Henry Jones
By analysing your competition and monitoring them on an ongoing basis, you'll get to know their behaviour, enabling you to anticipate their actions and stay one step ahead.
Competitive research is crucial to your success as a building products business because it arms you with the ability to quickly identify industry trends and adapt to competitors' campaigns or strategies to maintain a foothold or even out-compete them.
What is a Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis is a marketing strategy where you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competition by thoroughly researching and experiencing their sales and marketing process. The competitor analysis will provide you with both offensive and defensive strategies to determine opportunities and threats.
Categorise Your Competitors
Specific to the building products sector there will be certain avenues such as product directories and building product magazines. This is as well as the obvious online search engine Google and social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
One tip to help find your competitors is to search for your company name and the products you provide. This way you will find similar websites that are ranking for similar keywords that represent your business.
At the initial stage of categorising your competitors you want to get a comprehensive overview to understand the size of the market and how many people are within the same space.
As you come across companies with a conflict of interest with yourself you’ll want to categorise them into various levels. Below is an easy way to do this:
- Primary Competition: These are your direct competitors, they’re either targeting the same audience as you or have a similar product – or both.
- Secondary Competition: These competitors might offer a high or low-end version of your product, or sell something similar to a different audience.
- Tertiary Competition: This category consists of businesses that are related to yours. They could offer related products or services that are trending, they also include a business that may be beneficial to partner with further down the line.
Examine Your Competitor's Website & Customer Experience
Your website is your 24-hour salesperson, it never has downtime and is always accessible by prospects and customers, so it needs to be fully functioning to the highest standard.
Below is a list of questions to ask when looking at your competitors' websites, it's worth asking yourself the same questions. If you create a spreadsheet with the answers you can identify what your competitors are doing. You can then identify gaps for improvement on your own website.
This should outline what construction companies are doing with email marketing, content creation, Twitter, and LinkedIn. By cross-referencing this activity, you'll be able to see if they have a content marketing strategy.
- How good is their product photography? How do they display their products?
- How detailed are their product descriptions? What information do they include and exclude?
- Are there CTA’s throughout their product pages? Are they obvious or do they get lost due to poor colour or positioning?
- Are they trying to build an email list? Is there an option to sign up for their newsletter?
- Are their social media icons positioned on the homepage? Are they prominent?
- Do they have a blog section? If so, how often are they blogging? What topics are they discussing?
- Is their site optimised for mobile and tablet?
- What contact options do they offer? Is there an out-of-hours option?
- Do they have a live chat function on the website?
- How long does it take them to respond to an email and form submissions?
- Do they have downloadable content ready to view online? What types of content are they offering?
- Can you access their product data sheets?
- Is it easy to navigate around? Can you easily find everything?
Identifying Your Competitor's Marketing Position
By identifying your competitor's positioning strategy and mission, you’ll start to get a feel for the demands and expectations of your market. It will also help you understand to whom your competitors are speaking to and how they position themselves within the market.
To do this you need to gather as much information as possible. You can do this by:
- Following them on social media
- Sign up for their newsletter
- Subscribe and follow their blog
- Enquire about a specific product. This could even be a variation of a product and one they don’t publicly state they sell. This will demonstrate how they go about it, do they simply say “No we don’t do that” or do they reach out to other companies/suppliers to ensure they can get it for you?
Check Out Your Competitor's Reviews And Comments
Reviews are vital to get a full overview of the service your competitors provide. Don’t be limited to reviews but also look on social media for what customers are commenting on. These are the one thing that the company cannot directly influence or write themselves so it will be the most honest information you can gather.
If you start to see a pattern such as high ratings for quick lead time, or good installation you can start to get a feel for what that specific audience is after and why they might pick one company over another.
Conclusion
Undergoing a competitor analysis is key to your construction marketing strategy. Not only will it outline how other companies within your industry are positioning themselves but it should clarify exactly what your company is about and what it's not.
You should undergo a competitor analysis every time you review your marketing strategy or if there is a big change or update within your industry that affects everyone.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.