you collect and analyze key data.

Market and positioning analysis

This matrix is perfect for capturing the marketing strategies that each competitor uses to target buyers. What media channels do they use to promote new offerings? How much are they spending on ads? These are key questions that help you understand the marketing strategies your competitors use. It also allows you to identify potential weaknesses in their plans so you can increase your own competitive advantage.

Messaging analysis

This template helps you distill the key messages other companies in your market use to attract and engage potential customers. Use it to understand how other companies communicate with target buyers — including their tagline, what problems they address, and the promise of how their offering will address those problems. You can then strengthen your core message by adjusting your go-to-market strategy and positioning according to what you find.

Value proposition analysis

Use this template to evaluate your competitors' value propositions. This is a great way to compare the key messages your competitors use to communicate the benefits of their product. It allows you to rate the core messages that address your customers' needs so you can see how your position in the market compares. This gives you important insights into how competitors are targeting potential customers and the messaging they use, so you can identify ways to strengthen your communication plan.

Search engine competitive analysis

This template is ideal for analyzing your competitors' search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. With the help of your SEO tool , you can capture details about keyword rankings and website traffic volume by source. Understanding the domain authority of each competitor helps you identify where you need to boost your own SEO performance. Many marketing teams use this information to optimize content creation around target keywords to help bring in more organic traffic.

Social media analysis

This template helps you evaluate your competition's presence on social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Understanding which platforms your competitors are active on, how many followers they have, and the level of engagement gives you insights into what is resonating in your industry. This shows where there is opportunity to improve your own posts. If you do this exercise on a regular basis — monthly, for example — you can easily track how many followers you are gaining and how many your competition is losing.

Sales battlecard

Battlecards are a useful tool for helping sales teams respond to competitor claims. This template helps you summarize the unique differentiators that set your offering apart and the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor. This better equips your sales team to respond to competitors' claims and address any questions or objections prospective customers might raise during the buying process.

Plan, collaborate, and launch — all in one tool. Try Aha! free for 30 days.

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How to Write a Competitive Analysis (with 3 free templates)

“It’s not enough that we win; all others must lose.” – Larry Ellison

Personally, I disagree with Larry, and I think that the focus should be on the customer winning. Hopefully that’s often through your product or service offering, but sometimes your competitors can serve customers looking for a solution better than you can. In those cases, I think all parties (your company, your competitor and your customer) are better served by acknowledging that.

In fairness, Larry Ellison is the fifth richest man in the world, so if that’s how you keep score, he has much more credibility than I. On the other hand, he was paraphrasing Genghis Khan with his quote, so I guess it all depends whom you want to emulate with your marketing.

Learning from the competition

But, whether you agree with Larry or me (or even Genghis), I’m sure that we can all see the value in better understanding what competitors are doing.

So you can conduct a competitive analysis for the obvious reasons — to bludgeon the competition and raze their villages. However, you can also conduct a competitive analysis to help you better communicate with your customers about how you can best serve them (and even tell them what you can’t do ) while perhaps honing the fine art of “coopetition.”

Moreover, a competitive analysis is an especially helpful tool to help you craft your value proposition .

Free competitive analysis templates

To help you conduct a competitive analysis, we’ve created a few free templates loosely based on the Summary Competitive Analyses we conduct for our own Research Partners here at MECLABS .

Competitive analysis presentation

For a slight deeper dive, you can use this PowerPoint template.

Download the MECLABS Competitive Analysis Presentation Template

Competitive analysis Excel template

For a more in-depth look at your competitive landscape, this competitive analysis Excel template might be helpful to you.

Download the MECLABS Competitive Analysis Template

  Download the MECLABS Competitive Analysis Template  (Excel 97-2003 Version)

Very simple competitive analysis

If you’re only looking to get a very simple breakdown about your competitive landscape, you can use this simple Word document.

Download the MECLABS Very Simple Competitive Analysis Template

Even better, you can use these documents to communicate at three levels. While the fields aren’t the same in all of them, the PowerPoint and Word templates are meant to be a summary of the Excel template. So, you can use the Excel template to guide your own competitive analysis, the PowerPoint template to present this analysis to key marketing leaders, and the Word document as a memo to senior business leaders who would be less interested in all of the details.

Getting started

Digital marketing makes conducting a competitive analysis easier than it has ever been. While in the past, your best opportunity might have been to dive into the SEC filings of a public company, and perhaps sign up for their mailing list and buy some data from a business information vendor, now much of the information you need to know is publicly available … even metrics.

You can use social media and product review sites to see what customers think of your competitors, as well as obtain some real metrics on how many followers they have. You can also use sites like SimilarWeb  and Alexa to get a very rough (and let me emphasize, very rough) look at the traffic numbers and patterns for your competitors’ sites.

And, don’t overlook the power of search …

“Start the competitive analysis as if you were a potential customer and a run couple of searches with your popular keywords or using keywords that search engines recommend,” said Ana Gabriela Paez, Associate Director of Research, MECLABS.

“Then analyze companies that appear on paid and natural search results. You may not get all of your possible competitors, but you will get those that are working hard to steal traffic from your site. Sometimes companies will focus too much on reviewing their traditional competitors and forget to frequently monitor search results to see if there are new competitors in the mix or potential new substitutes for your product or service.”

That last point Gaby makes is crucial. After all, your competitors aren’t who you think they are, your competitors are who your customers think they are. So, if your goal is to make the best horse-drawn carriage and that is your only focus, you’ll never see that automobile coming.

And, perhaps most importantly, don’t overlook your own efforts. A competitive analysis is of little practical use if you don’t look at your own products and marketing materials with the same inquisitive eye, and then place your findings side by side with your competitors, stand shoulder to shoulder and see how you match up.

And, while you’re standing next to them, if you follow the teachings of Larry Ellison and Genghis Khan, give them a good, hard kick in the shin.

Related Resources

Gather Competitive Intelligence: 5 Tactics to Research Your Marketplace

Prospect Marketing: Nurturing leads lost to competitors

Competitive Messaging: Tell your customers what you can’t do

Online Reviews: How to start discovering your value proposition with Yelp

About Daniel Burstein

Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS. Daniel oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the editorial direction for MECLABS – digging for actionable information while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine – from Web clinics to Research Journals to the blog. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications – a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 18 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement and field marketing communications.

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Categories: Research And Measurement Tags: competitive analysis , competitive messaging , free tools , Value Proposition

Excel template is composed of xml files and there is no xls document in it.

Am I doing something wrong?

Hi @Ugur Ongor ,

We uploaded the original file, which was created as a .xlsx. If you have an older version of Excel, then you might would have some issues. We have now added the template in a .xls file as well, but there may be some functionality lost with the version differences. I hope this helps.

Let me know if there’s something I else I can do to help.

Great post Daniel. Do you have an email address you could send me to get in touch with you? Thanks, Jason

Jason, You can reach me at Editor AT MarketingSherpa DOT com

Ellison once told his sales force that Oracle’s competitive objective was to “cut off their oxygen,” but the quote you attribute to him was stolen from Gore Vidal (“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”) who said it in the late 1970s.

I have learn several excellent stuff here. Certainly value bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how so much effort you place to make such a magnificent informative web site.

Very good templates. Any suggestions for technical evaluations of industrial software products? And specially B2B products?

I like these templates very interesting. Please update me with the current ones.

The templates are a fantastic help! Any suggestions or participants occupying the Mobile and or Application Development space?

Thanks for these – very helpful. Do you have any thoughts on the usefulness of a visual competitive mapping vs a more linear competitive analysis? When do you think you should use each one?

Great article!

I think those templates are really good to get a start. But I think competitive intelligence in year 2015 includes a new strong component of monitoring marketing. This necessity comes along with the explosion f marketing channels in the digital world. Its really crucial to keep track of successful campaigns of the competition and to understand what is working within the target audience.

Thanks for reading and commenting Oleksandr. I agree, a competitive analysis isn’t a one-and-done activity. The marketplace is always changing. For example, anyone who conducted an analysis of the grocery marketplace a few months ago would probably be well served by understanding how recent developments change their competitive position in the marketplace.

Peter, I’m a big believer in properly attributing a quote, so thanks for questioning the source.

Based on your comment, I did some further digging, and found this article on Quote Investigator (a website sourced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications): http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/

According to the article, the first usage of a pretty similarly phrased idea was in 1959 by Somerset Maugham. Gore Vidal didn’t actually say it (he said the similar “Every time a friend succeeds I die a little.” but in an article by Wilfrid Sheed in The New York Times about Vidal, he uses the similarly phrased idea and credits it to La Rochefoucauld.

And then in 1988 Larry Ellison said, “It is not sufficient that I succeed – all others must fail” and crediting his paraphrase of the quote to Genghis Khan.

While this seems like it’s an authoritative source, I’m not 100% sure if is exactly accurate. I think the big picture is that, while many have had this idea through history, whether the idea started with Genghis Khan, La Rochefoucauld or Somerset Maugham, this is roughly the way Larry Ellison used to subscribe Oracle’s competitive stance.

While I disagree with the extreme nature of this sentiment, I do agree that it is important to keep an eye on your competition. After all, your value proposition is relative to other value propositions in the marketplace and dynamically changes as your competitors’ value propositions change as well.

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How to Write the Competitor Analysis Section of the Business Plan

Writing The Business Plan: Section 4

Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.

The competitor analysis section can be the most difficult section to compile when writing a business plan because before you can analyze your competitors, you have to investigate them. Here's how to write the competitor analysis section of the business plan.

First, Find Out Who Your Competitors Are

If you're planning to start a small business that's going to operate locally, chances are you already know which businesses you're going to be competing with. But if not, you can easily find out by doing an internet search for local businesses, looking in the online or printed local phone book, or even driving around the target market area. 

Your local business may also have non-local competitors that you need to be aware of.

If you're selling office supplies, for instance, you may also have to compete with big-box retailers within a driving distance of several hours and companies that offer office supplies online. You want to make sure that you identify all your possible competitors at this stage.

Then Find Out About Them

You need to know:

• what markets or market segments your competitors serve;
• what benefits your competitors offer;
• why customers buy from them;
• as much as possible about their products and/or services, pricing, and promotion.

Gathering Information for Your Competitor Analysis

A visit is still the most obvious starting point - either to the brick and mortar store or to the company's website. Go there, once or several times, and look around. Watch how customers are treated. Check out the prices.

You can also learn a fair bit about your competitors from talking to their customers and/or clients - if you know who they are. Other good "live" sources of information about competitors include a company's vendors or suppliers and a company's employees. They may or may not be willing to talk to you, but it's worth seeking them out and asking.

And watch for trade shows that your competitors may be attending. Businesses are there to disseminate information about and sell their products or services; attending and visiting their booths can be an excellent way to find out about your competition.

You'll also want to search for the publicly available information about your competitors. Online publications, newspapers, and magazines may all have information about the company you're investigating for your competitive analysis. Press releases may be particularly useful. 

Once you've compiled the information about your competitors, you're ready to analyze it. 

Analyzing the Competition

Just listing a bunch of information about your competition in the competitor analysis section of the business plan misses the point. It's the analysis of the information that's important.

Study the information you've gathered about each of your competitors and ask yourself this question: How are you going to compete with that company?

For many small businesses, the key to competing successfully is to identify a market niche where they can capture a  specific target market  whose needs are not being met.

• Is there a particular segment of the market that your competition has overlooked?
• Is there a service that customers or clients want that your competitor does not supply? 

The goal of your competitor analysis is to identify and expand upon your competitive advantage - the benefits that your proposed business can offer the customer or client that your competition can't or won't supply.

Writing the Competitor Analysis Section

When you're writing the business plan, you'll write the competitor analysis section in the form of several paragraphs. 

The first paragraph will outline the competitive environment, telling your readers who your proposed business's competitors are, how much of the market they control and any other relevant details about the competition.

The second and following paragraphs will detail your competitive advantage, explaining why and how your company will be able to compete with these competitors and establish yourself as a successful business.

Remember; you don't have to go into exhaustive detail here, but you do need to persuade the reader of your business plan that you are knowledgeable about the competition and that you have a clear, definitive plan that will enable your new business to successfully compete.

How to Write a Competitor Analysis for a Business Plan

April 28, 2023

Adam Hoeksema

A competitor analysis for your business plan can be an incredibly important part of the business planning process.  By trying to learn as much as you can about your competitors, you can learn a lot about what to expect in your own business.  You can also identify how you can differentiate your business and gain a competitive advantage.  

In this article I plan to walk through the following:

• What to Include in a Competitor Analysis

How to Find Data on Competitors

Finding competitor data for online businesses, finding competitor data for physical retail businesses, competitor analysis business plan example.

With that as our road map, let’s dive in. 

What is Included in a Business Plan Competitor Analysis

A competitor analysis should include the following components:

Market Overview

• Key Competitors

Competitor Profiles

Competitive positioning, target market, opportunities and threats.

• Conclusions and Strategic Recommendations

Begin with a brief overview of the market or industry you operate in, outlining its size, growth trends, and key segments. This will provide context for the competitive analysis and help you understand the market dynamics.  You can often find some great industry trend data from sources like IBISworld . 

Key Competitors 

Make a list of your main competitors, which may include direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer similar products or services, while indirect competitors offer alternatives or substitutes that could fulfill the same customer needs.  

One major turn off for investors and lenders is to say that you have “no competitors.”  You always have competitors.  If you are opening a coffee shop in your town that doesn’t have a coffee shop, your competitor might be the coffee at the local gas station, or coffee made at home.  

For each key competitor, provide a detailed profile that includes:

• Company background: Briefly describe their history, mission, and size.
• Market share: Estimate their share of the market compared to yours (if you haven’t started yet you won’t have any market share yet) and other competitors.
• Product or service offerings: Describe their products or services and how they compare to yours.
• Pricing strategy: Analyze their pricing model and compare it to your own.
• Distribution channels: Identify the channels they use to distribute their products or services, such as online, retail stores, or partnerships.
• Marketing and promotional strategies: Analyze their marketing efforts, including advertising, social media, and public relations.
• Strengths and weaknesses: Identify their competitive advantages and disadvantages in comparison to your business.

Assess your company's competitive positioning by comparing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) to those of your competitors. Highlight what makes you unique and areas where you can gain a competitive advantage.

Describe your target market and how it differs from your competitors'. Understanding the market segments that your competitors serve will help you better define your own target audience and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.

Based on your competitor analysis, identify potential opportunities to exploit in the market and threats that your competitors may pose to your business. This can help you develop proactive strategies to mitigate risks and capitalize on growth opportunities.

Conclusion and Strategic Recommendations

Summarize your findings and provide recommendations for how your business can differentiate itself, address competitive challenges, and gain market share. This may include recommendations for product or service development, pricing, marketing strategies, or strategic partnerships.

So one of your initial questions should be where in the world do you find reliable data on your competitors, it's not like you can call them and just ask them for their financial statements and customer database!  

Depending on whether your business is primarily online or a physical location, the approach and tools that I use to do competitive research will differ.  I am going to show you examples of the type of research that I like to do and the data that I am able to pull from a couple of tools that we like to utilize. 

There are a few data points that I like to find for online competitors.  I want to know:

• How much organic traffic is my competitor's website getting?
• How much paid traffic is my competitor’s website getting? 
• How much search volume is there for keywords that I want to compete for?
• How much would I have to pay per click for keywords that I want to rank for?

In order to find this data I use two tools.  

• Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Let me show you how I use both tools to gather data on my competitors.

How to Use Ahrefs for Competitor Analysis

Let’s assume I am working on a business plan for a gym in Indianapolis.  I would start by looking at the search volume for “Indianapolis Gyms” which would give me some idea of the number of people searching for this each month.  You can see below that there are 250 monthly searches for this keyword according to Ahrefs. 

Next, I would look to see which gym is top ranked for that keyword and in this example I found a Lifetime Fitness .  Now I can take that keyword and run it through the Ahrefs Site Explorer and I can now see how much website traffic that particular competitor is getting each month.  This particular website is getting about 800 organic website visitors per month. 

Ahrefs can also estimate how much paid traffic a particular website is receiving each month as well.  

If you want to see exactly how I use the Ahrefs tool, check out the short video below:

Watch:  I recorded a demo of using Ahrefs for competitor analysis here. 

How to Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner for Market Research

I also like to use Google Adwords Keyword Planner to gather some additional data about my market.  So again, if I search for “Indianapolis Gyms” I can see Google’s estimate of traffic per month as well as seasonal trends in search volume.  I can also see the average cost per click that advertisers are paying for that keyword.  

As you can see, the cost per click ranges from $1.32 to $5.29 for advertisers right now.  If you can see how much paid traffic your competitor is getting on Ahrefs and you know the average cost per click for relevant keywords from Google Keyword Planner, you can back into a rough estimate of how much your competitor is spending on advertising per month.  I think this can be useful as well.  

One other thing you might notice is that Ahrefs seems to have conservative search volume estimates compared to Google Keyword Planner. We saw 250 monthly searches from Ahrefs and 2,400 from Google Keyword Planner.  This should give you some range of how big your market might be. 

If your competition is not an online business, or doesn’t really have much of an online presence, then finding foot traffic data is going to be much more useful for you in your competitor analysis. 

We have partnered with a company called Advan Research to be able to pull foot traffic data reports from their platform. 

Here is some of the really cool data that we can get and how you might use it in your competitor research. 

Monthly Foot Traffic Data

You can pull monthly foot traffic data for your competitors.  This foot traffic data is based on cell phone GPS data and can provide some great insight on potential customer traffic you might expect.  For example, in the graph below we pulled the monthly traffic for a local Steakhouse that gets about 5,000 visitors per month. 

Daily and Hourly Foot Traffic Data

You can pull foot traffic data for a location by the day and the hour to get an idea of what days and hours are busiest for your competitors and likely to be busiest for you.  

Customer Location Data

One of the most powerful data reports you can pull on a competitor is a heat map of where their customers are coming from.  If you notice that customers are traveling a long distance to your competitor, you could look at finding a location that is closer to a large segment of your competitors' customers. 

Annual Revenue Estimate and Revenue per Square Foot Data

Finally, for larger businesses or publicly traded companies, Advan can provide you with estimates of their annual revenue, revenue per square foot and how many square feet they are renting for their business.  Talk about some serious competitor intelligence that can set you ahead and impress your investors and lenders. 

The following is an example of a competitor analysis for a restaurant business plan which you can adapt to your own business.  I would also recommend that you incorporate data from Ahrefs, Google Adwords Keyword Planner and our Foot Traffic Data Report into this section of your business plan.  The idea here is to get a good understanding of where the competitors stand and to identify your place in the market. 

I. Competitor Analysis

The purpose of this section is to identify and evaluate the main competitors in the local Italian restaurant industry and to determine our competitive positioning. Understanding the competitive landscape will help us to develop effective strategies that enable us to compete effectively in the market, differentiate ourselves, and carve out a sustainable market share. Our analysis will focus on the following key areas

A. Market Overview

The local Italian restaurant market is valued at approximately $X million and is expected to grow at a CAGR of X% over the next five years. The industry is characterized by the presence of several well-established Italian restaurants, popular chain restaurants, and a few emerging independent restaurants. The primary segments within the industry are fine dining, casual dining, and fast-casual dining.

B. Key Competitors

Competitor A (Fine Dining Italian Restaurant)

Market Share : X%

Strengths: High-quality ingredients, exceptional culinary skills, elegant ambiance, and strong brand recognition.

Weaknesses: High pricing, limited menu offerings, and a focus on a specific customer segment (high-income individuals).

Competitor B (Casual Dining Italian Restaurant)

Market Share: X%

Strengths: Wide variety of Italian dishes, family-friendly atmosphere, and strong customer loyalty.

Weaknesses: Inconsistent food quality, slow service during peak hours, and limited menu innovation.

Competitor C (Fast-Casual Italian Restaurant)

Strengths: Quick service, affordable pricing, and convenient locations.

Weaknesses: Limited menu variety, lack of authentic Italian flavors, and a focus on takeout and delivery over dine-in experiences.

C. Competitive Positioning

Based on our analysis, our competitive positioning is as follows:

Unique Value Proposition: Our primary differentiation lies in our commitment to providing authentic Italian cuisine using high-quality, locally-sourced ingredients, combined with exceptional customer service in a warm and inviting atmosphere. This will enable us to attract customers seeking a genuine Italian dining experience that sets us apart from competitors.

Competitive Pricing: Our pricing strategy is to offer value for money while maintaining profitability. By carefully selecting our suppliers and managing our costs, we will be able to offer a competitively priced menu without compromising on quality.

Target Market: We will cater to a broad range of customers, including families, couples, and groups of friends, by offering a versatile menu that appeals to various tastes and preferences. Our focus will be on attracting local patrons and tourists alike, who are looking for an authentic and memorable Italian dining experience.

Marketing and Promotion: We will invest in both traditional and digital marketing strategies to create brand awareness and drive customer traffic. This will include targeted social media campaigns, local newspaper advertisements, participation in local food festivals, and collaboration with local businesses and organizations.

I hope this has been helpful in giving you some ideas on how to gather relevant competitor research so that you can make informed decisions about where you locate and start your business. 

If you are interested in our Foot Traffic Data Report to help provide the data for your competitor analysis or other sections of your business plan, please don’t hesitate to contact us.  

About the Author

Adam is the Co-founder of ProjectionHub which helps entrepreneurs create financial projections for potential investors, lenders and internal business planning. Since 2012, over 50,000 entrepreneurs from around the world have used ProjectionHub to help create financial projections.

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• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Competitive Analysis

The seventh in a comprehensive series to help you craft the perfect business plan for your startup.

This article is part of a series on  how to write a great business plan .

The Competitive Analysis section of your business plan is devoted to analyzing your competition--both your current competition and potential competitors who might enter your market.

Every business has competition. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competition--or potential competition--is critical to making sure your business survives and grows. While you don't need to hire a private detective, you do need to thoroughly assess your competition on a regular basis even if you only plan to run a small business.

In fact, small businesses can be especially vulnerable to competition, especially when new companies enter a marketplace.

Competitive analysis can be incredibly complicated and time-consuming... but it doesn't have to be. Here is a simple process you can follow to identify, analyze, and determine the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.

Profile Current Competitors

First develop a basic profile of each of your current competitors. For example, if you plan to open an office supply store you may have three competing stores in your market.

Online retailers will also provide competition, but thoroughly analyzing those companies will be less valuable unless you also decide you want to sell office supplies online. (Although it's also possible that they--or, say, Amazon--are your real competition. Only you can determine that.)

To make the process easier, stick to analyzing companies you will directly compete with. If you plan to set up an accounting firm, you will compete with other accounting firms in your area. If you plan to open a clothing store, you will compete with other clothing retailers in your area.

Again, if you run a clothing store you also compete with online retailers, but there is relatively little you can do about that type of competition other than to work hard to compete in other ways: great service, friendly salespeople, convenient hours, truly understanding your customers, etc.

Once you identify your main competitors, answer these questions about each one. And be objective. It's easy to identify weaknesses in your competition, but less easy (and a lot less fun) to recognize where they may be able to outperform you:

• What are their strengths? Price, service, convenience, extensive inventory are all areas where you may be vulnerable.
• What are their weaknesses? Weaknesses are opportunities you should plan to take advantage of.
• What are their basic objectives? Do they seek to gain market share? Do they attempt to capture premium clients? See your industry through their eyes. What are they trying to achieve?
• What marketing strategies do they use? Look at their advertising, public relations, etc.
• How can you take market share away from their business?
• How will they respond when you enter the market?

While these questions may seem like a lot of work to answer, in reality the process should be fairly easy. You should already have a feel for the competition's strengths and weaknesses... if you know your market and your industry.

To gather information, you can also:

• Check out their websites and marketing materials. Most of the information you need about products, services, prices, and company objectives should be readily available. If that information is not available, you may have identified a weakness.
• Visit their locations. Take a look around. Check out sales materials and promotional literature. Have friends stop in or call to ask for information.
• Evaluate their marketing and advertising campaigns. How a company advertises creates a great opportunity to uncover the objectives and strategies of that business. Advertising should help you quickly determine how a company positions itself, who it markets to, and what strategies it employs to reach potential customers.
• Browse. Search the Internet for news, public relations, and other mentions of your competition. Search blogs and Twitter feeds as well as review and recommendation sites. While most of the information you find will be anecdotal and based on the opinion of just a few people, you may at least get a sense of how some consumers perceive your competition. Plus you may also get advance warning about expansion plans, new markets they intend to enter, or changes in management.

Keep in mind competitive analysis does more than help you understand your competition. Competitive analysis can also help you identify changes you should make to your business strategies. Learn from competitor strengths, take advantage of competitor's weaknesses, and apply the same analysis to your own business plan.

You might be surprised by what you can learn about your business by evaluating other businesses.

Identify Potential Competitors

It can be tough to predict when and where new competitors may pop up. For starters, regularly search for news on your industry, your products, your services, and your target market.

But there are other ways to predict when competition may follow you into a market. Other people may see the same opportunity you see. Think about your business and your industry, and if the following conditions exist, you may face competition does the road:

• The industry enjoys relatively high profit margins
• Entering the market is relatively easy and inexpensive
• The market is growing--the more rapidly it is growing the greater the risk of competition
• Supply and demand is off--supply is low and demand is high
• Very little competition exists, so there is plenty of "room" for others to enter the market

In general terms, if serving your market seems easy you can safely assume competitors will enter your market. A good business plan anticipates and accounts for new competitors.

Now distill what you've learned by answering these questions in your business plan:

• Who are my current competitors? What is their market share? How successful are they?
• What market do current competitors target? Do they focus on a specific customer type, on serving the mass market, or on a particular niche?
• Are competing businesses growing or scaling back their operations? Why? What does that mean for your business?
• How will your company be different from the competition? What competitor weaknesses can you exploit? What competitor strengths will you need to overcome to be successful?
• What will you do if competitors drop out of the marketplace? What will you do to take advantage of the opportunity?
• What will you do if new competitors enter the marketplace? How will you react to and overcome new challenges?

The Competitive Analysis section for our cycling rental business could start something like this:

Primary Competitors

Our nearest and only competition is the bike shops in Harrisonburg, VA. Our next closest competitor is located over 100 miles away.

The in-town bike shops will be strong competitors. They are established businesses with excellent reputations. On the other hand, they offer inferior-quality equipment and their location is significantly less convenient.

Secondary Competitors

We do not plan to sell bicycles for at least the first two years of operation. However, sellers of new equipment do indirectly compete with our business since a customer who buys equipment no longer needs to rent equipment.

Later, when we add new equipment sales to our operation, we will face competition from online retailers. We will compete with new equipment retailers through personalized service and targeted marketing to our existing customer base, especially through online initiatives.

Opportunities

• By offering mid- to high-end quality equipment, we provide customers the opportunity to "try out" bikes they may wish to purchase at a later date, providing additional incentive (besides cost savings) to use our service.
• Offering drive-up, express rental return services will be seen as a much more attractive option compared to the hassle of renting bikes in Harrisonburg and transporting them to intended take-off points for rides.
• Online initiatives like online renewals and online reservations enhances customer convenience and positions us as a cutting-edge supplier in a market largely populated, especially in the cycling segment, by customers who tend to be early technology adapters.
• Renting bikes and cycling equipment may be perceived by some of our target market as a commodity transaction. If we do not differentiate ourselves in terms of quality, convenience, and service, we could face additional competition from other entrants to the market.
• One of the bike shops in Harrisonburg is a subsidiary of a larger corporation with significant financial assets. If we, as hoped, carve out a significant market share, the corporation may use those assets to increase service, improve equipment quality, or cut prices.

While your business plan is primarily intended to convince you that your business makes sense, keep in mind most investors look closely at your competitive analysis. A common mistake made by entrepreneurs is assuming they will simply "do it better" than any competition.

Experienced businesspeople know you will face stiff competition: showing you understand your competition, understand your strengths and weaknesses relative to that competition, and that you understand you will have to adapt and change based on that competition, is critical.

And, even if you do not ever plan to seek financing or bring in investors, you absolutely must know your competition.

The Competitive Analysis section helps you answer the "Against who?" question.

Next time we'll look at another major component in a business plan: how you will set up your Operations .

More in this series:

• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Key Concepts
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: the Executive Summary
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Overview and Objectives
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Products and Services
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Market Opportunities
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Sales and Marketing
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Operations
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Management Team
• How to Write a Great Business Plan: Financial Analysis

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Competitor Analysis Business Plan Template

Helping you nail your marketing strategy

At Robot Mascot, we specialise in creating investment materials, including our free competitor analysis template to help you convince investors and win their support.

A competitor analysis will help you to better compete against your competition, win more customers, and increase your market share.

What is a competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis, also known as competitive analysis, involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors and analysing their strengths and weaknesses against your own. 

Conducting a competitor analysis is essential to understanding other businesses in your market. It forms an important part of your business plan – a vital document designed to help you secure investment during the pitching process . As part of your business plan, you’ll need to show investors that you’ve conducted an in-depth analysis of your direct and indirect competitors and demonstrate how your business differentiates from them.

What is a competitor analysis template?

Our simple competitor analysis template allows you to identify and analyse the competitors within your market in a clear, organised and digestible way. 

Our dedicated template for competitor analysis is designed to help you identify areas in which you have a competitive advantage and where you may be weaker than your competitors. Pinpointing areas of weakness is an essential part of competitive analysis because it allows you to take action and improve or develop particular areas of your business. 

Our free competitor analysis template will help you gain insights into your competitor’s capabilities and determine where you sit within the current market landscape. 

What is the purpose of competitor analysis?

Analysing your competitor’s strengths and weakness allows you to create and implement tactics and activities that will help you improve your offering within the market.

By comparing your business to your competitors, you will be able to identify your core strengths and areas of your business that need development or improvement. It will also reveal opportunities and threats, and how your business can better serve prospective customers.

What should a competitor analysis include?

A competitive analysis should include important details about competitors’ businesses, from product/service information and key selling points, to target audience and marketing strategy , to pricing and market share. 

Our competitor analysis template includes the following crucial categories required to conduct an in-depth competitive analysis:

• Company Overview
• Market Information
• Product Information
• Promotional Strategy
• Competitive Edge

The core categories contain sub-sections, allowing you to dive into more detail when analysing each competitor. For example, the ‘Promotional Strategy’ category contains dedicated sections to help you map out information about your competitor’s digital marketing activities, key website features, social media accounts, offline marketing activities and PR coverage . 

Why is competitor analysis important?

Competitor analysis is a key part of your business plan because it shows that you have a comprehensive understanding of the market and your position within it. Competitive analysis grants you insights to help you make informed decisions about every aspect of your business, including your products/services, sales and marketing strategies, and more.

There are many benefits to conducting a competitor analysis, including:

• Identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, and comparing them to your own
• Gaining a comprehensive understanding of your market
• Spotting industry trends
• Setting benchmarks for future growth

While a competitor analysis is an essential part of your initial business plan, it is also something that should be conducted at every stage of your business. This will enable you to:

• Identify any changes or advancements to your competitor’s products/services
• Monitor and act upon industry developments 
• Spot potential threats posed by new market entrants or products/services

How to conduct a competitor analysis

You can use our free competitor analysis template to conduct a comprehensive analysis on all core areas of your competitors business. We’ve also provided a few extra tips to help you conduct a competitive analysis:

1. Identify your direct and indirect competitors

Direct competitors offer similar products or services to your business. Indirect competitors offer products or services that are completely different to yours, yet serve the same need or provide a similar solution.

While there may be a few obvious competitors, you should also try to identify those which you haven’t yet considered. To locate competitors, you need to think like your customers. Ask yourself, who would your customers turn to if they didn’t purchase from you? 

You can also find out who your competitors are by conducting online searches using similar product/service keywords. If a certain brand is appearing for the same terms that you’re also ranking for (or should be ranking for), they’re probably a competitor.  

It’s important to analyse both direct and indirect competitors to help you establish a competitive advantage, and to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the market.

2. Start with the basics

Once you have your competitor list ready, start by researching the basic details of their businesses. For example, take note of their website, social media profiles, location and company size. From there, you can find more granular information to help you conduct a truly in-depth and accurate review.

3. Reach out to your potential customers

Find people who are currently experiencing the problem you’re looking to solve and speak to them about it. Interviewing potential customers can help you acquire some valuable insights including, what they’re currently buying. It’s important to gather feedback from customers to find out why some customers choose one solution over another and what influences their decisions.

For a full breakdown of how to do competitor analysis, read our complete step-by-step guide to conducting competitor analysis .

Download our competitor analysis template

If you’ve identified the competition and you’re ready to start analysing them, allow us to help. Robot Mascot’s competitor analysis template is available in Excel and is free to download. It provides all the crucial categories that will help you analyse each competitor effectively, including a dedicated section for SWOT analysis. 

Our downloadable competitor analysis template is designed for UK startups and entrepreneurs. It offers insightful instructions about how to gather information about your competitors, and how to assign each competitor a ‘score’ to accurately benchmark them against your business. 

To discover your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and compare them to your own, download our business competitor analysis template for free.

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SWOT Analysis For Business Plan

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Prepared by: [Your Name], [Your Business Name]

I. Executive Summary

The following SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunitanalysis provides a comprehensive overview of [Your Business Name] 's current position in the market and identifies key factors influencing its strategic direction. By evaluating internal strengths and weaknesses alongside external opportunities and threats, this analysis aims to inform strategic decision-making and guide future actions for sustainable growth and success.ies, and Threats)

II. Market Analysis

Market Size and Growth

Assess the size and growth rate of the target market(s).

Identify key trends and drivers shaping market dynamics.

Market Segmentation

Identify distinct customer segments within the market.

Evaluate the attractiveness of each segment based on factors such as size, growth potential, and profitability.

Market Trends

Identify emerging trends and shifts in consumer behavior.

Consider technological advancements, regulatory changes, and socio-economic factors impacting the market.

SWOT Analysis of the Market

Evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the market landscape.

Identify areas of opportunity and potential threats to market entry or expansion.

III. Customer Analysis

Customer Demographics

Profile the characteristics of your target customers (e.g., age, gender, income, location).

Identify primary and secondary customer segments.

Customer Needs and Preferences

Understand the needs, preferences, and pain points of your target customers.

Analyze customer feedback, surveys, and market research data.

Customer Behavior

Analyze purchasing behavior, decision-making processes, and factors influencing customer choices.

Identify key touchpoints and interactions throughout the customer journey.

Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Assess customer satisfaction levels and factors driving loyalty.

Identify opportunities to enhance customer experience and build long-term relationships.

IV. Competitive Analysis

Competitor Identification

Identify direct and indirect competitors operating in the market.

Assess their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.

Competitive Landscape

Analyze the competitive landscape in terms of market share, pricing strategies, and product/service offerings.

Identify competitive advantages and areas of differentiation.

SWOT Analysis of Competitors

Evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of key competitors.

Identify areas where your business can gain a competitive edge.

Competitive Strategies

Assess competitor strategies and tactics.

Identify potential threats posed by competitors and strategies to counteract them.

V. Strengths

Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

Identify what sets your business apart from competitors.

Highlight any proprietary technology, patents, or processes.

Strong Brand Recognition

Assess the strength of your brand in the market.

Consider brand reputation, customer loyalty, and brand awareness.

Skilled Workforce

Evaluate the expertise and skills of your team.

Highlight specialized knowledge or experience that gives your team a competitive advantage.

Financial Stability

Analyze your financial resources, revenue streams, and cash flow.

Consider if you have sufficient capital to support business growth and withstand market fluctuations.

Strategic Partnerships

Identify any alliances or partnerships that provide access to resources, distribution channels, or new markets.

Assess the value and strength of these relationships.

VI. Weaknesses

Limited Market Presence

Evaluate your market share and penetration.

Consider if your business has a narrow customer base or limited geographical reach.

Resource Constraints

Identify any limitations in terms of financial resources, manpower, or technology.

Assess how these constraints may hinder business operations or growth.

Dependency on Key Personnel

Evaluate if your business heavily relies on specific individuals.

Consider succession planning and strategies to mitigate risks associated with key personnel turnover.

Product or Service Limitations

Assess any shortcomings or gaps in your offerings.

Consider customer feedback, product/service reviews, and areas for improvement.

Operational Inefficiencies

Identify areas where your business processes can be optimized.

Consider factors such as production bottlenecks, supply chain issues, or outdated technology.

VII. Opportunities

Market Expansion

Identify untapped markets or niche segments with growth potential.

Consider geographic expansion, demographic shifts, or emerging trends.

Technological Advancements

Explore how advancements in technology can enhance your products, services, or operations.

Consider opportunities presented by AI, IoT, blockchain, etc.

Strategic Alliances and Partnerships

Explore potential collaborations with complementary businesses.

Consider joint ventures, co-branding opportunities, or distribution partnerships.

Changing Consumer Preferences

Identify shifts in consumer behavior or preferences.

Consider how you can adapt your offerings to meet evolving customer needs.

Regulatory Changes

Identify upcoming regulatory changes or industry standards.

Explore how your business can adapt to new regulations or compliance requirements.

VIII. Threats

Intense Competition

Assess the competitive landscape and potential threats from new entrants or established rivals.

Consider pricing pressures, product differentiation, or market saturation.

Economic Downturns

Evaluate the impact of economic fluctuations on your business.

Consider how you can mitigate risks associated with recessions, inflation, or currency fluctuations.

Technological Disruption

Identify disruptive technologies or innovations that could render your products or services obsolete.

Consider how you can stay ahead of technological advancements and adapt your business model accordingly.

Supply Chain Disruptions

Assess vulnerabilities in your supply chain.

Consider risks such as raw material shortages, transportation disruptions, or supplier dependencies.

Legal and Regulatory Risks

Identify potential legal or regulatory challenges.

Consider risks related to intellectual property, data privacy, or industry-specific regulations.

IX. Conclusion

This SWOT analysis, supplemented by market, customer, and competitive analyses, provides a comprehensive framework for strategic planning and decision-making at [Your Business Name] . By leveraging strengths, addressing weaknesses, capitalizing on opportunities, and mitigating threats, [Your Business Name] can navigate the competitive landscape with confidence and pursue sustainable growth objectives. Regular review and adaptation of this analysis will ensure [Your Business Name] remains agile and responsive to evolving market dynamics.

Analysis Templates @ Template.net