How To Do Your Competitors' Analysis

Introduction

Doing your competitor’s analysis is important. Let me convince you why!

Whether you’re just starting out, or have been in the game for a while, studying your competitors is crucial to finding out what’s happening in your niche, which is paramount to your success. The concept of doing a competitive analysis is pretty simple: find out what your competition is doing, and then figure out a way to do it better. However, there are a million ways of going about it, so it’s important to know what to look for, how to organize the information, and how to then implement a strategy.

Before you do an analysis, it is important to figure out who are your actual competitors — Try to find out who is dominating the search results for your specific practice area and location. By understanding what your competitor is offering, you can oversee a complex analysis of everything they may offer in order to stay ahead of them.

Let’s begin,

How you should go about it?

Step 1. Prepare a Competitor’s Overview: This is important to gather important information about all of your competitors in one place. It allows you to capture details about each firm, services, and their go-to-market strategies.

You may use this Competitor's Analysis Template (Sheet 1) as a tool to organize your research, so you can easily find and access the information you need. It serves as the foundation of your competitive analysis and provides a consistent way to collect and analyse key data.

Refer to Sheet 1 in the Competitor's Analysis Template.

Step 2. Prepare a Competitor Scorecard: To rank your competitors and measure the threats they represent to your business. It is a great way to assess your competitors using a consistent set of scoring metrics. You decide which attributes you want to score. For example, you can assess organizational attributes, such as market awareness or ability to execute. Or you can rank product attributes, such as ease of use, unique features, and quality. This template also provides a weighted scoring approach, so you can rank the relative importance of each attribute from the customer's perspective.

Refer to Sheet 2 in the Competitor's Analysis Template.

Step 3. Do a capability analysis: This will allow you to assess how your service and team compares to a competitor's. It is a great way to analyse the collective skills, abilities, expertise, and even how product features match up.

Refer to Sheet 4 in the Competitor's Analysis Template.

This template helps you define what your organization is good at and where you can improve. It also lets you rank the relative importance of each capability to customers. This keeps you focused on how effectively you are solving the client's problem.

Do a Features analysis: This is important to create a detailed comparison of the features that each service includes. It allows you to conduct a thorough assessment of competitive services, so you can see how your own offering stacks up. This helps you identify features that are unique to your services, as well as any gaps in relation to what your competitors offer. This makes it easy for internal teams to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of their product from the customer's perspective.

Step 5. Prepare an imitability ladder: This will help you determine the uniqueness of your offering. It is a great tool to help you assess how easily your tangible resources (financial, physical, technological, and organizational) and intangible resources (human, innovation, creativity, and reputation) can be imitated. This helps you understand your competitive advantage and identify existing and potential weaknesses in your business strategy.

Refer to Sheet 5 in the Competitor's Analysis Template.

Step 6. Conduct your SWOT analysis: Wrap up your competitive analysis with some self-reflection. The final table in Sheep 6 is a SWOT analysis where you’ll get honest about your firm or service’s strengths (eg. you have an established customer base), weaknesses (eg. you’re more expensive than your competitors), opportunities (there’s an entire client vertical that you haven’t tapped into yet), and threats (eg. your competitor is rolling out new features). Identifying risks and areas where you’re falling short can be sort of brutal, but it’s valuable information to have as you figure out how you’ll rise to the top of the heap when the competition is stiff.

Refer to Sheet 6 in the Competitor's Analysis Template.

This will help you define a service strategy that will set your firm apart from the competition. It is perfect for identifying the basic, expected, augmented, and potential benefits of your services. This makes it clear where you need to add value to your solution, so you can create client delight and lasting competitive advantage. You can include functional features and non-functional features (such as branding) that differentiate your services from competing solutions.

Conclusion

Overall. Doing Competitor's Analysis is an extremely useful for every law firm should regularly implement into their business development strategies in order to continue fostering long-term growth.

Building out the analysis can seem intimidating at first. Still, once you gather all the necessary information, you will have what you need to determine how you stack up against your competitors.

Hope you have enjoyed this piece. I’ll be happy to answer any related concerns you may have!

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