Competitive Analysis Template

What is a Competitive analysis?

Getting to know your competitors is a game-changer for any business. When you understand your strengths and weaknesses compared to others in your field, you can find your unique place in the market, connect with customers more effectively, and win new business.

A Competitive Analysis helps you navigate your competitive landscape with clarity. It’s a practical framework for assessing your market position, identifying opportunities, and staying agile in a fast-changing environment.

Why does this matter? Imagine if your pricing was higher than the average in your market or compared to direct competitors. Without a clear view of where you stand, you might miss out on attracting new customers. A competitive analysis offers valuable insights that can shape a smarter marketing strategy and empower your sales team to turn more leads into customers.

By regularly diving into competitor research, you keep your finger on the pulse of market trends, giving your business the edge to adapt and thrive.

An effective competitor analysis helps you:

• Gain valuable insights into your competitors to better align your marketing efforts. Assess their strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities to sharpen your own competitive edge.
• Understand key marketing tactics and uncover market opportunities to position your business for success. Stay ahead by analyzing competitor websites and content strategies to identify and adapt to current market trends.
• Minimize risks by quickly responding to changes in the industry.

What information do I need to create a competitive analysis?

The first step in competitor research is identifying who the competition is. There are many ways to identify competitors, but the easiest is just Googling yourself – seriously! You may also use tools like Ahrefs to do a SERP analysis.

Start with a simple web search and relevant social media platforms for your business name, product ideas, and overarching business idea. From there you can explore the competition’s digital footprint as deep as you need to get a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape.

Search the competition’s website content and social media presence, news mentions, support threads, reviews, and online communities – to name a few! Also, look for competitive analysis examples relevant to your business niche. Use this free competitor analysis template to edit and share with your marketing team.

As you’re documenting your competitors track the basics:

• Name of the business
• Location
• Mission statement
• Product offering
• Messaging
• Pricing
• Target customers
• Competitor’s products

When analyzing each competitor’s products or services, make sure you take a close look at the customer experience on their website, content marketing, social media, and digital footprint.

• How solid is their product photography and copywriting? How do they display their offering and communicate value?
• Where are their calls to action on the website? Are they obvious or do they get lost?
• How long does it take for them to respond to emails, live chat, and contact form submissions?
• What’s their market share?
• What information is included in their marketing banners and callouts? How about their email campaigns?
• What is the frequency of their promotions? What benefits do those promotions provide to their customers and potential shoppers, as well as their business?
• How many people follow them on social media? What is the engagement rate of their audience?
• How many employees do they have? What kind of tasks do their employees perform?

How do you write a competitive analysis?

Writing a competitor matrix is the easy part. Once you’ve done a deep dive into the competitive landscape, you’re ready to create a side-by-side comparison of your business and the competition to help your team strategize better, plan business growth, content marketing, customer success, social media and other communication strategies to provide a clearer vision for the organization. Get started with Xtensio’s competitive analysis template.

Step #1: Describe your competitors
Introduce your competitor analysis with your target audience in mind and outline the general market landscape. You’ll list your three main competitors and their basic information: product, mission, location, company size, web presence, social media channels, and tagline.

Step #2 Analyze the competition’s strengths and weaknesses
It’s easy to notice what your competition is doing wrong, but what about the things they’re doing right? In order to compete, dissect all aspects of your competition by completing a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threat Analysis) for each competitor. What are their customers happy about? What are they complaining about? Use this opportunity to dive into some qualitative competitor analysis.

Go online and collect YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter comments. Chat with your competitors’ customers if you can interact with them. You can use all of this information to find your own strengths, weaknesses, and your competitive advantage.

After summarizing your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it’s time to look at the bigger picture as to how this fits in with your marketing strategies. It’s time to figure out where every major competitor currently fits into the competitive landscape.

What’s each competitor’s position with respect to the market landscape criteria? Add new data pieces to compare across the board. Surely, this will help your audience understand the market and where your competitors stand concerning one another.

A competitive analysis will allow you to plan effective strategies to battle the competition and establish your own company in your target market. Remember, the competitive analysis is meant to help your team plan and strategize to stay ahead of the competition.

A report that communicates the findings of your competitive analysis will ensure stakeholders are on board and in the know. Add your team to collaborate or share a link so you can analyze your report together.

Check out Xtensio’s competitive analysis template how-to guide for more tips. Take advantage of other strategic frameworks to review the broader picture:

• Porter’s Five Forces Analysis
• PESTLE Analysis

How to do a competitive analysis with Xtensio

• Click and start editing, no account or credit card required.
  Follow along with the instructional copy. Add charts, graphs, images, and videos to customize your competitive analysis. Drag & drop. Resize. It’s the easiest free competitive analysis template ever.

• Customize everything in the analysis to match your brand guidelines.
  Define your style guide. Add your (or your client’s) brand fonts and colors. You can even pull colors directly from a website to easily brand your analysis.

• Work together on the cloud.
  Add colleagues (or clients) to collaborate on your competitive analysis. Changes automatically save and sync across all devices, in real-time.

• Share a link. Present a slideshow. Embed. Download a PDF/PNG.
  No more jumping from tool-to-tool to create different types of deliverables.

• Reuse and repurpose.
  Save your own competitive analysis templates. Or copy and merge into other documents.

Follow along step-by-step with the competitive analysis how-to guide.