Competitor analysis is very important in Chinese marketing, especially for new players. The media landscape in China is very different from other countries. Moreover, the pandemic has come together with a reshuffling in Chinese shopping habits, business market share, media popularity, and other aspects in China market. How shall we choose the right media platforms? how to allocate the budget? And what message should I deliver to Chinese clients so they would purchase my services or goods. A competitor analysis can see all the metrics and benchmarks you are concern about.
What’s more, competitor analysis will help you assess the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors and identify threats and opportunities to your business in China. Whether you are a startup in China or an established company trying to introduce new products or services to the Chinese, competitive analysis will bring you useful insights. Based on that knowledge, you can establish a plan of action for your brand that will help you stay one step ahead of your competition and expand to China market.
What should you include in a competitor analysis?
Find and classify your competition — you have to know who you’re competing against
Take a note of the basic information — media online presence of your company? What’s the performance
Analyze your competitors social media presence — a lot of activities will take place on social media. Take a look at the channels your major competitors are using and what message they send.
Understand your competition positioning — who is the ideal customer of your competitors? What’s the most important part of their messaging? How are they reaching their target customers?
Analyze the product your competition offers — take a deeper look at the features, perks, and technology
Analyze their customers base — the type of customer will tell you who the desired audience is, what is the level of brand awareness, which social media platforms they use, and much more.
Take a look at the SEO efforts — SEO competitive analysis will tell you how your competitors use search engines to their benefit
Compare their prices — maybe you’re missing a low hanging fruit by pricing your product too low or too high.
Analysis on the post — how often your competitors’ post on social media, what posts have the most likes, shares and comments.
Sentiment analysis — combine volume of mentions with sentiment analysis, whether the response to a particular message was positive, negative, or neutral
In summary, analyzing all the above mentioned categories, you can get an excellent overview of your competitive landscape, Chinese market trends and how to initiate your marketing strategies.
Find your competitors
You can divide the competitors into three groups:
Primary competitors – businesses which target the same audience or have similar products.
Secondary competitors – businesses which sell products in the same category. For example, a secondary competitor to a brewery is a vineyard.
Tertiary competitors – business who are not your direct competitors but might become one in the future, if you expand your product line or service.
The difference between direct and indirect competitors is important to correctly assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
What are the benefits of competitor analysis?
The benefits of competitor analysis are hard to miss.
Moreover, competitor analysis will help you:
Identify market opportunities that will increase your market share and brand awareness
Exploit your competitors’ weaknesses and convert their customers to your product or service
Improve your position with given product category
Better market your strengths to your potential clients
Provide information needed to plan future marketing strategies
Allow you to make well-informed decisions on how to develop your product
How to conduct a competitive analysis?
competitor analysis is a huge task – both in terms of the amount of information you will have to process and the resources it takes.
Firstly, to have a comprehensive view of your competition activities and strategies, you should analyze many different aspects of companies’ presence. A thorough market research is the cornerstone of competitor data.
Secondly, competitor analysis will take up your time. You have to spend some amount of time searching and analyzing the information, preparing the document, and implementing necessary changes.
It’s important to spread the insights you gathered through competitive analysis among different departments of your company.
Competitive analysis is not about copying competition solutions. Moreover, it’s more about positioning your company at the right place on the China market. Knowing what industry trends are worth following, and improving your products and services. The process is about defining your strengths and weaknesses and increasing your market share.
From startup to market leader — competitive analysis in a nutshell
Competitive analysis helps you assess your position on the market. No matter whether you are just starting out or already have an established position within your industry landscape.
In conclusion, the analysis is one of the best things you can do for your own business. Because every part of competitive analysis perspective can bring the benefits for your business.
Thus, if you want to be one step ahead of your competitors in the China market, you have to assess the status quo first. Knowing which areas you need to improve and where exactly can you gain competitive advantage easily. Now you know what is competitive analysis. Contact Deep Digital China and become the top in your league!