Have you considered studying your competitors to understand what their customers think of them, what can you learn from them in terms of good features and what you should avoid?
Conducting a competitive landscape analysis is an important step of any conversion optimization program.
Conducting a competitive analysis is important for the success of a conversion rate optimization program
- It helps you understand how customers and potential customers think of your business vs. your competitors.
- You learn from the strengths and weakness of your competitors.
Infographic by- Invesp
To Publish this Image on your Blog or Website . Copy this code
10 steps to conducting a competitive analysis
In order to carry out comprehensive competitive analysis for conversion rate optimizations, conduct the following 10 steps:
1. Collect industry data
Your goal is to answer the following questions:
- What is the size of your industry?
- What are the growth estimates for the coming years?
- What is the penetration level in terms of customer awareness?
- What are the barriers to entry?
- What other external factors such as political, economic and social that impact on your industry?
In short, you must have a clear, deep and wide understanding of your industry.
2. Determine your top 5 competitors
The reason you need to pick the top names in your niche is simply because they’ll have greater success in terms of conversions than everyone else.
There’re are several tools and websites you can use to determine your top 5 competitors. We suggest using the following:
- Google Search
- Google Trends
- SimilarWeb
- Compete
- Alexa
- Semrush
- Review sites such as Yelp.
- You can also ask existing customers of prospects who they would consider for the same service and this will give you a clear idea who are the big boys in your niche. Others use conference data and ask suppliers.
3. Interact with your competitor
You need to have a firsthand experience with your competitor.
How about placing an order like any other customer or conducting a usability test on their website? Get to know your competitors and understand how they operate both online and offline.
4. Analyze your competitors
Analyze your competitors in order to understand:
- The type of products and services they offer
- The size of the products and prices they offer
- Their annual revenue
- Their Unique value proposition
- Their market share
- Website banners, nature of website copy, and first impression of their web design and website images they are using.
- The different of testimonials they use
- The case studies and white papers they have published.
This will give you a complete picture of your competitor
5. Determine your competitor’s customer acquisition strategy
What marketing strategy is your competitor using to generate new customers? Are they mainly using paid search or organic search or a combination of both? Are they using social media?
6. Analyze your competitor’s landing page strategy
Analyze your competitor’s landing page, focus on the following elements:
- Headlines: do they have strong, persuasive headlines?
- Do they have a clearly stated value proposition?
- Do they have a unique page design that catches the visitor’s eye?
- What is the color theme/design/balance?
- What image/videos are they using?
- What incentives or special offers do they use on the landing page?
Having said that, you should then be able to identify the elements of your own landing pages which you can add, change or improve.
7. Analyze competitor’s pricing strategy
How companies price their products or services is every important. There is a very thin line between right pricing and pricing your products either too low or too high. You need to get your pricing right in order to make a profit and attract customers. Obviously, if your competitors are experiencing success, it means their pricing strategy is right. Ask yourself the following questions as you analyze their pricing strategy:
- Do they offer multiple pricing options?
- What guarantees do they offer?
- Do they use vendor comparisons?
- What are the weaknesses and strengths in the competitor’s pricing strategy which you can learn from?
8. Analyze the competitor’s check-out strategy
If you are selling online, then the checkout process is an important area to focus on. Remember that most websites report checkout abandonment rates upwards of 65%. Here are the elements to evaluate in your competitor’s checkout:
- Do they incorporate their value proposition into the checkout process?
- Do they use a single-step or multi-step checkout?
- How do they handle shipping and shipping costs?
- Do they offer upsells and cross-sells during the checkout?
- Do they have use an assurance center in the checkout?
- Are there clear indicators of each step in the checkout process?
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses in the competitors checkout and make a list of lessons you can implement or avoid in your own checkout process.
9. Rate each competitor on a scale of 1-5
Rate your competitors using the following metrics:
- The quality of their customer service.
- The quality of their products and services.
- Their hours of operation.
- Their pricing model
- The incentives they use.
- The number of employees.
10. Learn from your competitors
For each competitor, identify:
- Their top 5 strengths
- Their top 5 weaknesses
- The top 5 options/features they are not offering to their customers.
After following the 10 step process we mentioned above, you should have a list of items that you can implement on your website.
© 2006-2015 Invesp