How Do I Create a Competitor Analysis Report?

Professionals in fields such as marketing and sales use competitor analysis reports to better understand certain business environments. For example, professionals in the auto industry might write a competitor analysis report to show marketers, executives, and shareholders what the auto market looks like, why competitors are successful, and in which areas they are failing. If used correctly, this kind of report can help a business to find an unsaturated niche market, intelligently price products, and appeal to the most promising demographics. To create a competitor analysis report, it is important that you can be absolutely objective. In other words, you need to keep your feelings and hopes out of the process and gather and analyze data without any expectations

Your first step in creating a competitor analysis report should be to identify who your competitors are. Sometimes this can be easy to do. If you are interested in learning about grocery stores in your city, for example, you need only visit each one. Find out if they sell products similar to what your own store sells. If you feel that learning the identities of you competitors is more difficult, you might want to hire market researchers. They can contact members of your target demographic and learn where they go for relevant products or services.

Once you have identified your competitors, your next step in creating a competitor analysis report is to learn about the individual products that your competitors sell. For this task, you certainly can benefit from hiring researchers. You should learn for how much competitors sell their goods and which features products contain that set them apart from others in the market. A good market research initiative can help you to understand why consumers prefer certain products and how they think these products can be improved.

It also is important to become familiar with the strengths and the weaknesses of your competitor businesses. Again, this is an area in which you can benefit from having professional researchers. You should try to find out how much competitors are paying for materials, what kinds of profit margins they generate, and with which kinds of demographics products are most popular. This kind of information can be quite difficult to come by since companies might not be required to make this data available to the public.

A good competitor analysis report also should include information regarding market outlook and which strategies competitor businesses are using. For instance, if a market outlook suggests that a new technology is altering consumer concerns, your report might illustrate how competitor businesses are answering new demands and keeping up with new trends. While it is important to learn from other strategies, it might be more important to formulate unique perspectives that allow your company to separate from the competition.