This template helps you create a live map of your entire competitive landscape, allowing you to assess your position in the market compared to others. We break down our analytical framework into four broad categories – Company Highlights, Market Analysis, Product Analysis, and SWOT Information, thus simplifying your understanding of the market for every type of product or service you offer so you can make more informed business decisions.
A competitive analysis is one of the most useful market research for understanding what other competing businesses are doing, and how you measure up against them. This is a crucial step of any market analysis since it’s hard to pin down what other companies are doing to win customers in your target market without running a full & up-to-speed analysis of your key (direct & indirect) competitors. To learn more about different kinds of competitors to watch out for, feel free to check out our Competitive Matrix template here.
By using this premade spreadsheet, you create a live map of your entire competitive landscape, making it easier to form a complete picture of the market as it stands and your position in it. We break down our framework into four broad analytical categories: Company Highlights, Market Analysis, Product Analysis, and SWOT Information. Sub-headings are added under each for you to flesh out with relevant data as per your business context.
Once you carefully enter the information for yourself and against each competitor, you essentially have a rundown of each company’s market position, sales & marketing tactics, growth & success strategies and other business-critical aspects available to you at a glance.
Template Features
Customizable
This spreadsheet can be customized to the needs of businesses operating in any market or industry. You can easily replace, adjust or add to the default categories we have used with any other criteria better suited to your unique business context.
Scalable
Our template can be scaled or expanded to analyze as many competitors as needed. Similarly, you can add as many individual categories & subcategories of information to collate and compare across competing businesses. For example, you can add new sections to incorporate other popular assessment frameworks, like PESTEL and Porter’s 5 Forces.
In-depth
We have sought to cover the most common indicators under each analytical category so you have a good place to start your research & analysis. We based this selection on what we came across while reviewing hundreds of competitive analysis templates & matrices available out there.
Now let’s explore our template and the default informational & analytical categories we have used in more detail:
Company Highlights
For this opening part, you want to gather basic company-level intel on each competitor (and, of course, yourself!).
You can rename this category to ‘Company Overview’ or ‘Company Information’ or any other title of your choosing, but the basic idea remains the same: detailing the key features or characteristics of a company as a whole, such as:
- Company tagline or slogans
- How many countries does a company operate in?
- Where is the company headquartered?
- What kind of funding or investment does a company have access to?
- How much overall revenue is generated by the company every year?
Market Information
In this section, you will look at a range of market-related factors like who the product is for and what different ways are used to sell, market and distribute this type of product by different businesses.
First up, figure out which target audience is being catered to. Perhaps, your competitors are only selling to a localised segment of the population, like women, teenagers, gym-goers or people falling in a certain income bracket. In the case of direct competitors like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the target market remains the same, i.e., people who want to buy a soft drink.
We also added a separate category to help you document the market share enjoyed by each competitor and compare this value to your own to understand your relative financial standing in the market. To access this information, look through industry reports or annual company reviews, and whenever possible, only stick to the latest datasets & the most reputable data sources.
In the next two rows, specify what strategies & channels are being used to market and distribute a product to customers. When assessing the former, look at what each business (including your own) has done to reach out to prospective consumers in hopes of turning them into loyal customers. Ask yourself what big advertising campaigns were recently launched by other businesses to achieve short, medium or long-term goals? Or what kinds of different intermediaries (like, wholesalers or retailers) are involved in taking a product from the warehouse where it was made to the home of a customer who bought it?
Product Analysis
In this section, you analyze the specifics of your product against similar products available on the market. It’s somewhat safe to assume that no two products in a specific market will offer the same value or utility or have identical core features & functionalities; it is these differences across products that you want to explore here so you can better differentiate your offerings and steal greater market share for yourself.
In our template, we use a four-part framework to analyze competing products:
Pricing
Find out how your competitors are pricing their products. Are they offering the same functionality as you do but at a much higher or lower cost? What kind of discount offers or loyalty programs are being offered by your competitors to encourage customers to buy their products?
Product features
Think of the most salient features that make a given product special or a ‘client-favorite’. Perhaps one of your competitors is using the latest software technology to solve customer needs, or their product sales cycle is more customer-friendly than yours?
Customer reviews
They often say the customer is always right. If that’s true, it means you need to document any direct feedback given to a product or service from first-hand users or clients. Check out product review websites like Amazon Customer Review or Trustpilot to learn more about what customers say and feel about a product.
Quality
What is the quality of the raw materials or ingredients being used? Is your product more or less durable than others?
Here are some of the most widely used benchmarks to study your products across competitors:
- Usability or quality of user experience
- Core product features or functionalities
- Style & design
- Product quality and range
- Use of new, enabling technologies
- Type and number of warranties
- Market positioning strategy
- Value generated for customers
- Sales & distribution channels used
- Post-sale Service
- Level of customer support offered
For a more detailed product feature analysis, use this pre-made Excel sheet to systematically analyze products in an ever-competitive market landscape.
SWOT Analysis
Whether you are a budding entrepreneur, a professional marketer, or the head of a multinational, you will find a SWOT Matrix to be a handy way of organizing your market and company-level insights on how things are and where they need to go! As one of the most well-known strategic planning tools used by businesses of all types, a SWOT analysis helps you create a data-driven summary of your strengths & weaknesses, allowing you to make more informed business decisions while staying on top of market trends, alerts & future predictions.
When done for your competitors, a SWOT analysis allows you to understand the impact of any strategies or tactics being successfully implemented by your competitors, which you might want to emulate or incorporate in your own business model in the future. This helps you better position your company by uncovering potential areas for improvement within your own brand.
You can think of this part as the final (and most rewarding) step of your competitive analysis, where you get to consolidate all your research into a more actionable comparison of your product or business model with your competitors’. When fleshing out the details for this one, ask yourself things like:
- Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified and successfully cashed in on?
- What is working well for your rivals? (Content marketing, product quality, etc.)
- What is your competitor’s weakest point?
- Where does your brand have a clear advantage over your competitors?
- What could competitors do better?
Remember to be creative, think outside the box, and include as many relevant stakeholders in the process as possible so you have a better chance of identifying any problems, risks, or delays that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Who Is Our Template For?
- Marketing professionals: To assess market trends and competitor strategies.
- Business strategists: To identify opportunities for differentiation and market positioning.
- Entrepreneurs: To plan market entry strategies.
- Product managers: To benchmark features and improve product offerings.
When Do I Need One?
- If you want to develop, launch, or halt production of a product.
- When you are evaluating customer service opportunities to boost performance.
- If you want to design business strategies that outshine your rivals.
- If you are looking to invest in new technologies, geographical locations, or markets.
- If you want to decide whether you should take your supply chain global or not.
7 Best Tips To Map Out Your Competitor Landscape
- Identify at least 5 competitors based on industry-level research and market surveys.
- To avoid overclogging your analysis with too much information, do not select more than 10 individual competitors.
- Include both direct and indirect competitors for a more fool-proof analysis of the market.
- To diversify and enrich your analysis, consider both emerging and legacy brands.
- Choose competitors who work on a similar business model to yours for more comparable findings.
- Be consistent when it comes to key design components like fonts and colors.
- Use a pre-designed analysis template to save yourself hours of design work so you can focus more on what’s important – your content!
Wrap Up
Whether you are a digital marketing guru consulting for multiple companies at once, or a business student looking to hone your business analysis skills for an upcoming exam, a template like this is an incredibly useful tool to have in your business arsenal.
By giving you a preformatted document you can tailor to the unique competitive landscape of your industry, you are able to visualize a systematic understanding of the relative standing of each player in the market, and faster. In other words, you can analyze your competitors’ products, services, pricing, marketing strategies, and market positioning in a structured & reliable way, bringing you one step closer to making more informed and responsive business decisions.
Simplify your understanding of your market for every type of product or service you offer with our professionally designed Basic Competitive Analysis template!
Our preformatted, free templates can be directly downloaded to your device as Word & PowerPoint files, or accessed via Google Slides for cloud-based editing & collaboration!
