To stay ahead of your competitors, you need to do more than just focus on your own strategies and performance. You also need to understand your competitors’ strategies, and decode their successes and learn from their failures. By gathering information about your competitors, you will also grasp your own market position. This allows you to make informed decisions to get a competitive advantage, as you can take a strategic position by differentiating your brand from competitors’.
As a PR and communications professional, your efforts are crucial to succeed as they shape a company’s image, build relationships with stakeholders, and influence public perception. In this blog post, we look closer into why and how you can keep track of your competitors and use the information to your advantage.
Why benchmarking matters
Benchmarking against your competitors is critical to understand your market position. It involves evaluating and comparing your performance, processes, and strategies against those of your competitors or industry peers. These are two useful ways to utilize your insights:
Stand out among your competitors
Distinguishing your brand is essential to succeed. By analyzing your competitors’ strategies to see how they position themselves, it’s easier to understand what differentiates your brand. For example, if your competitors push low prices as their USP, you should probably go in another direction. Is the quality of your products what makes you unique? Try to find messages that differentiate your brand. By identifying and leveraging your USPs, it will be clearer to your target audience why they should choose you instead of competitors.
Stay proactive and manage your reputation
Staying ahead of challenges is key to maintaining a strong reputation and thereby becoming the preferred choice for your target audience. One way to succeed is by proactively addressing potential challenges based on competitor analysis insights. Start by looking at your competitors’ success stories as well as failures. What competitor content resonated with your audience? What statements made your audience upset? Analyzing your competitors’ successes can inspire new ideas, while understanding their failures provides valuable lessons. This way, you can adapt your communication strategies according to what fits your target group, ensuring you don’t upset them and instead maintain a solid reputation.
How to monitor your competitors
Keeping an eye on your competitors is a strategic necessity. Here’s an overview of what channels you can use to effectively monitor your competition and how to do it, to gain valuable insights.
Social media
Social media is a great arena for competitor monitoring. Analyze your competitor’s online presence to understand how your audience responds to their messaging, and in what channels. This way, you can uncover opportunities and identify trends. This can be done manually but will be much more effective if you use a social media monitoring tool.
Industry press
Stay informed about industry trends and competitor activities by monitoring relevant publications. Subscribe to industry publications, both online and offline, to gain insights into market dynamics, emerging technologies, and competitor strategies.
Global and local news
Beyond industry-specific news, keeping a broader view of what is going on in the world is important, too. After all, your competitors are – like everyone else – affected by global and local events and will probably adjust their strategies accordingly. Monitor news outlets for any shifts in market dynamics, economic trends, or global events that could impact your industry. This broader perspective ensures that your competitor analysis is well-rounded and anticipates changes before they directly affect your business.
How to compare your brand with your competitors
To make use of your competitor insights, you need to understand your own positioning in the market. Evaluate how your brand compares to competitors in terms of visibility, messaging, and overall reputation. This self-awareness is crucial for making informed decisions in your competitive strategy.
Benchmarking yourself can seem like an overwhelming task, but with our brand report, it’s done in just a few clicks. Brand report visualizes complex data in an easy-to-grasp report that can be shared with your team or stakeholders. It focuses on key metrics when it comes to comparing your brand with competitors, such as brand awareness and brand reputation. Our brand report also includes the crucial metric Share of Voice, which we will now look closer at.
Share of voice as a key metric
When evaluating your own brand position, one key metric is Share of Voice (SoV). SoV is essentially the percentage of the overall conversation or media space that your brand occupies.
A higher Share of Voice means your brand is getting a larger share of the spotlight. It positions your brand as an industry leader and increases recognition and authority. The more your brand is heard, the more it becomes synonymous with expertise and trustworthiness.
However, it’s not just about how loudly you speak; it’s also about how your voice compares to others. Regularly benchmarking your SoV against competitors provides a comprehensive view of your standing in the market. SoV is a powerful tool to understand how well your brand resonates with your audience, compared with your competitors’. Looking into the trends and nuances in your SoV allows you to make informed decisions. For example, you may notice that blog posts around a certain topic generate a lot of mentions, while others do not seem to interest your audience. This way, you can refine and optimize your communication strategies for maximum impact. Increasing your SoV helps solidify your authority and recognition within your industry.
When it comes to calculating Share of Voice, our brand report will do it for you. This not only simplifies the process, but also ensures accuracy. Discover our brand report today to get reports on your Share of Voice and other crucial metrics.
In summary
To succeed in a competitive business environment it’s crucial to monitor competitors. By decoding competitors’ strategies, benchmarking against them, and leveraging USPs for differentiation, you can create a beneficial market position where you stand out.
Monitor competitors through social media, industry press, and global news. The easiest way to get a comprehensive competitor analysis is by using our brand report. It gives you a visualization of how your brand compares with your competitors. One of the metrics in the report is Share of Voice (SoV), which is crucial to understand the positioning of your brand, to enhance recognition and solidify authority. Regular benchmarking of SoV against competitors is a powerful tool for optimizing communication strategies and maximizing impact.
In summary, this blog post provides a roadmap for how to navigate competition effectively, but also how to establish and fortify your brand’s market position.
