List your top competitors: Keep in mind that listing your competition isn’t always as simple as Company X versus Company Y.
Sometimes a division of a company might compete with your core product or service, even though that company’s brand might put more effort into another area.
For example: Apple is known for its laptops and mobile devices, but Apple Music competes with Spotify for its music streaming service.
From a content standpoint, a blog, YouTube channel, or ig database similar publication might compete for incoming website visitors, even though your products don’t overlap with theirs at all.
And like Health.com or Prevention on certain health and hygiene-related blog topics, even though the magazines don’t actually sell oral care products.
►Identification of industry competitors
To identify competitors whose products or services overlap with yours, determine what industry or industries you’re looking at. Start high-level, using terms like education, construction, media and entertainment, food service, healthcare, retail, financial services, telecommunications, and agriculture.
The list goes on, but find an industry term you identify with and use it to create a list of companies that are also in this industry. You can build your list in the following ways:
Check out your industry quadrant on G2 Crowd — In certain industries, this is your best first step in secondary market research.
G2 Crowd aggregates user ratings and social data to create “quadrants,” where you can see companies represented as contenders, leaders, niches, and top performers in their respective industries.
G2 Crowd specializes in digital content, IT services, human resources, e-commerce and related business services.
►Identification of content competitors
Search engines are your best friend in this area of secondary market research. To find the online publications you compete with, take the general industry term you identified in the previous section and come up with some more industry-specific terms that your business identifies with.
A catering company, for example, may generally be a “food service” company, but you may also consider yourself a provider of “event catering,” “catering,” “baked goods,” and more.
Once you have this list, do the following:
Google it: Don’t underestimate the value of seeing what websites come up when you do a Google search for industry terms that describe your company. You may find a combination of product developers, blogs, magazines, and more.
Compare your search results to your buyer persona:
Remember that buyer persona you created during the primary research stage earlier in this article? Use it to examine the likelihood that a post you found through Google could steal your website traffic.
If the content the website publishes appears to be the material your Buyer Persona would want to see, it is a potential competitor and should be added to your competitor list.
After a series of similar Google searches for industry terms you identify with, look for repetition in the website domains that appeared.
Examine the first two or three pages of results for each search you performed. These websites are clearly well-respected for the content they create in your industry and should be watched carefully as you build your own library of videos, reports, web pages, and blog posts.