Competitor Analysis Framework

Typically, understanding a competitor's brand positioning can be done through a simple analysis of a brand’s social media presence, along with what customers are saying about the brand online through review sites like TrustPilot and the Better Business Bureau. Visit their social media pages and sift through comments under a brand's posts, along with content that they are being tagged in. This will help to better understand consumer sentiment and how customers feel about their products and services. Furthermore, you can understand the competitors weaknesses, along with how your brand is currently differentiating itself.

It’s important to understand how competitors are marketing their products or services and spreading brand awareness. Where are they launching their campaigns? What are the conversion goals of their campaigns? What product benefits are they highlighting in their campaigns? What mediums are their advertisements? It is important to understand how your brand's marketing strategies are similar and different to your competitors. Other things to consider:

Do they have a blog? If so, how frequently are they posting to the blog, and what kind of content they are blogging about?

How frequently do they run paid advertisements on social media? What types of advertisements get the best engagement?

Do they run email campaigns? If so, how often do they send emails to their customers and what kind of content is included in the emails?

More times than not, companies know exactly who their desired customers are. Hiring an agency to tell you what you already know isn’t worth spending money on. Most agencies utilize out-dated, low performing, and invalidated websites and assessment tools to conduct their competitor examinations. At 9th Hour, we do what others should - get in the trenches.

For example, (without divulging our “secret sauce” on the internet): We’re working with a brand named “X”. Through in-house methods, We take at least 100 of each of their competitors most consistently engaged followers on Twitter and/or Facebook, dissect their behaviors, and find similarities amongst them. Next, we use proprietary in-house software to develop their buyer persona. From here, we are able to extract customer pain points that identify ways your competitors are falling short. From here, we help to refine different areas of the brands marketing strategy in order to fill the void created by their competition.