5 Ways Competitor Insights Can Propel Your Growth Strategy

Almost every business has competition in some form or another. It’s part of what drives excellence and expediency in product or service development and the processes behind them. At the same time, every brand ought to scrutinize what their competitors are doing to be successful and learn from those things. 

Competitor insights, when leveraged effectively, can transform your growth strategy and aid in identifying areas of weakness and strength. In turn, you can optimize your efforts to outsmart the competition. Here are five ways evaluating your competitors can help boost your growth strategy to the next level.

1. Supercharging Your Strategy With Competitive Content Analysis

One of the most practical ways competitor insights can help your business is by fine-tuning your content strategy. When you dive into a competitive content analysis, you’ll start to spot gaps in the market — those opportunities that your competitors might have missed. It’s all about looking at what kind of content they’re putting out, how often they publish, and how their audience responds.

For example, take a closer look at which of their blog posts or articles are getting the most traffic and engagement. Once you know that, you can create content that surpasses your competitors’ — filling in those gaps with something fresh. Plus, understanding what topics they’re focusing on gives you a solid sense of what’s clicking with your shared audience. This helps you craft a content plan that addresses the current demand and anticipates what’s next, keeping you ahead of the curve.

2. Identifying Market Trends and Opportunities

Every business in your sector will have a different approach or at least different processes by which they solve problems for their customers. And that asymmetry can cause some businesses to make discoveries that are different from others. That’s why paying close attention to your competitors can help your brand recognize emerging trends that your business might not have thought about yet.

It doesn’t mean your brand is incompetent. It just means you’re likely focusing harder on other aspects than your competitors aren’t. And the odds are that they are also taking note of your brand doing just that. It’s a two-way street in that sense. Competitors can frequently learn a lot from each other.

3. Optimizing Your Marketing and Advertising Tactics

Looking at competitor data and content can help inform decisions about your business’s marketing tactics by revealing what’s working for others. Now, while it can make sense sometimes to mimic competitors’s marketing strategies, it’s rarely something you should do wholly. It’s perfectly fine and even advantageous to repeat things that worked for others, but those things should be an accessory to an otherwise new creative strategy. 

Look to social media and see the types of engagement your competitors are getting on their posts. Take note of how people are resonating with their messaging, and try to draw connections to why that is. It may help your brand reconstruct its messaging to appeal better to its audience. 

One thing you can definitely copy is your competitors’ ad placements. It’s not true in all cases, but if a competitor is running ads on a specific platform, like Google, Facebook, or TikTok, odds are it’s working for them. Sure, they might just be testing the waters with these placements, but continued presence on these platforms will suggest that you, too, can capitalize on those same spaces profitably.

4. Understanding Customer Pain Points

Keeping a close watch on competitor customer feedback can be like having a crystal ball of crisis prevention for your own brand. Looking at customer feedback, reviews, and testimonials about your competitors can give strong hints into common pain points and unmet needs with their product. These insights can help shape your product development and customer service strategies to curb those issues before they even happen.

For example, if you see customers complaining about a competitor’s product being hard to use, you can focus on making the features of your product more user-friendly. And if customers are raving about a feature your product doesn’t have, it might be worth considering adding something similar to stay competitive. 

Here’s another example: Online Saas platforms often have community-driven functionality and feature requests available in public forums. These are usually a mechanism by which users of the product can upvote or downvote desired feature additions or revisions. One Saas platform could review the requested feature lists of their competitors and then concentrate on implementing all of the biggest requests. That can then be positioned as a competitive advantage over competitor platforms that lack those much-requested features.

5. Refining Your Pricing Strategy

There are really two ways to handle pricing in a competitive market. The first is commoditized pricing, and the second is value-based pricing. Commoditized pricing is basically a race to the bottom, where every business in your space is fighting for the lowest price point. Then, there is value-based pricing, which aims to deliver unmatchable value for a price equitable to that value. 

If you’re in an industry that’s stuck in the price-down helix, a strategy you ought to attempt is breaking away from that system entirely. What would it look like if your brand was the highest-priced product in your vertical? What sort of impression of quality would that then create in the minds of your audience? 

To accomplish this approach well, you must think about ways to resculpt your offer to provide value in ways your competitors’ products don’t. In other words, you want to create selling points with your products that make them hard to compare to other products based on price alone. 

An example of this would be repositioning the value offer of your product to be something that’s “one-of-a-kind.” Phrasing your offer like this disrupts buyers’ decision-making process, where they simply look at which option is cheapest. Now, they have to compare the features included in your offer versus others, and the price tag becomes less of the focus. 

Pay attention to the features your competitors offer and the price they attach to them. If you believe your product is the higher-quality option, price it based on value and communicate to your audience why that is. 

Last Words on Learning From Competitors

While you might wish your business was in its own category with zero competitors, there are aspects of competition that can be helpful if you pay enough attention. In a crowded market, your most capable competitors can be your greatest inspirations. They can be the source you use to refine your own business strategy so it doesn’t become obsolete.

Stay attentive, don’t be complacent, and keep an eye on your competitors at all times. If you do, you’ll spot opportunities to improve, innovate, and stay ahead.