Competitive Analysis Template

What Is a Competitive Analysis Template?

A competitive analysis template is a document (usually Excel or Google sheet) where brands can establish competitors, set parameters and collect data to more deeply understand where they fall within their industry, as well as their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The great thing about having a ready-to-use template is that you can keep this information on deck, ready to be shared, discussed, actioned or referenced at any time.

Why Your Brand Needs a Competitive Analysis Template

While templates aren’t an absolute necessity in your arsenal, they simplify what is already a pretty daunting process. By having an easily adjustable template ready to be filled with competitive information, you don’t need to spend any time thinking about what type of data needs to be collected. This means more time diving into the competitive data and creating actionable insights that will inform your strategy moving forward and help you stand out from the competition.

How To Use Dash Hudson’s Social Media Competitive Analysis Template

Dash Hudson has created a thorough analysis template to ensure you get every ounce of valuable data from your competitors and their content. This template works best if you break the process up into steps. Let’s begin with step one. 

Step 1: Keyword Research

While you might want to dive into collecting data on your competitors, you should start by identifying exactly what you’re looking to compare. Once you know what you would like to know more about, find 5-10 of the most relevant keywords or trending hashtags for your topic. These will guide your research, help form your keyword landscape and show you who your top competitors are for this specific topic. 

Once you have decided on your keywords or hashtags, it’s time for the fun part: identifying your competition. You will go on every platform (including Google), search these keywords and see which competitors come up. The process is roughly the same on each platform as you can just use the search bar to type in your keyword and then you will get your results. Platforms like LinkedIn will only show posts from your community, so ensure you have some type of connection to the competitors you expect to see. Once you have collected 3-5 of the top ranking competitors for each platform and keyword, it’s time to begin competitive research.

Step 2: Competitive Research

Through your keyword research, your top competitors should be quite obvious. If it’s not completely obvious, choose the competitors you see most often, even if it is only a handful of times. 

With this group of competitors, you will begin building your competitive landscape. This will be a living, breathing tab that houses the most important information about these specific competitors like brand summary, target markets, pricing and more. You will also perform a SWOT analysis here to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of not only your competitors, but your brand as well.

Step 3: Social Analysis

While it’s important to have the basic competitive research down, it’s even more valuable to have the metrics that matter most: what works for these competitors on social. Social analysis will get updated more frequently and highlight follower size, post frequency, engagement rate and even top-performing posts on all of the most important platforms. These analytics will help inform your strategy moving forward and give you some insight into what types of content you need to create for your topic and your audience. 

Step 4: Recommendations

There is no doubt that while collecting all of this information, you’re already getting ideas of what you want to do next. The Recommendations tab allows you to capture any updates you want to make to your competitive landscape and create action items for each channel based on your findings in your social analysis. There is even a section for recommendations you will want to action in the future because, as we all know, competitive analysis is not a one-and-done. This template is about to become your new best friend. 

Are you ready to understand your competitors deeper than ever before? Download your free competitive analysis template to get started today.