There are many things you have to do in order to run a business smoothly and efficiently, such as doing a certain amount of analysis. You must forecast your profitability, determine what combination of resources to use, assign the work order to different employees, and so on. It is critical for every business to perform an analysis to basically determine the strengths and weaknesses of the company. It also serves to identify potential threats and opportunities the business might face due to external factors. Doing these things will help you to form a marketing strategy that can help your business grow.

However, all these are for your own company. It is just as important to conduct a marketing analysis of each of your major competitors. In marketing competitor analysis, you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals.  You try to figure out what situations may provide an opportunity for them and which situations are likely to become a threat for them. A critical part of your own marketing strategy, the competitor analysis enables you to establish appropriate strategies about how to run your business. This can be seen as a reactive approach as you are basing your strategy as a reaction to how your competitor will run his company.

When preparing to bid an opportunity, the capture manager should conduct a thorough competitive analysis of each of the other major offerors. Information regarding their strengths, weaknesses, past performance, relationship with the customer, and possible solutions should be recorded in the capture plan and used to develop the win strategy

Before doing a marketing competitor analysis, one has to ask the right questions:

• Who are your competitors?
• What products or services are they selling?
• How much market share do they have?
• What were their past strategies?
• Are they using the same strategy?
• How aggressive are they on the advertising front?
• How competitive are they?
• Are their strengths and weaknesses the same as yours?
• How big of a threat are they to you?
• How do their strategies affect your business?

As part of the marketing competitor analysis, there are two ways to identify your current and future competitors:

• Look at them from a customer’s point of view
• Look at them from their point of view.

By looking at them from a customer’s point of view, you are looking at their major strengths and flaws, like any other preliminary review. Ask yourself consumer questions: Why would a customer go for their services? Is it because they do things differently, or their quality is top notch? Either way these things are strengths for the competitors. You put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and wonder why you would go for them instead of coming to your own company.

Conversely, you can look at them from their point of view to understand their firm better. Examine their assets, and how you would play them in the marketing field. Try to see what their weaknesses are and how you would compensate for them.

While doing the marketing competitor analysis, you have to consider everything. For that, you need to assess the external factors. This is where the second analysis comes into play. Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) factors are analyzed so that a company knows how to react when there is a change in any one of the four metrics. By doing the PEST analysis, you are getting to know how your competitors will react when there is a change. Will they consider that change an opportunity to do better, or see it as a threat? This can give you an idea as to how your rivals operate. You can even base your marketing strategy to counter their ideas. Supposing there is a social change and your competitors cannot deal with, you will be prepared.

With these questions and tips in mind your business will grow above and beyond your competitors, ensuring that customers come to you in the future.