To be a leader in your industry, you need to know exactly where you stand and how do you compare with your business rivals. As we know how important competitive analysis is for our customers, we've just added the possibility of projects comparing for our valued BrandMentions users.
See how multiple projects stack up against each other with BrandMentions' newest feature: Compare Projects.
We admit it. Here, at BrandMentions, we're addicted to constant and never-ending self-improvement. A new week brings a brand new update. Here are just some of the things BrandMentions' Compare Projects can help you with:
- Know Exactly Where You Stand Among Your Competitors
- Find The Strengths & Weaknesses of Your Competitors
- Make Informed Business Decisions Based On an Extensive Market Knowledge
Know Exactly Where You Stand Among Your Competitors
You might now the saying: A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace. Whatever business you'd be in, chances are there are other companies out there offering a similar product or service as you.
Therefore, to be a leader in your industry, you need to know how to perform a competitive analysis, but also so you need to have a good idea of where you're standing from a business point of view. Competitor analysis is more than a simple SWOT analysis where you find the strength and weaknesses of your business, your competitors, or your market segment.
A solid competitive analysis is your way of showing that you know exactly where you stand among your fiercest competitors.
Before you undertake a new brand, communication, or marketing strategy, you need to know where you are, where you want to go, how you might get there, and what might be in the way.
BrandMentions understands all these and offers you the possibility of getting an overview of where you're standing within your market niche.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can compare yourself to your competitors, side by side. How many mentions did you receive lately? How about your competitors? Are most of your mentions negative while your competitors' are positive? These mentions KPIs can give you a very good overview of where you're standing, at just a glance.
When comparing your brands or projects side by side, you can get comparative data on the following KPIs:
- Total number of mentions.
- Total number of backlinks.
- Total Reach for the mentions collected.
- Total number of positive mention .
- Total number of negative mentions.
- Web and social mentions distribution.
- Top Influencers
- Top Sites
- Mentions' Performance.
- Google Search Trends
- The Sources of mentions
- The Location of mentions
- Number of Mentions by WeekDay.
- Language representation.
- Trending hashtags.
- Context of mention.
Find The Strengths & Weaknesses of Your Competitors
Knowing your competition is as important as knowing your product and your customer. And finding strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, relative to those of your own product or service, it's definitely a must.
Simply knowing what your competitors offer is not enough.
Establishing an edge over your competitors is just part of the daily grind, but ask yourself, to what extent are you prepared to gain an edge over your competitors?
Usually, most mentioned means most popular. Yet, knowing which brand has the most mentions in your niche is useful, but not enough.
There are a lot of insights you can get when analyzing your brand in comparison to your competitors. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can easily draw the conclusion that while my brand gets most of their mentions from web pages (blog, forums, etc.), my competitors are focusing a lot on social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
Of course, a more detailed analysis needs to be done here, yet, at a glance, you can get a precious insight you probably wouldn't have knew about otherwise.
Now you’ll probably begin your thoroughly honest strength & weakness analysis of your competition. After completing this portion of the competitive analysis, you should be able to take what you’ve learned and applied it to your strategy or product roadmap.
When examining your competitors' strengths & weaknesses, be objective, and dig deep!
With BrandMentions' comparative projects feature, you instantly get lots of valuable insights. Just take a look at the screenshot below. In a glimpse, you can have an overview of the public opinion when it comes to your brand vs your competitors: how many of your total mentions are negative? And how about your competitors? Do they have a better public perception than yours?
Also, get to know how often is your brand searched in Google compared to your competitors. Are people interested in your competitors' brand more than yours? Knowing these pieces of information are of paramount importance as they are definitory
when it comes to setting up your marketing priorities.
After you have completed the strength and weakness analysis for the competition, it’s time to start thinking about your own competitive advantages, as well as any weak areas where your company can aim to improve.
Make Informed Business Decisions Based On an Extensive Market Knowledge
BrandMentions offers you access to an extensive pool of knowledge: from understanding your customers' needs, the business environment you're operating in, to your competitors' performances.
Similar to an internal research, by evaluating quantitative and qualitative data, if you research your competitors, you will uncover effective strategies and new ideas for increasing your business' performance, be it on social media, online, or in the physical store.
By doing an accurate competitor analysis, you'll be able to receive a lot of data and insights for making better business decisions.
Let's take for instance the screenshot below. If you're planning to extend your business at an international level, it would be very useful to analyze where your competitors are popular already. You might want to avoid those areas, or, on the contrary it might give you some good developing ideas. Either way, take a look at what your competitors are doing and analyze their strategy on a side-by-side comparison, before making any business decisions. You might be surprised by the quantity and quality of the insights you'll get.
By knowing the way a business gathers, shares and exploits knowledge can be central to its ability to thrive. This doesn't just apply to huge or multinational companies. Having an extensive market knowledge can benefit everyone from a local barbershop to a manufacturing firm.
There is nothing like a good competition to push you even further. And there is no better way to grow than knowing all your competitors' ins-and-outs and where you are standing among them.
Adding the possibility of comparing projects within BrandMentions was one of the most requested features by our users. If you want us to implement other features that you need within your marketing projects, please feel free to share your feedback with us.
Happy monitoring, and enjoy uncovering your competitors'strategies!
