How to Prepare a Competitive Analysis Report?

You absolutely need to know what your competitors are up to. After all, how do you want to compete with them if you don’t do any research? Here’s how to create a top-notch competitive analysis report and some tools to help you with that task.

Competitive analysis report is a document that briefly outlines competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, identifying your company’s relative advantages and disadvantages. It provides insights into growth opportunities, such as product improvements, market share, and customer expectations, to enhance competitive positioning.

Competitive analysis is a key to understanding your direct and indirect competitors, as well as industry trends, target audience, and many other important factors.

Today you’ll learn what competitive analysis is, how to properly conduct it, and see some competitive analysis templates that will help you with reporting. Let’s get to work.

Table of contents:

1. What is competitive analysis?
2. How to perform competitor analysis?
3. How to create a competitive analysis report?
4. Competitor analysis tools
5. FAQ

What is competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is a critical part of a company’s marketing and business strategy. It involves identifying your competition and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to your own product or service. This analysis helps you to create strategies that will provide you with a distinct advantage, the barriers that can be developed to prevent competition from entering your market, and any weaknesses that can be exploited within the product development cycle.

Read more: Competitor Analysis: All Why’s, How-to’s and More

How to perform competitor analysis?

Performing a competitor analysis involves several steps that help you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you can differentiate your own business. Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to performing a competitive analysis:

Step 1: Identifying competitors

Start by identifying both your direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors are businesses offering a product or service similar to yours, while indirect competitors may offer different products or services but still compete for the same customer dollars. You can do this through market research, industry reports, and customer feedback.

Step 2: Examining and comparing products or services offerings

Next, look at the products or services each competitor offers. What features do they highlight? What is their pricing structure? How do they deliver their product or service? This can help you understand what sets you apart.

Step 3: Analyzing competitors’ market positioning

Analyze your competitors’ marketing and branding strategies. How do they position themselves in the market? What kind of language and imagery do they use in their marketing materials and social media? Understanding your competitors’ positioning can help you to differentiate your own business.

Step 4: Reviewing customer experiences and satisfaction

Look at customer reviews and feedback for your competitors. Are there common praises or complaints? These can highlight potential strengths and weaknesses.

Step 5: Evaluating their online presence

Look at your competitors’ online presence, including their websites, social media profiles, SEO strategies, and online advertising. This can provide insight into how they reach their audience, what kind of content they share, and how they engage with their customers.

Read more: Calculating Online Presence Score with Brand24

Step 6: Identifying competitors’ market share

Look at their share in the market. It can provide a clear idea about their reach and influence within your industry.

Step 7: Analyzing the pricing strategy

Understanding your competitors’ pricing strategies can help you to better position your own product or service. Are they aiming to be a cost leader, or are they charging premium prices?

Step 8: Performing the SWOT analysis

Based on the above data, conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis on each competitor. This helps you identify where your competitors are strong and where they’re vulnerable, providing potential opportunities for your business.

Read more: How to do a SWOT analysis?

After you’ve gathered and analyzed this information, you can use it to create or refine your own marketing strategies. For example, you might choose to target a niche market that your competitors are ignoring, or you could decide to position your product or service as a higher-quality option. A good competitive analysis helps you understand the competitive landscape and find your unique place within it.

How to create a competitive analysis report?

After you perform the competitive analysis, it’s time to create a report for the stakeholders. Follow the same principles as to any other report you’d make. It needs to be simple and clear, easy to read and presented in a format that’s available for anyone that wants to look at it.

So how do you create a competitor analysis report for your CEO, marketing team, or sales representatives? Or anyone else, for that matter.

Take a look at the steps mentioned in the previous chapter. When you finish the competitive analysis, you already have all the data you need; you just need to present it in a readable format. Some competitor analysis tools already create beautiful PDF reports you can share immediately. I listed some tools you can use below.

A competitive analysis report aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of your competition and how your business stacks up against them. Here’s a list of elements to consider including in your report:

1. Introduction:
   • Purpose: Clearly outline the purpose of the report.
   • Scope: Define the range or extent of content covered.
2. Methodology: Explain how you gathered data and which tools or resources were used.
3. Market Overview:
   • Market Definition: Define the market in which you and your competitors operate.
   • Market Size and Growth: Provide details on the current size of the market, historical growth rates, and projected growth.
   • Market Trends: Outline current trends in the industry.
4. Competitor Profiles: For each competitor, include:
   • Company Overview: Brief description, history, headquarters, and size.
   • Product/Service Overview: Detailed description of their product/service offerings.
   • Market Position: Their share and position in the market.
   • Pricing Strategy: Overview of their pricing model.
   • Marketing and Sales Strategies: Advertising, promotions, sales channels.
   • Strengths and Weaknesses: From both a business operation and product/service perspective.
   • Opportunities and Threats: Based on the current market scenario and their position.
5. Competitive Landscape:
   • Market Share Analysis: Visual representations (like pie or bar charts) showing market share distribution.
   • Product/Service Comparison: Feature-by-feature comparison, perhaps using tables or matrices.
   • Pricing Comparison: A comparison of pricing strategies across competitors.
6. Digital Presence Analysis:
   • Website Analysis: User experience, website traffic, content strategy.
   • SEO Analysis: Keywords targeted, backlink profile, domain authority.
   • Social Media Analysis: Platforms used, frequency of posts, engagement levels.
   • Online Advertising: If they use PPC or other online ads, the scope and scale.
7. SWOT Analysis: Provide a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for each competitor, and perhaps one for your business as well for a side-by-side comparison.
8. Key Takeaways & Recommendations:
   • Insights: Summarize the main insights gathered from the analysis.
   • Strategic Recommendations: Provide actionable steps or strategies your business can adopt in light of the findings.
9. Appendices (if needed): Any additional information, raw data, full company profiles, or resources that support the main content of the report.
10. Conclusion: A brief wrap-up of the report, re-emphasizing the purpose and the main findings.

Remember, a competitive analysis report should be concise, focused, and easy to digest. Use visuals like charts, graphs, and tables wherever possible to illustrate points, and ensure the data is presented in a structured and logical manner.

Competitor analysis tools

To create a perfect competitive analysis report, you need a proper set of tools. Here’s a list of tested and recommended competitor analysis tools you can use to file your report.

Brand24

Brand24 is a media monitoring tool that’ll help you file competitive analysis reports. You can monitor competitors’ brand mentions across the web and measure their impact on brand awareness.

Not only will you have an overview of your competitors’ market share, but you’ll also get in-depth PDF reports directly in your inbox. We’re also introducing AI reports that analyze brand mentions and provide insights based on the results.

The comparison tab is especially useful for creating competitive analysis reports.

Media monitoring is a crucial part of competitive analysis, so don’t sleep on this part!

Semrush

Semrush is an advanced SEO tool providing valuable data concerning your website and competitors. The tool is mostly used for SEO keyword research but includes other valuable analytics features.

Semrush can give you a good overview of your competitors’ websites. The tool estimates average traffic and user demographics along with top keywords.

It’s a bit pricey, but you get a lot of value for that money.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a direct competitor to Semrush. It’s another all-in-one SEO suite that combines keyword research and other useful SEO statistics with website analytics.

Using Ahrefs, you can identify competitors, check their website estimate traffic, and compare keyword databases.

Ahrefs is useful not only for competitive analysis but also can give you a good overview of your site’s health and pinpoint things to improve.

Moz

Moz offers a suite of SEO tools that can be used to analyze competitors’ SEO strategies, from keyword usage to backlinks.

Moz is also one of the pioneers of Page Score – an objective indicator of how good SEO a site has. It’s an artificial indicator that can be manipulated, but it’ll give you an estimated overview of how your website compares to your direct competitors, which can be included in your report.

SimilarWeb

This tool allows you to analyze website traffic, engagement metrics, and other key performance indicators of any website, providing insights into how your competitors’ websites are performing.

One of SimilarWeb’s most useful features is the Google Chrome addon which can quickly tell you the most important website statistics. When you are visiting one of your competitors, you can easily check their estimated website traffic, demographics, and other metrics.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo helps analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. It’s an excellent tool for understanding your competitors’ content marketing strategies.

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See also: 11 Competitor Analysis Tools You Need to Know

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you write a competitive analysis report?

A competitive analysis report is a document that compares your company’s products, services, and strategies to those of your direct competitors. It’s an essential part of any business strategy and can help identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Here are the steps to writing a comprehensive competitive analysis report:

1. define your competition,
2. identify the aspects to analyze,
3. collect data,
4. analyze the data,
5. create a competitive positioning map,
6. identify their strategies,
7. identify opportunities and threats,
8. write the report,
9. create an action plan,
10. review and update regularly.

Each section of your report should have clear headers, be concise, and offer direct insights. Visuals like charts and graphs can help break up the text and make data more digestible. The aim of the report is to guide strategy and decision-making, so it should be practical, actionable, and easy to understand.

What is included in a competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis typically includes the following elements:

1. identification of competitors,
2. company overview,
3. competitor product or service analysis,
4. market share analysis,
5. marketing strategy analysis,
6. SWOT analysis,
7. sales strategy analysis,
8. customer perception,
9. financial analysis,
10. trends and predictive analysis,
11. summary and recommendations.

Remember, competitive analysis is a critical part of your business strategy. It should be a living document, updated regularly to keep pace with market changes, new competitors, and shifts in strategy.

What is a competitive analysis template?

A competitive analysis template is a structured document or framework that helps you systematically capture key information about your competitors. It ensures you’re collecting the same type of data for each competitor, making comparisons more accurate.

You can create a competitive analysis template in a variety of formats depending on your preference and the complexity of your analysis, such as a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or even a more visually oriented tool like a PowerPoint presentation. Be sure to make it as detailed and comprehensive as necessary to inform your strategy and decision-making.

What is a competitive audit report?

A competitive audit report, much like a competitive analysis report, is a comprehensive document that details the strategies, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your competitors. It provides insights into their operations and performance that can inform and shape your own strategies.

The terms “competitive audit” and “competitive analysis” are often used interchangeably, but the term “audit” may suggest a more detailed, structured, or formal approach to the analysis.

Start trial and create your first competitive analysis report with Brand24!