Over the past few weeks, I’ve walked you step-by-step through a process for gathering information about your top competitors. At this point, you should have a ton of data neatly organized in your spreadsheet.
But now it’s time to shift gears from just information gathering to analysis and evaluation of that data to determine gaps and opportunities in your market.
Because, unless you start taking steps toward making some decisions about how to use the data you’ve gathered, it’s all pretty much useless.
And I don’t want you to fall into the age-old trap of “paralysis analysis,” where you get lost in all the possible options and never make a choice.
So, let’s get straight to your action step for today, which is to do a “quick and dirty” gaps and opportunities analysis and brainstorming session using the data you’ve collected to this point. This process will get you “out of your head” and force you to get some actionable ideas down on paper.
This is the first step toward turning your data into diamonds (in the rough, at least).
Finding Gaps and Opportunities in Your Market
Here’s the process…
- Create four new columns in your database: “What I Like,” “What I Don’t Like,” “Gaps,” and “Opportunities for Action.”
- For the “What I LIke” column, you simply go across a row in your database where you’ve collected data on one of your competitors and read your notes looking for positives you’ve noted. You’ll probably also want to open that competitor’s website up so you can glance back and forth to remind yourself of what you were thinking during your data-gathering sessions. You might want to supplement your notes by scanning through their website again. Then, simply add in your “What I LIke” column everything you’ve seen about that competitor that you think might be worthy of emulating (not copying, emulating).
- For the “What I Don’t Like” column, do the exact same process, but looking for everything you don’t like about that competitor’s website, programs, marketing approach, etc., and record those thoughts in the “What I Don’t Like” column. Of course, it probably makes sense to do both this step and the previous one at the same time if you have the bandwidth to do so, as your likes and dislikes will probably come to you all jumbled up.
- The “Gaps” column takes a little more mental effort. For this column, you want to look at everything you now know about a competitor and ask yourself, “What’s missing? What are they NOT doing? Is there a gap there that I could fill through my own business?” This is a crucial step, so don’t skip it! In upcoming posts, I’m going to show you how to use all you’ve learned to establish your unique positioning in your field, and knowing what gaps exist in your market is an important piece of the puzzle.
- Finally, after you’ve done the three columns above, look at what you’ve written down and jot some notes in the “Opportunities for Action” column. This won’t be the last word on actions you’d like to take in response to your competitor analysis, but it’s a good idea to get down what you’re thinking in the moment while it’s fresh, before any of those brainstorms slip away. If you saw something you’d like to emulate, jot down an action step you could take to move in that direction. If you saw something that you definitely want to avoid, write that down. If you identified what appears to be an unfulfilled need (“gap”) that the competitor isn’t filling (and that you think you could), get it down now.
- Once you’ve gone through the process above for one of your top competitors, go on to the next one and repeat the process. It will get easier and you’ll get faster at it as you go.
Once you’ve finished this initial gaps and opportunities analysis of your top competitors, you should be bursting with ideas about how you can carve out a unique niche within your market that you can dominate.
And that’s what I’ll be showing you how to do in the coming weeks.
But before we get there, there’s one last, crucial lesson I want to share with you about competitors. And I’ll do that in my next post, so stay tuned!
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–If you’ve been dutifully trying to keep up with the process of creating your positioning that I’ve been walking you through over the past few months, I know it’s A LOT, and you may not have been able to complete each step before I hustled you along to the next one. But now that we’re about ¾ of the way through the process, I hope you can also see that it’s not exactly rocket science. This is all very doable–and you don’t need an MBA to do it.
So, if you’ve fallen behind and not been able to complete a step here or there, just remember that you still have all the posts I’ve shared on positioning, and you can always go back and complete a step that you only got started on previously.
And once you’ve gone through this whole process once, you can always add new competitors to your database and mine that data for new insights using the process I’m sharing.
Positioning your business to win a big chunk of the market share in your field takes some work–and it’s work that’s never done, as conditions are always changing–but learning how to do this work will put you in the top 1% of people in your field who have never learned this process.
So, hang in there. All your work is about to pay off!
