It’s a phrase you have heard many times. It’s true that “the first step to business success is to figure out how to find the company’s competitors.” Problem is, “who” does not necessarily refer to companies but rather individuals. Who is trying to disrupt the market and get into the same niche as yours? Who are you trying to attack from a different angle? This article will discuss how to identify potential competitors and allies in 2023 using various methods, such as the best strategies and websites to find company competitors.
Competitive Monitoring: Why Identify & Monitor Competitors
Why competitive monitoring is important: More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies already use competitive intelligence to increase their competitive edge.
What is Competitive Monitoring?
An entity that offers a similar product or service to yours is a competitor. They could also be someone trying to steal your customers. Any other business that operates in the same sector as yours can be a competitor. It can also include a business offering products or services that complement yours, such as if they sell food and you sell beverages.
It is possible for competitors to be indirect rivals. You might be able to influence their success by selling organic food and not being a direct competitor. Because your company’s success is directly affected by its performance, it’s crucial to monitor and identify competitors. Find your company’s competitors that will help you to understand their business and their strengths so you can predict their actions and respond accordingly. You can monitor competitors to keep track of their activities and help you stay ahead of the market. Data analytics speeds up decision-making for businesses 5x faster, so this area is something you should be focusing on in 2023.
Also read: 4 Things You Can Learn From Competitor Web Traffic Analytics
What are the 5 Types of Competitors?
What are my competitions? It is crucial to know the five types of competitors that you will likely run into when trying to locate competitors for a company in 2023.
Competitors are other people or companies that offer similar products or services to yours.
These are the main types of competitors:
1. Direct Competitors
Direct competitors are the most important and first type of competitor. These companies offer products and services similar to yours and these are the companies that are trying to grab market share against each other. For example, If you own a restaurant, and another restaurant opens up right next to you, This new restaurant could be directly competing with your business.
Businesses that sell identical products or services are called direct competitors. These companies may be local or national but are generally in the same industry. You are likely to be benchmarked by them in their business strategies. It is important to monitor and keep track of these competitors.
2. Indirect Competitors
The second type of competitor is the indirect competitor. These companies offer products and services that may be compatible with your product or your service but are not directly related. Ford and Toyota, for example, are indirect competitors. They both sell cars, but they don’t sell tires together like Michelin with both companies.
An emerging competitor is the third type of competitor. Companies are emerging competitors. Although they haven’t been around for long enough to be considered established rivals, they have enough potential to do so if you let them grow and don’t fight back. A good example would be Facebook in its first creation, compared to the current It’s one the most popular social media sites and it has millions of users worldwide who use it daily on their smartphones, tablets, and computers.
3. Substitute Competitors
Substitute competitors are the third type of competitor. These competitors offer products and services that are very similar to yours. The customer will choose another brand if the price or quality of your products or services goes down. The competitor is determined to create a competitive advantage that makes other companies more difficult to compete with. These competitors are looking for market opportunities for the market to open up, so it’s a smart idea to keep an ear on them.
4. New Market Entrants
These companies are those that go into a market it has been popularized and established by another company (i.e. your company). If your company offers small business accounting software, for example, H&R Block might then be considered an entrant. They entered the market after it was already established by your company.
4. Price Cutters
These competitors try to compete with other companies by offering lower prices. They are more competitive than their competitors in gaining market share at all costs (even if that means going out of business). for example, Amazon is well-known for offering electronics and books at lower prices than other big box retailers like Best Buy or Walmart in order to increase their market share in the retail sales of electronics and books.
10 Steps to Find Competitors for a Company in 2023
1. Market Research
When trying to determine how to competitors a company in 2023. the first thing to look at is how to locate them. This will give you insight into the activities of your competitors, their target audience, and how they market themselves.
Also read: Top 10 Market Research Tools
2. Identify your Competitors
After you’ve done market research and identified your competitors, it is time to identify them. This can be done in many different ways:
Google Alerts, Moz Open Site Explorer, or Ahrefs are search engine optimization (SEO), tools that help you identify websites ranking for keywords relevant to your business. They notify you when new content is posted on these sites.
Social media monitoring vendors such as BuzzSumo or Social Mention can help you locate mentions of your competition across the internet so you can keep an eye on their performance in the public eye.
3. Get Customer Feedback
You need to see beyond the obvious when trying to determine how to locate a company’s competitor in 2023. Asking customers and other stakeholders is the best way to find out.
Ask your family and friends if they know of competitors. If they don’t know of any competitors, they could be a great resource to find out who might be in your market. Ask them about their opinions on the product or service of the competition and why they prefer it to the other. If they have any complaints talk to them about these issues and then implement those ideas into your business strategy.
You can search Google for keywords that are related to your industry, product, or service. A list of websites similar to yours will be returned. It may even be very similar. You can then look at these websites and research their content to see if you can improve their products or services by getting customer feedback or doing additional research. This will give you ideas on how to improve your offerings and also provide insight into the market. What existing customers are looking for from their current providers so You can provide more value to them in the future.
4. Check Forums Online – Reddit, Quora, etc
You can also search for your competitors by entering the name of your company in any forum like Reddit and Quora. These forums are filled with people who enjoy sharing their opinions on everything, from politics to food to business. It is important to discover what others think about your brand and What they think of your competition
5. Check out Social Media Sites
You can find information about your competitors’ customers on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. It’s possible for someone to complain about a product via social media. They might be open to answering questions about their dislikes or preferences. You can gain valuable insight into how they feel about products from other companies (including yours).
6. Do Keyword Research
It is important to find out what keywords your competitors rank for. This will allow you to find possible keywords for which you could rank.
- Search Google, Bing, or Yahoo to find the name of your competitor.
- Click the “Organic Keywords” tab.
- Copy the keywords list that appears in the table on the right-hand side of your screen. Or download it as an a.csv file.
- Copy the list and paste it into a spreadsheet program like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Add any columns you feel might be of use (e.g. total monthly searches).
Bonus SEMrush provides a comprehensive breakdown of each keyword that your competitor ranks for, as well - as the percentage of traffic to their website from those keywords.
- Keyword research is a great way to find indirect competitors.
7. Monitor Paid Media Data
If you are trying to figure out how to find a company’s competitors, Google Ads is one of my first stops. Google Ads Keyword Planner tool can help you identify keywords that drive traffic to your site and to other businesses in your industry. This tool can be used to identify companies that are performing well in their SEO and PPC campaigns, as well as how they rank on Google.
Also, try to determine how to find companies that are similar to your company. To monitor the paid media data of your target market or industry, use tools such as Moz, SEMrush, and Google Trends. This will allow you to get a good idea about the advertising budgets of other brands and how they target consumers.
8. Identify Competitors Through Organic Search Data
You can identify indirect competitors by using organic search data. This will allow you to identify brands that are not advertising but have a similar audience. SEMrush’s Organic Traffic Report tool will help you identify the best-performing pages for each keyword. Next, you can use Ahrefs Content Gap to find out which pages are missing and compare them with your competitors’ pages. (Pro accounts required).
Also read: 6 Top Competitor Monitoring Tools
9. Use Googe Maps to Find Competitors
Google Maps can help you locate the business’s location. You can search for “company name” and “competitors”, then narrow your results by region or country.
10. Look at Review Websites
Review websites are a great place to start if you want to discover how to find other companies like yours. Look at the reviews and check if they have links to your competitors. Try searching for the websites of its competitors if there aren’t.
A Google search for “competitor analyses” can be used, followed by the name and address of your target company. You should see articles with tips for performing competitor analyses.
It’s possible to find information about competitors on the investor relations page of a company’s website.
Conclusion — How to Find Company’s Competitors
For almost every business, competitive research is essential to its success. A detailed competitive analysis can help you make informed business decisions, identify trends that are worth exploring, and see where your company stands relative to its peers in the industry. This data can be used in many ways to get an edge on your competitors, including researching new companies and analyzing pricing strategies.
Before you launch any new product or service, it is a good idea to conduct a competition assessment. You may find that there are already companies offering a similar product/service and you can adjust accordingly. It is now easier than ever to identify competitors for a company with the many strategies and tools we have in 2023.
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