Sometimes business can feel like the metaphor of the duck—all the appearance of calm and collected until you take a peek under the water and see those feet paddling like crazy.
To help enhance the calm and reduce the frantic paddling, we’re diving deep into the world of competitive intelligence and uncovering how to do landscape analysis for your business—with expert insights and examples, of course.
Step 1: Set a clear objective
First things first—before you conduct landscape analysis and dive into the nitty gritty of competitive intelligence strategies, it’s essential to have a clear direction so that you can be strategic with the competitors you choose and the data you gather.
For example, your goal might be to find competitor strategies, evaluate customer preferences, uncover benchmark metrics, or explore partnership opportunities—all of these are different objectives and will require different analysis methods.
It’s safe to say that your objective is the foundation of your analysis, and it can make or break your findings.
Step 2: List out your competitors
The next steps are to list direct and indirect competitors.
Conducting a landscape analysis gives you a strategic edge. It provides deep insights into market dynamics, competitor strategies, and consumer preferences.
For instance, a clothing store sells suits online and is launching a new summer seersucker suit collection. The store can greatly benefit from a landscape analysis. It can examine competitors’ offerings, pricing, marketing tactics, and customer reviews.
This process can also help it find direct and indirect competitors. For example, other men’s suit clothing companies are direct competitors, and clothing rental companies are indirect competitors.
Folks who have already conducted landscape analysis for their business, such as Shawn Stack, the CEO and founder of Hallmark Timmins, recommend identifying 3-5 direct vital competitors.
He says, “As a small company with limited resources, it’s simply not realistic to analyze the entire market landscape. Instead, focus on the 3-5 direct competitors serving your target customers.
Thoroughly analyze their product offerings, pricing, marketing messaging, and overall business model. This focused analysis will uncover key opportunities for differentiation and areas where you can provide greater value to customers vs. the competition.”
Other SMEs, like Alex Adekola, the CEO and founder of Ready Adjuster, recommend identifying and not overlooking emerging disruptors by stating:
“For a small business, threats often come from left field—new tech, shifting consumer habits, or giants entering your turf. Broaden your analysis to adjacent markets and macro trends shaping your industry. One idea is to set up Google Alerts for keywords around your space, so you catch new developments.”
Step 3: Gather data
Experts recommend finding data on your competitors from multiple sources (and considering various data points while at it). For example, you can get your information from public financial records, press releases, customer reviews, case studies, employee reviews, etc.
Another idea is to use software—e.g., tools like Ahrefs allow you to find information about your competitor’s content marketing efforts. In contrast, social listening tools will enable you to monitor your competitors’ social media presence.
Perhaps one of the most important things you can do when gathering data is to find underlying patterns in your competitors’ communication and determine what audience pain points they consider.
For example, Band of Brothers focuses on the heroism of American soldiers during WWII, particularly those involved in the Normandy landings. Reviews from customers often highlight the emotional connection they feel when visiting the actual battle sites. They appreciate how they honor the soldiers’ bravery and sacrifices, offering a personal and respectful narrative.
Screenshot provided by the author
Step 4: Synthesize your findings
Next, depending on your objective, you could approach an analysis framework that allows you to synthesize your findings.
It’s not compulsory to do only one type of landscape analysis—you could consider multiple aspects and perspectives when identifying key opportunities that will help you stay ahead of the curve.
We’d also recommend bringing in an expert at this point in time to get their analysis of your data (as well as to get their insights on what they imagine the future of your industry to look like).
Step 5: Identify key market opportunities
Now that you have a gold mine of data, the next steps are to make sense of it and decide how to use it strategically to make better business decisions.
Bring your marketing team, sales team, and product team on board to analyze your data and get their thoughts on how to improve your offering. For example, you could offer new products, change marketing scripts, or refine your value proposition.
It’s also worth noting that a business landscape analysis is not a one-and-done job; you’ll need to make this a part of your business so you can continually improve your offerings. You could conduct it periodically, such as yearly, quarterly, or on an event basis.
At this stage, you’ll also benefit from creating a landscape analysis report, which will help you better understand your data, future plans, and culminating team insights.
Step 6: Lay out a plan for using these opportunities
Last but not least, all you need to do is create a plan to bring these opportunities to life.
To do this, you can prioritize the key opportunities, develop clear business strategies for them (including milestones, budget allocations, resources, etc.), implement the plan, and then monitor and review as necessary.
Time to do your own intelligence work
We previously mentioned that to keep track of your competitors, you’ll need to monitor the conversations surrounding them on social media to give yourself a competitive edge.
That’s where social listening tools can help. But what if you could make these insights even more powerful by having AI analyze key findings?
That’s where media intelligence providers like Agility PR Solutions can be helpful.
With its AI-powered social listening, you can not only track insights on social media but also manage these findings more systematically using advanced options like filtering, group-related searches, unlimited social searches, and much more!
To get started, book a call with an Agility PR expert today to learn how its solutions can help you,
