The competitive landscape can be brutal, and staying current with how your business is perceived by the market can be a challenge. If you operate in a fast-paced, highly-competitive sector or have an intense price war on your hands, then staying ahead of your competitors is vital. As an organization, staying abreast of change can be challenging at times. However, it’s important not to become paralyzed by the constant stream of new data that enters our operating sphere. To stay as nimble as possible, it’s essential to identify and address any weaknesses that could derail your organization’s progress. In this article, we will outline the key elements necessary to do a competitor analysis using sentiment analysis.
What is a Competitor Analysis?
A competitor analysis is a technique used to identify and analyze the behaviour of key competitors in order to gain insight into what consumers might do in response to your brand. This information can be used to determine how best to position your product or service, as well as how to improve your marketing efforts.
As it is important to understand the current market dynamics and how customers perceive your product, you can use the information gathered to anticipate what your competition may do next. The components of a competitor analysis include the following:
Identifying your key competitors
When beginning a competitor analysis, it’s important to identify the competitors that are currently offering similar products and services to yours. This can assist in determining how you might be perceived by the market.
Identifying how competitors are perceived
Understanding how your competition is perceived can help you to understand how customers might perceive your brand.
Benefits of a Sentiment Analysis
Below we outline some of the benefits of forming a competitive analysis based on sentiment analysis:
Provides Competitive Intelligence
Through a competitive analysis, you can gain insight into how your competitors are operating, what their strengths may be, and what they may be missing. You can then incorporate these insights into your strategy to better position your business in the competitive landscape.
Helps to Streamline Decision-Making
A sentiment analysis can assist with streamlining decision-making by providing you with a snapshot of how customers perceive your product or service. This information can assist with product or strategic decisions, as well as assist with marketing campaigns.
How to do a Competitor Analysis
You can conduct a competitor analysis using a number of different tools and strategies. The type of analysis you conduct will depend on the level of detail you’d like to attain, along with the amount of data you’re able to collect.
Keep Researching
It can be tempting to just pull data from your database and start analyzing it. However, it’s important to keep researching your competitors. This can be done by reading blog posts, articles, and white papers, as well as talking to business owners and managers. You can also use a sentiment analysis tool to quickly summarises all related news and opinion to give you a clear picture of the sentiment towards your brand or company,
Consider Collecting Data from External Sources
There are a number of online sources you can tap into, including APIs, to help collect data. It can be beneficial to work with a partner to collect data, as it can be harder to source data yourself.
Use Predictive Algorithms and Predictive Models
Predictive algorithms and models can be used to help with the analysis, as well as streamline the decision-making process. Predictive models can be used to help with the sentiment analysis, as well as assist with determining the probability of a particular outcome.
Steps to Take Before You Start
Before you begin, it can be beneficial to keep the following in mind:
Define Your Research Objective
Before you begin collecting data, it’s important to define the research objective. What are you trying to learn from this analysis? What are you hoping to discover?
Research Key Players
One of the first things you’ll want to do is to conduct research on your competitors. However, it may be helpful to start with research on your key players as well.
Define Key Performance Indicators
Before you begin collecting data, it can be helpful to define key performance indicators (KPI). What are the KPIs that you would like to see?
Use APIs and Data Sources
There are a number of online sources you can tap into to help with your competitor analysis. Some of these include business intelligence (BI) APIs, data warehouses, and data sources. It can be beneficial to work with a partner to help facilitate the collection of data, as it can be harder to source it yourself. APIs offer a number of benefits, including the following:
Help to Streamline Analysis Process
When working with APIs, it can be helpful to use a data visualization tool, such as Tableau or SEMrush. This can be used to streamline the analysis process, as well as assist with identifying key data points.
Help to Minimize Data Gaps
It can be challenging to collect data yourself, as there may be gaps in your database. APIs can help to fill these gaps, which can assist with the analysis process.
Summarize the Data You Collected
Once you’ve collected the data from your sources, it can be helpful to summarize it. This can be done by identifying key insights and putting them into context throughout your report.
Identify Key Insights
Once you’ve analyzed your data, it can be helpful to identify key insights. What have you discovered? What are the takeaways that you can share with your readers?
Share Contextual Insights
It can be helpful to include contextual insights to highlight the data points. What is the data saying in the real-world? What can you do with this information?
Identify Key Word Groups and Entities
When conducting a competitor analysis, it can be helpful to identify key word groups and entities. These include the following:
Key Words
Identify the top-ranked keywords related to your product or service. It can be helpful to rank these keywords and rank them according to the frequency of their usage. This can help to identify the most popular keywords related to your brand.
Key Concepts
Identify the top concepts related to your product or service, such as “travel,” “tickets,” or “hotels.” It can be helpful to rank these concepts and rank them according to the frequency of their usage. This can help to identify top concepts related to your brand.
Conducting Sentiment Analysis
Finally, once you’ve analyzed the data you collected, it can be helpful to conduct a sentiment analysis. This can be done by identifying how customers are feeling about your brand. The output of sentiment analysis is often a score or a label indicating the overall sentiment (e.g. positive, negative, neutral) of the text. Sentiment analysis can be performed using various techniques, such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). One common approach is to train a machine learning model on a labeled dataset of text and corresponding sentiment labels, and then use this trained model to predict the sentiment of new, unseen text.
Once you’ve conducted a sentiment analysis, it can be helpful to identify the top keywords and associated sentiment scores. What are the most common sentiments associated with your product or service?