Eliminating all competition is the dream of a lot of eCommerce store owners out there. However, best believe, totally “eliminating” your competition does you a certain level of harm. You have a lot to gain from what your competitors do within the industry and need them to make improvements on your own, especially improvements that satisfy the needs and wants of consumers. One can also learn various eCommerce tactics for marketing, SEO, growth, etc as everyone puts their best foot forward.
How do you know the working strategy to improve upon? Competitive analysis is your best bet. You know the trends and successful tactics to guide your eCommerce activities. However, the concept of competitive analysis goes deeper than this and our article provides you with what you need to know; from what the term means to its importance and how you get the most out of it. Let’s get right in.
What Is Competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis is the process of gathering insights into the strategies and processes of competitor businesses, comparing these with your own applied strategies to make improvements. It involves doing a Shopify search, and analysis of tactics, processes, and activities applied by competitors, allowing you to additionally uncover which of these work for the relevant products you wish to improve sales on, as well as the processes that have proven to fail about these products. Of course, the competitive analysis also works on services and for service-based businesses.
How you execute competitive analysis depends on what you wish to improve upon or study through your competitors. For example, the competitive analysis may be done on only the eCommerce website of businesses you compete with, as you try to see the colors, design elements, or language and tone that work, among others. It may also be done on a wider and more complex marketing approach implemented by your competition businesses. Either way, you get an in-depth understanding of what your competition is doing right.
A high-level competitive analysis focuses on improving your overall marketing, promotion, and Shopify sales strategy, taking note of a lot of important elements. Some of these important elements include:
- How capital was generated or every source of funds
- The common or main target audience
- Each competitor’s unique value proposition
- Price-range of products
- The type of benefits pointed within marketing, promotional, and sales content
- Practices while delivering products
- Customer experience and CRM
- Email marketing tactics
The competitive analysis involves all these and more. What you choose to learn from your competitors depends on what you wish to improve upon, as mentioned earlier.
Why Competitive analysis Is Important For Your Shopify Sales?
Now, you may be wondering why it is so important to monitor what your competition does and do Shopify search rather than just entirely focusing on your activities and independently improving on them. Well, how do you know you are beating competitor businesses, especially considering that they share your target audience and customers with you? With Competitive analysis, you know just where you need to be.
Competitive analysis, especially for startup businesses new to eCommerce, helps you to understand the environment and how competitive it is. It helps you hit the ground running through working strategies, as you know your competition and what helps them to get high Shopify sales.
With competitive analysis, you make informed decisions on improving user experience, marketing, promotional, and sales activities, alongside other business operations. You also understand the best channels to relate with your customers, create benchmarks against your competitors with which you maintain a quality standard, easily determine the price, and know how to make your value proposition as unique as possible.
Although newcomers stand a lot more to gain from competitive analysis, even existing eCommerce businesses benefit from it. As one, you stay relevant by keeping activities within trends and ensuring every new working tactic being implemented is part of your business’s operational framework. All these help you get the better of your major competitors by making use of them and getting a larger market share as well as increased Shopify sales.
How To Improve Shopify sales Using In-Depth Competitive Analysis
Identify Your Competitors
Preferably by creating a list of about 6 to 10 competitors, you identify the businesses you want to run analysis on through Shopify search for instance. The number of competitors is placed between 6 and 10 because you want to make an in-depth analysis that covers a diverse set of competitors and with which you may make a general presumption without having to scour the whole industry. Resorting to search engines and common eCommerce marketplaces and platforms helps you find these businesses, with these offering the same types of products or services, selling to the same target audience, and a mix of both new and experienced businesses, among others.
Determine Your Type Of Competitors
Generally, there are three types of competitors; direct competitors that sell the same grade and types of products to the same audience, indirect competitors that sell different grades of the same types of products(either higher or lower in quality) to the same audience, and tertiary competitors who sell different categories of products to the same audience. The final two are important to look out for as they may wish to expand to your exact business niche.
Understanding your type of competitor helps you recognize the tactics or strategies to implement from them, as well as where to place benchmarks against them.
Understand Your Competitors’ Positioning
Positioning is where your competitors place themselves to easily connect with the target audience. With this, you want to check their social media, website usage, and external activities outside the internet. You also identify in your competition analysis how they describe their products and present their unique value proposition to customers. Positioning is all about how your competition interacts with your target audience.
Identify Their Competitive Advantage
This is what they offer to customers that get these customers coming back for more. With this, you identify what each competitor offers and try to beat it. This could be either in the quality of products, customer service, or ease in delivering services and products to them. Anyone it is, you want to identify it in a bid to ensure that you offer exactly this.
Conduct SWOT Analysis
Of course, this is after you collect all information about your competition, including information on their marketing, promotional, and Shopify sales tactics, in addition to the previous steps mentioned. SWOT analysis is simply the process of identifying your strengths and weaknesses for comparison purposes. You already know what your competition has to offer, where they succeed, and where they fail. It is time to compare these with your business and determine where you triumph over them and where to make improvements through information obtained from them.
SWOT-analysis helps you understand the strengths in your business, opportunities for growth, existing weaknesses, and threatened aspects of your business that could end up as weaknesses. Having comparative data on your business, helps you maintain the continuous standard you set for yourself and stay within established benchmarks and things like these boost your Shopify sales.
In conslusion
Overall, competitive analysis helps you get the better of your competition in terms of Shopify sales through in-depth insights into their activities. It involves the implementation of tools for SEO analysis as well as the analysis of PPC/keyword performance, social media performance, email marketing performance, and content marketing performance, among a lot of others. As a new business, you easily get integrated into the market.
