Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another video in my DIY series. Sorry, now just give me two seconds while I put up the full screen. So yes, this is another video in my DIY competitive series where I show you and your company the processes that I have used in my decade plus of performing competitive intelligence for some of the top companies in the US. My name is Finbar and I run Finbar.co, competitive intelligence as a service business for seven figure and above revenue businesses. Today's short presentation is going to run through my process and steps for the common business topic that almost every business generating a million or more in revenue a year wants to know. And that is how to identify the primary strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. So let's go through the eight crucial steps in the process that will allow you to essentially DIY your own competitive analysis by following my process. Just before I go through the steps, I like to give a quick reminder of the main things I see from people I have worked with that are unaware of what competitive analysis is, or maybe just doing their first research analysis and are probably not familiar with what doing a competitive analysis actually entails. So firstly, competitive research may seem dull at times. It can be boring. There's a lot of boring parts to the process, so don't get discouraged. Secondly, clearly defining and framing your topic is crucial. This will help you and your team get aligned and also the executives. It's good to also, whoever you're producing the research for to essentially give them the goals and objectives and kind of sign off on that before you do it. This cuts out, keeps you aligned, as I said, keeps out the boredom as you will have a clear structure and end goal of your research. Thirdly, avoid searching for a single solution. Try to have as little bias or what you think the result or recommendation will be. Just go on the data that you've pulled and you run your analysis and you create the story off just that alone. Don't have any preconceived ideas is what I would recommend. Fourthly, so base your recommendations on data and ensure they're quantifiable. So use the data and your analysis to shape the story. Again, a bit like the last one, don't do this for a particular person or create a story that will appease that person. That's a crucial one. I see that a lot with especially first timers and competitive analysis. Fifthly, ethics play a vital role. Always abide by the law. You know, like everyone knows when they're accessing data, they shouldn't be. So don't be that guy, don't be that girl, don't be that company who does that. And sixthly, and finally, understanding your industry is just as important as knowing your competitors. Don't compare yourself to companies in different industries in different growth stages with different customers. Whatever you kind of try to learn and take from them, obviously probably won't work because you're a different business with a different goal set in general. So moving on to the process and the eight step process, I'll keep each step quick, but basically these are the eight steps I would use to answer the very common question of what are the primary strengths and weaknesses of our competitors? So step one is competitor identification and segmentation. So start by identifying your competitors. So list direct competitors offering similar products or services. Then you can identify indirect competitors. So providing different products or services, but they do address the same customer need. So then when you're finished, you just segment these competitors based on the market segment, such as product type, target audience, or geographic region. So you'll just need an Excel sheet for that, for the output for step one. Step two, multi-channel data collection. So I use social listening tools like Brandwatch and Hootsuite. This allows me to monitor like competitor mentions, sentiment across social media platforms. I also use things like Trustpilot and Yelp, sometimes G2, but mostly Trustpilot and Yelp that kind of aggregates and analyzes like customer feedback and reviews. So I find that useful. You can also use things like Glassdoor and Indy to kind of measure and get the sentiment on company culture, you know, in maybe strengths and weaknesses on like management, operational strengths, et cetera. And then I also always try to look at some sort of financial statement, annual report. You don't need to be a financial whiz to do this. It's clear, like if you compare, you know, a few years back, you can see differences in spending and revenue and stuff like that. So look at some financial stuff, news articles, you know, to kind of get maybe the financial health of the competitor and the overall, that's just like an overall data collection strategy. Try to get as much, you know, sources as possible. Thirdly, data synthesis and mapping. So the output here will be a strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, grid. I have loads of them, so just contact me if you want one, the ones that I use, or else just use one off the internet. You can easily download for free. So identify recurring themes and trends like through the collected data, map key attributes such as product quality, customer service, innovation, and market reach against each competitor. And then you move on to step four, which is competitive benchmarking. Again, use performance metrics like market share, retention rates, product performance metrics, social media engagement for benchmarking, any public available data like NPS and CSAT. And then you assess the rate and impact of innovation through patent filings, product launches, R&D investments for step four. Step five, this is entirely up to yourself if you're doing a DIY. What I like to do when I do kind of comprehensive reports on this question is I use like NLP tools to perform like text and sentiment analysis on reviews, social media posts, news articles. This helps me give like an all around picture. I can't go through every data point myself. And then, you know, other like I use predictive analytics to forecast future trends and potential kind of like strategic moves based off all the data points I've gathered so far. Step six, and there's only eight total steps. Step six is when you start kind of start reporting, put it into dashboards, put it into heat maps, and you kind of develop kind of comprehensive profiles for like each competitor that you've studied, key strengths, weaknesses, strategic insights. You start to form, you know, your overall opinion and you kind of, you know, that kind of gets you ready for the step seven, which is basically the culmination of the report and the recommendation section, which is most likely what most executives in your company or whoever asked you to do the research will want to see. So here is where you kind of extract all the insights from the data visualizations, the heat maps, the reports. You start developing your recommendations, how you can leverage your competitor weaknesses and counter their strengths. And then you use different, you can kind of, what I like to do is put different use cases forward, which will prepare for potential market shifts and competitor actions, essentially like that, which is good reading in a report and always comes back with like good feedback that the consumer of the report will enjoy. And then the final thing is, you know, what's all this one-time work if you're not going to continuously monitor? And that's kind of setting up reporting, setting up alerts. It's not like you'd have to do the same amount of work every three, six, nine to 12 months, but just keep on top of the things. You now have a good view of your customers or so your competitors, and you might as well just keep on top of it and make sure that any big changes, you understand why and where they were coming from their competitors. So hopefully that gives you a good outline, just an eight-step process. I know, I hope it wasn't too complicated and it was kind of helpful. You can download the step-by-step guide that I use in the video description below, and then you can reach out to me at hello at finbar.co for any assistance you may have with running competitive intelligence for your business. So thank you for the time. Have a good day. Thank you.