How To Build A Competitor Map

How To Build A Competitor Map

Competitor analysis is often the first place new businesses turn for market and keyword research. New businesses are struggling to gain much value from competitor analysis as they often don’t track the correct variables or understand how to interpret their data.

Competitor Mapping

Competitor mapping refers to the process of visually organizing and analyzing information about your competitors, helping you to see who your competitors are, how they compare to your business, and where they stand in the market. By mapping out this information, you can easily spot patterns, trends, and opportunities that might not be obvious at first glance.

Competitor mapping gives you a clear picture of the competitive landscape, enabling you to make informed decisions. Competitor maps take several different forms, like scatter graphs, comparison charts, bar graphs, line graphs, Gantt charts, and pie charts.

The purpose of competitor mapping includes gaining insights into market dynamics, identifying strengths & weaknesses relative to competitors, and improving strategic decisions.

Key components of competitor mapping include competitor profiling, SWOT analysis, and business model canvas.

Benefits of Competitor Mapping :

1. Better understanding of the industry

2. In-depth overall analysis of competitors

3. Useful insights for further optimization

4. Effective analysis of competitors’ online presence

5. Identification of newer opportunities

Step-by-step guide to build competitor map

1. Identify your competitors

Identify all your potential competitor types. Instead of analyzing hundreds of irrelevant businesses, you should list the ones that actually matter. They can be categorized as direct, indirect competitors, and new entrants. To keep my data less random, do prefer to restrict the number of competitors monitored on a map to between four and ten companies.

If you don’t know who your internet rivals are, search for a core term on Google and check what companies appear in the organic and advertising parts. You can also find local companies in your niche by doing a “near me” search.

Semrush, Ahrefs, Sistrix, SE Ranking, and other SEO tools can be used to download shared terms with your rivals.

2. Decide which areas of your business require deeper analysis

This includes price-benefit analysis and a location map tracking market share. The one way to uncover different variables for analysis is to perform a SWOT analysis.

You can discover different variables like location, price, or reputation, that can be charted. Again, separate variables between what you can control and what you can’t before undergoing a more rigorous competitive analysis.

3. Choose your variables to track

Variables that you are tracking depend on the area of business you are seeking to learn more about. To help simplify your analysis, list a set of variables based on specific areas of your business you might analyze, include new service launch, new menu item, market share, marketing campaign, and new location.

For instance, a tech startup conducting a price-benefit analysis for determining how much value people think they get from your products at the current price.

However, a luxury company might gain more from doing a price-value analysis to find out how much the cost of their goods affects how people perceive their brand.

Discovering factors such as price has various effects that must be matched with your target audience. Raising your pricing may therefore help your brand seem more upscale in some situations, but it may also make your products seem a little less desirable, given the high cost that customers must pay. For this reason, it is advised that conducting several competitive analyses depends on various factors.

4. Visualize your data

Do learn how to visualize data. There are a couple of tools, including simple design tools and advanced data visualization tools.

Building a scatter graph in excel is the easiest way, including scatter chart tracking two variables using Google Sheets. For instance, chartering the relationship between the price of a one-time service and the company’s rating on Google. Highlight your data range and click the Explore button in the bottom right, google will give you multiple chart options, like a simple scatter plot. Google would automatically create a chart for you that you be able to share or download.

Create a simple comparison chart with Canva that provides a great template for free, and Pro accounts to build simple comparison charts with its visual editor. For instance, Canva’s free version has dozens of charts enabling you to edit your chart’s aesthetic and internal values.

Visualize your competitors with a Bubble map in Vizzlo that provides sophisticated ways to brand and customizing your competitor map to your liking. Add your own custom values and input them into your bubbles to get an accurate representation. Additionally, you may click anywhere on the graph to make a bubble that represents the point at which your custom value reaches its equilibrium.

Use design tool, excel sheet, or a data visualization is really simple and gives you the chance to brand, personalize, and style your research. For creating an automated chart with Python, Google Data Studio is an excellent tool for visualizing data, but manually inputting data or sharing it from spreadsheets can be tiresome.  

5. Highlight areas for improvement

The last step of competitor mapping is to identify areas of improvement.

Uncovering a relationship between the data helps you in identifying strategies for creating a unique selling proposition or exploiting a competitor’s weakness. Running multiple forms of competitor analysis helps you uncover a better understanding of your data and identify trends and relationships. Overall, competitor mapping is a relatively simple process, and plenty of tools enable you to create or automate a competitor map