Why Startups Should Focus on Competitive Analysis

I started off my first journey of suffering after I chose to blog about Football back in 2012. I was neither aware of the huge competition in this sports niche nor a big fan of Football. To be honest, I didn’t know competitive analysis at that time.

After a month or so I realised that it isn’t an easy hobby to adopt. (I didn’t know anything except studying.) I started questioning myself. Why is it difficult to get good traffic for my blog? What is the thing I am missing and if I cannot do it, how others are too good at it? Yes, I started the competitive analysis in my subconscious where I was totally unaware of it.

Challenging yourself, wondering about things and searching over the Internet is the beginning of practical learnings.

And we all know,

Nothing is impossible to a willing heart. – John Heywood

All those queries and brainstorming led me to know about my competitors, their strength, and of course their weakness. A new journey started since then. This is where competitive analysis starts. It basically starts from knowing your domain, doing a market research, finding your competitors, analyzing their strengths and weakness in order to find opportunities for business venture or idea.

This is the 21st century, right. It is no more a difficult task to perform a good competitor’s strengths and weaknesses analysis and make a good feasibility report. Some paid tools do it in minutes, all you need to do is just sign up!

Entrepreneurs are neither fortune teller nor risk taker. They are risk analyzers. And, they measure the risk by performing a lot of competitive analysis and risk managing strategies. And, lastly, they are not afraid of failure.

How will your business compete in this small global village? If you ask entrepreneurs, they wouldn’t be interested in answering until they have done some good research and have the knowledge and information about the market of your business.

How To Perform The Competitive Analysis?

Although, we already discussed that we start the competitive analysis from knowing our own idea and opportunities but let’s know what great leaders and writers say about it.

David A. Aaker (a specialist in brand strategy & marketing) in his book, Developing Business Strategies suggested to concentrate our efforts in these four major areas …

1. Market Research(Reasons for Success and Failures of Firms in your niche.)
2. Primary customer motivators and their business model.
3. Major component costs and maintenance
4. Industry mobility barriers and new opportunities.

So, this is all we have in the making of unbeatable brand strategies and some great success stories as well. How are you performing your SWOT analysis? Hope you have learned today how to do a competitive analysis and the advantages of competitor analysis.

Do you have anything to add to this story? Do let us know in the comments!

[This post by Farheem Rafique first appeared on ThugStart and has been reproduced with permission.]

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