Everything You Need to Know About Competitive Product Analysis
At the risk of sounding like a hastily-written wedding speech, it’s sometimes worth kicking things off with a good old-fashioned dictionary definition – as a means to perfectly crystalize a subject matter, and to help keep our eyes on the proverbial prize.
Competitive product analysis is, naturally, all about finding a solid way to compete in your market, so the fact that the dictionary defines ‘competition’ as ‘establishing superiority over others’ should really tell you everything you need to know.
That is: in order to successfully compete, you need to find a clear way to offer that superiority to your target market.
And if you want to do that, you’ll need to understand exactly where those avenues for ‘being better’ lie. Competitive analysis, then, is super important. It’s what’ll help you shape your product into something that actually has a demonstrable space in the market, and build something that people actually need.
Here’s everything you need to know to get that competitive edge…
What is competitive product analysis?
Competitive product analysis is the act of taking an objective look at the market you want to operate in and trying to understand what everyone else is doing, why, and what it means for your product offering.
A proper competitive product analysis framework will involve analyzing your closest rivals’ products on a pretty intricate level. You’ll pick them apart, see what works, what could be improved if they’re cost-effective to the end user, what customers actually think of them, and how the product you’re building differs – if at all.
But the process should also go beyond the nuts and bolts of product design to include things like your competitors’ marketing strategies, online presence, sales tactics, market share, and share of voice. The aim is to understand everything you possibly can about the products you’re competing against because that knowledge will help you carve out something distinctive.
When you perform competitive product analysis, you’re really looking for answers to a bunch of market and customer-centric questions, like:
- What key features make your product different from the competition?
- Are your target customer needs being met?
- What’s lacking in the marketplace?
- Is our product as unique as we thought?
- What do we need to do to win in this space?
- Are there any big threats out there to your business model?
What’s important to remember is that the aim here isn’t to imitate the top dogs in your field.
Instead, you want to use all the juicy info your competitive analysis drums up to work out how you can be different. Amongst a sea of similar products and offerings, you’re looking for the little gaps and avenues for differentiation.
Why is competitive product analysis important?
Ever heard the phrase ‘reinventing the wheel’? It’s pretty apt here.
Imagine you’re one of our cave-dwelling ancestors, and you proudly step out into the community one morning to showcase the brand-new invention you’ve been toiling on night after night… Only to discover that the guy in the cave next door already came up with wheels a few weeks back, and everyone in caveman land already has a bunch of them. There goes your shot at infamy, and your seat at the top table.
In the world of product design and development, not running competitive product analysis will land you in a similar position.
The importance here is in understanding what’s out there and why it already has a foothold in the market. Your competitors are clearly doing something right, else they wouldn’t be your competitors at all. So it’s up to you to understand what that is, and then to use that as a springboard toward a solution that does something unique.
If you don’t undertake those crucial steps, your product will be dead on arrival because it’ll offer nothing established offerings don’t already. And without competitive analysis, you’ll proudly announce something to the world that’s so similar to an established player as to be a bit laughable.
But competitive product analysis isn’t just important for creating a new product with a clear product strategy. For existing products, it’s also a vital part of the continuous discovery process.
Who needs to be involved in competitive product analysis?
A problem shared is a problem halved, right? When you’re running any kind of analysis, it helps to have as many qualified heads involved as possible. And competitive product analysis is no different – especially as you’ll be looking at much more than just the core functionality of competing offerings.
So who needs to be in the room?
1. Product team
Your product management, design, and development teams are central to your offering’s success, so it’s vital that they understand the competitive landscape. That includes core features, design trends, the overall user experience, how tiered offerings stack up, and an understanding of the technical makeup of rival products. If, for example, a competitor app loads up lightning fast, you’ll want to audit the tech behind the processes.
2. Sales team
You might be building a product-led growth model but, even so, it’s worth thinking about the sales funnel and how your competitors are driving customers down it. What does their sales process involve? How big is their sales team? And do they regularly offer discounts to new or existing customers?
3. Marketing team
People need to hear about your product before they get to know and love it, so if you have a strong competitor with a great share of voice, you’ll want your marketing team to understand why. What’s their strategy? Which channels are they using most? What social media platforms are they using, it could help you decide where to put your efforts into growing your social media presence one platform at a time. Do they create blogs, whitepapers, and video content? You’ll need to map it all out.
4. Customer success team
How, and how well, do your competitors help their customers? Are they known for lightning-fast customer support? Do they offer onboarding and training? Or do customer reviews on third-party aggregators point to experience gaps that you can capitalize on?
5. Leadership team
To be agile and disruptive, your business decisions really need to be coming from the top-down and the bottom-up all at the same time. But in order for those two directions not to clash, it’s really important that the leadership team fully understands the competition – as intimately as any of the departments reporting to them. That’s how you’ll ensure that the ship isn’t being steered toward outdated ideas or wonky assumptions.
How to do competitive product analysis: the 7 steps
Ready to get going? Here’s a checklist of tasks to tick off on your road to total competitive product analysis…
1. Think about your goals
Before you go deep diving into any competitor analysis tools or workshops, you need to clarify your aim. Almost without exception, this should be to find, or confirm, a problem that exists out there, waiting to be solved by your product.
That’s vital to keep in mind because it can be easy to end up evangelizing features and characteristics you like about your rivals’ products that you want to ape with your own.
While some degree of feature parity is good to have, it’s more important that you use this exercise to figure out how your own product can be markedly, usefully different.
2. List your competitors
Sounds simple, but there’s more to listing out competitors than you might think. And that’s because competitors come in two distinct flavors: direct and indirect.
Direct competitors are the ones you’ll no doubt be the most familiar with; they’re the products that most closely resemble the ones you’re working on.
Indirect competitors can be harder to spot. They’re the brands that offer a similar product in a different field, or who work in your field but could pivot towards offering a similar product at any moment. And if that happens, they’ll shift to being a direct competitor.
A few years back, for example, you might have said that Microsoft – with Outlook and Skype under its belt – was an indirect competitor to Slack. But with the arrival of Microsoft Teams, the company shifted to become one of Slack’s biggest competitors.
3. Analyze competitor product features and cost
With your list of competitors nailed down, you’ll want to draw up a standardized framework for listing features and benefits.
What’s on offer from each one? What is the core use case for the product? This line of questioning should really be a list of pros that you can use to highlight the cons. This should include nitty gritty stuff like cost, storage options, technical efficiency, ease of use, and scope for growth.
4. Analyze competitor product design
Competing products can offer great insight in terms of UI and UX. That’s because analyzing the design and user-friendliness of your rivals will show you two things:
Trends
There will usually be some commonalities among your competitors in terms of navigation and core UX design that you’ll want to follow, simply because users expect things to work in a standardized way. Think of it like this: 99% of cars have the wiper and blinker stalks in the same place because it makes moving to a new car an easier transition.
Opportunities
Some commonalities, however, are repeated and reused without scrutiny – so be on the lookout for any UI or UX elements that seem widespread but could do with a bit of a tuneup. In 2007, for example, every cell phone on the market was a button-heavy ugly duckling – until Apple took a good hard look at what could and should be done differently.
Likewise, at ProdPad, we know that a lot of our competitors are built around Gantt chart functionality. But we also know that Gantt charts only slow product teams down – and cause them to spend way too much time explaining why deadlines were missed – so we won’t be adding one to our platform anytime soon.
5. Analyze competitor product sales tactics
Your competitors may take a very hands-off approach to sales if they’re leaning on a product-led growth model, but it’s worth investigating what their processes are, all the same. The easiest way to do this is to pretend to be a would-be customer.
Inquire about their product and see how long it takes for someone to book a demo session for you. Go through that demo and analyze what sales tactics they have in place. And then track their follow-up communication to see how often and how proactively their qualified leads pipeline is being managed.
6. Analyze competitor product marketing tactics
How are your competitors getting their products under the nose of your target audience? Analyzing their marketing strategies is a powerful way to learn what it takes to do the same. Broadly, that means using a healthy mixture of analytics tools and desk research to consider four verticals:
Output
This is a biggie because ‘output’ can mean a whole bunch of stuff when it comes to marketing. Are your competitors writing blog posts? Are they big on YouTube? What social media channels do they use? Do they make or sponsor any podcasts? Is there a must-read industry whitepaper with their name on it? What’s their publishing cadence? How often do they send out press releases? The more questions like these you can answer, the better informed you’ll be.
Promotion
Are your competitors regularly sharing their blogs on social media? Are they using paid posts on those social channels? What about Google and display ads? Do they run influencer marketing campaigns? Again, the more you know, the stronger your own marketing strategy can become.
Engagement
Pumping out huge amounts of marketing material and content is one thing, but it’s useless if no one’s paying attention. Benchmarking engagement – including things like comments, retweets, and likes – across all your competitors’ output will help you understand what your target demographic is actually receptive to.
Share of voice
Similarly, you can use digital marketing analytics suites and tools like SimilarWeb to understand how competitors’ content is helping them capture the share of voice across social and search. If their SEO strategy is helping them rank highly on google, for instance, then you ought to think about why, and what you can do to rank for currently underserviced keywords.
Similarly, frequent news headlines will point to a proactive PR team that has strong relationships with the press – something for you to work on.
7. Learn what people think about your competitors
Third-party review sites, focus groups, and NPS scores are your best friend when it comes to understanding what people really think about your competitors’ products.
- Are their needs being met?
- If not, why not?
- Are there any patterns or trends in publicly-available feedback?
- Where can the experience be improved?
It’s here that you’ll learn about the problem areas, issues, and pain points that your product can swoop in and fix to win over your mutual audience.
What to do with your competitive product analysis
Ok, you’ve had several teams working away on collecting all this info on every direct and indirect competitor out there. What now?
Formalize your findings
You’ll probably have a lot of seemingly disparate information, but it’s worthwhile trying to standardize your findings into a spreadsheet format that can be replicated for every competitor. That might mean having some blank fields for some (or removing fields where you’ve only gathered info for one of them), but the more you can formalize the information, the easier it’ll be to reference, compare, and make sense of.
SWOT analyze your competitors
You can then use the above to drill down further into something more bite-sized. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) can help you summarize everything you know into four digestible boxes. The opportunities you discover are the areas where your product can shine.
Be honest about what you’ve learned
Learning that your product’s not as special as you thought can be a bitter pill to swallow. But it’s crucial that you’re honest with yourself about what you discover, and use it to your advantage.
Staying the course under the assumption that people will favor your product just because is a road to ruin.
Adap and innovate
As we’ve mentioned, competitor analysis isn’t about copying what’s working out there and hoping for the best. It’s about discovering where there are gaps in the market.
Those learnings will be your guiding light toward true differentiation and market disruption. It could be that you need to massively change course, but that’s ok: it will be a redirection based on real insight. If there’s a customer need that isn’t being met, it’s one for you to fill.
Or, in other words: if you’ve learned something truly game-changing, it’s time to update your roadmap.