You’ve heard it countless times before. “The first step to success in business is figuring out how to find competitors of a company” And it’s true, you need to know who your competitors are. The problem is that “who” doesn’t necessarily mean the companies, but more like individuals. Who is disrupting the market and trying to get into the same niche as you? Who is attacking from another angle? This article will go over how to identify competitors and potential allies in 2023 using various methods such as the best tactics and websites to find company competitors.
Competitive Monitoring 2023: Why Identify and Monitor Competitors
Why you need to embrace competitive monitoring: Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are already using competitive intelligence to gain a competitive advantage.
But what is competitive monitoring? A competitor is an entity that provides a similar type of service or product to your company. You can also think of them as someone who is trying to take away some of your customers.
A competitor can be any other business in the same industry as your own. But it can also be a business that offers products or services that are complementary to yours — for example, if you sell food and they sell beverages.
Competitors may not be direct competitors. For example, if you sell organic food while they sell conventional food, they might not be a direct competitor but they could still affect your success.
It’s important to identify and monitor competitors because they’re one of the key factors affecting your company’s success. Identifying competitors helps you understand how they operate and what their strengths are so that you can anticipate their actions and react accordingly. Monitoring competitors allows you to stay informed about their activities, which can help keep you one step ahead in the market. Data analytics makes decision-making 5x faster for businesses, so this is an area you want to focus on in 2023.
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What are the 5 Types of Competitors?
Who are my competitors? When trying to figure out how to find competitors of a company in 2023, it is important to understand the 5 types of competitors you are likely to run into.
Competitors are people or organizations that offer products or services that are similar to yours.
The main types of competitors include:
1. Direct Competitors
The first and most important type of competitor is a direct competitor. These competitors offer similar products and services as yours, and these are the companies that are competing against in trying to capture market share. For example, if you own a restaurant and another restaurant opens up across the street from you, then that new restaurant would be a direct competitor to your business.
Direct competitors are businesses that are selling identical products or services. These companies can be either local or national, but they’re generally in the same industry as you are and likely benchmarking you as well in their business strategies. It’s important to keep track of and monitor these competitors.
2. Indirect Competitors
The second type of competitor is the indirect competitor. These companies offer products or services that aren’t directly related to yours but could be used in conjunction with your product or service. For example, Ford and Toyota are indirect competitors because they both sell cars but they don’t sell tires together as Michelin does with both companies.
The third type of competitor is an emerging competitor. Emerging competitors are companies that haven’t been around long enough to be considered established competitors but have enough potential to become one if you allow them to grow without putting up a fight yourself first. An example would be Facebook when it was first created compared to today where it’s one of the most powerful social media sites in existence and has millions of users globally who use its services daily on their computers, tablets, and smartphones. BizVibe can help you identify these indirect competitors.
3. Substitute Competitors
The third type of competitor is substitute competitors. These are competitors who offer products or services that are close substitutes for your own. If the price of your product goes up, or the quality of your product or services declines, the customer will switch to another brand. This competitor is focused on developing a competitive advantage that makes it harder for other companies to compete with you. These competitors are waiting for opportunities for the market to open up, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on them.
4. New Market Entrants
These are companies that enter a market after it has become established and popularized by another company (i.e., your company). For example, if your company is currently offering accounting software for small businesses, then H&R Block could be considered an entrant because they have entered the market after it was already established by your company.
4. Price Cutters
These are competitors who attempt to undercut other companies by offering lower prices than those charged by their competitors to increase market share at any cost (even if it means going out of business). For example, Amazon is known for offering lower prices than many big box retailers like Best Buy and Walmart to increase their market share in retail sales of electronics, books, and other items found on their website or in their stores across the country.
10-Step Process: How to Find Competitors of a Company in 2023
1. Market Research
The first thing you must look at when trying to figure out is how to find competitors of a company in 2023. This will help you gain insight into what your competition is up to, who their target audience is, and how they are marketing themselves.
2. Identify Your Competitors
Once you have done some market research and know where your competitors stand, it’s time to start identifying who they are. There are many ways to do this:
Search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Google Alerts, Moz Open Site Explorer, or Ahrefs can help you find websites ranking for keywords related to your business by alerting you when new content is published on those sites
Social media monitoring tools like Social Mention or BuzzSumo can help you find mentions of your competitors across the web so that you can keep tabs on how they’re doing in the public eye.
3. Get Customer Feedback
When you’re trying to figure out how to find a company’s competitors in 2023, you need to look beyond the obvious. The best way to do this is to ask customers and other stakeholders.
Ask friends and family if they know of any competitors. If they don’t, they can be a good resource for finding out who else might be in the same market as your business or company. Ask them what they like about the competitor’s product or service and why they would choose one over the other. If they have any complaints, talk with them about how these issues could be resolved and implement those ideas into your business strategy.
Search Google for keywords related to your industry, product, or service. You’ll get a list of websites that are similar to yours in some way — may be even very similar! Check out these websites, research their content and see if there are any ways you could improve upon their existing products or services through customer feedback or additional research. This can help you get ideas for how to improve upon your offerings as well as give you insight into what existing customers want from their current providers so that you can create more value for them in the future.
4. Check Forums Online – Reddit, Quora, etc
The fourth step in finding your competitors is to type the name of your company into any popular forum, like Reddit or Quora. These forums are full of people who love to share their opinions on everything from politics to food and even business. The most important thing here is to find out what people are saying about your brand and what they think about your competition.
5. Check Social Media Sites
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great places to find out about your competitors’ customers. If someone is complaining about a product on a social media site, it’s likely that they would be willing to answer questions about why they don’t like it or what they do like instead. This can give you valuable insight into how they feel about other companies products as well (including yours).
6. Conduct Keyword Research
It’s important to know what kind of keywords your competitors are ranking for. This will help you to identify possible opportunities for you to rank for those same keywords.
- Perform a search in Google, Bing, or Yahoo for your competitor’s name.
- Click on the “Organic Keywords” tab.
- Copy the list of keywords that show up in the table that appears on the right side of your screen (or download it as a .csv file).
- Paste this list into a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, and add any additional columns that you think might be useful (for example total monthly searches).
Bonus: SEMrush gives you a detailed breakdown of every keyword your competitor is ranking for and the % of traffic coming to your competitor’s website from those keywords.
Keyword research, using Google’s search results, and looking at paid data is also one of the main ways to figure out how to identify indirect competitors.
7. Monitor Paid Media Data
When trying to figure out how to find a company’s competitors, one of the first places I look for is the Google Ads platform. Use the Google Ads keyword planner tool to see what keywords are driving traffic to your website and other businesses in the industry. This can help you identify which companies are doing well with their SEO or PPC campaigns and how they’re ranking on Google.
Additionally, when trying to figure out how to find competitors of a company, Use tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Google Trends to monitor paid media data for your target market and industry. This will give you a good idea of what other brands are spending on advertising and how they’re targeting consumers.
8. Identify Competitors Through Organic Search Data
Organic search data will help you identify more indirect competitors — brands that aren’t advertising but have a similar audience based on their organic search traffic. To do this, use SEMrush’s Organic Traffic Report tool and look at the top-performing pages for each keyword set. Then, use Ahrefs’ Content Gap feature to see which pages are missing from your website and how they rank against your competitors’ pages (you’ll need a Pro account).
You could also do this for free on Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
9. Use Googe Maps to Find Competitors
Use Google Maps to find the location of the business. Search for “company name” + “competitors,” and then narrow down your results by country or region.
10. Look at Review Websites
If you are looking to figure out how to find competitors of a company, the last step is to look at review websites. Check out the review websites and see if there are any links to your competitors. If there aren’t, try searching for its competitors’ websites.
You can also perform a Google search for “competitor analysis” followed by the name of your target company. This should bring up articles that offer tips on performing competitor analyses.
If the company has an investor relations page on its website, then it’s likely that you’ll find information about its competitors there too.
How to Find Competitors of a Company
Competitive research is vital to the success of almost any business. The data uncovered in a detailed competitive analysis will help you make informed business decisions, identify trends worth exploring, and generally see where your company currently stands in its industry and the competition. There are several different ways you can use this data to gain a leg up on your competition (looking for new market opportunities, researching up-and-coming companies, analyzing current pricing strategies, etc). It is wise to do at least some sort of competition assessment before you launch a new product or service—you may even find that there is already a company that offers a very similar product/service, and you can adjust accordingly. How to find competitors of a company is easier than ever with all the strategies and tools available to us in 2023.
Monitor the way your competitors are interacting online.
BizVibe delivers competitive intelligence alerts on demand.
