Understanding Competitors: Identifying Direct and Indirect Rivals

So now you want to analyze your competition. And the first step to that is to identify your competitors, the brands out there that your targeted audience is most likely weighing before they make their purchase decision. So essentially, the brands that are focused on the same targeted audiences that you are, right? So identify them.

Some will be direct competitors, companies that are very much like you and offering a similar product or service to a similar targeted audience, but it can also include some competitors that might be indirect. They are potentially offering a slightly different service than you are, or a somewhat different service than you are, but they are targeted towards the same audience and meeting a similar need. So let me give you an example of that.

Let's say you are McDonald's, and I asked you who your target audience is. Well, the obvious answer is a direct competition includes Burger King and Wendy's, and other fast food franchises that focus on hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and French fries, and the core offerings of McDonald's. But McDonald's is not just competing with the burger chains, right? They're also competing with other fast food options because if you are a family with young children and it's Friday night and you're looking for a quick and expensive fun meal that your kids are gonna love, and you might order out, hey, we'll go to McDonald's, let's order from McDonald's or let's order from Burger King, but that wouldn't be your complete set, right? Kids love pizza, so you likely would be considering Pizza Hut or Domino's.

Kids might like fried chicken, so maybe you would include the KFCs and the Popeyes, right? So you can see how those brands are not offering hamburgers; they're not directly offering what McDonald's does, but they offer a similar product, right? So you need to understand what other options people may have, including some that are not exactly like yours. Then you wanna collect data on these competitors. So where do you find this information? Well, start with their website, right? Every brand's going to have on its website some reference to its mission, and its brand positioning will be explained.

We also know something of its product offerings, service offerings, its pricing, its sales process, the steps a customer may need to go through to make a purchase, as well as the brand's social media. Again, you can find out what topics the brand is focusing on, how it's positioning itself to its audience and its communication, and what the audience is saying about the brand's content and whether they're engaging with it or not. Then, depending upon the industry, there are going to be publications and blogs that are focused on the industry.

Now, not in every case would a company necessarily be big enough to get that focus, but you can certainly find out information on local media, in some cases, about many of the brands that you will be competing with, right? And then there are platforms like the social media platforms, including Meta, that, and I'll show you that in a moment here on Instagram, where you can gain competitive benchmarking information. So what do I mean by that? The Meta Business Suite is the platform that, as a marketer on Instagram or Facebook, you can use to do a number of things, including gaining insight on your audience, some of the demographic information we were discussing earlier, as well as set up your advertising campaigns, your product promotion campaigns, calendar for you to be able to schedule your content, right? So, a number of activities relating to marketing or creating content on Instagram or Facebook can be facilitated through the Meta Business Suite, but the Meta Business Suite also has insight into your competitors. If you were to go to the menu on the left of the Meta Business Suite, and the Meta Business Suite can be accessed through Instagram if you have an Instagram business account, we'll be discussing that in a little bit, or directly by just Googling Meta Business Suite, and it will go directly to it.

That way, as long as you have a Meta Business page set up, you will be able to market, I mean, be able to access the Meta Business Suite. And if you look under Insights, there's a section called Benchmarking, right? And clicking on Benchmarking, it will create a meta based on what it understands of your business. When you create your business page, and you put initial information about what industry you're in, and the more you market on that platform, the more it will understand about the services and products that you're offering.

It will identify competitors within your industry and present the engagement these competitors are getting for the content they post, the page likes, you know, whether that's up or down from the previous month, and the amount of content that they publish. You can pair yourself with these competitors, right? And you can tweak this list. You can add competitors just by adding their brand name, as long as they're on Meta, then they will be included.

And you can find out how you relate to your competitors from a standpoint of content on Meta platforms, Instagram, or Facebook, and how you relate to the rest of the industry. They show you a percentile regarding engagement, regarding the amount of content you create, whether it's above average or below average for your overall industry. So it's a great source of at least understanding something about the strategy and results they're getting on Instagram.

You know, if you're marketing on the same platform as they are, that insight could be helpful. So let's close this section with a quote from the great American poet, Maya Angelou. People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

And the more you understand about your content audience, the more you can position your brand image to make your audience feel positively about your brand when they engage with your branded content on any platform, but in this case, we're discussing Instagram.