It would indeed be an extremely foolhardy mobile app developer who would consider commencing to develop an app without looking at what products are already available in the market that addresses similar needs. Performing a competitive analysis is a strategy that is aimed at finding out what your competitors are offering, the strengths and weaknesses of their products, and their product positioning.
The purpose of doing the exercise is to understand how you can build a better product or offer a more superior solution to your customers. A comprehensive competitor analysis covers everything from product features to its performance, market share, pain points, pricing, distribution, content strategy, web and social media presence, and more. Some of the most apparent benefits of conducting a competitor analysis are:
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Fine-Tuning Your Product Features and Developing a Unique Selling Proposition
When you want to develop and launch a mobile app, you want it to be a runaway success because it addresses all the things customers want from it and offers them unmatched convenience. The only way you can establish what features and functionalities your app should have is to understand what your customers need and want and to what extent these are being met by your competitors.
Performing a competitive analysis will give you a thorough insight into what the other brands are offering and the reason they are offering to customers to use them. By analyzing the product features and the stated unique selling propositions of your competitors, you will be able to understand better what features you need to offer and what kind of a USP, you need to formulate that will create an impression on your target audience that your app is distinctly a cut above the rest.
According to Forbes, a USP explains to customers why you are the right choice for addressing their problems. In addition to the product features, you should analyze their websites, social media accounts, mission statements, services, advertisements, and everything else you can lay your hands on that you can use to dig out unique talking points that your brand can leverage to score over the competition.
Meet Customer Expectations
The success of a mobile app primarily depends on the extent; it can meet the needs and wants of customers. There are some things that customers can spell out but often there are many functionalities and conveniences that they desire the app to have but are not able to adequately express. You must do a proper analysis of customer requirements and preferences by scanning through the reviews and the customer feedback of the apps already in the market as well as conducting interviews and group discussions with the potential audience so that you can discover the things that the customer considers important.
By reading the reviews of the competitor apps thoroughly, you will be able to discover not only the market gaps that are not being addressed adequately but also get an insight into the needs and expectations of the customer better. The brand competitive analysis process should continue even after the launch of the app so that you can understand what improvements are necessary.
Establish a Benchmark for the Brand
Success app development and marketing cannot happen in a vacuum. Regardless of whether your business is a new one or an established one, you should benchmark your brand against that of your competition to establish a point of reference for growth measurement. Competitive analysis helps to unlock insights from historical data regarding how customers view your product as well as those of your competitors.
This analysis has the potential to offer a greater understanding of the growth and scale of your own business. By scrutinizing the historical data of your brand and your competition, you will be able to understand better how the market views the products they have at hand. The benchmarking process is essential for improvements to be made in both product performance and ROI.
Helps to Identify Gaps in the Market
By performing a competitive analysis, you will be able to develop a matrix that will help you to identify markets that are either not being served at all or are underserved. A competitor mapping exercise can be used strategically to examine the unique service models and business models of your main competitors by placing them on a matrix that can measure parameters like price, quality, level of customization, etc.
By undertaking this exercise, you may be able to discover a market need or a gap that has zero or minimal presence and can be successfully exploited. Similarly, geographical mapping exercises can help you to identify locations where customer needs are not being addressed due to the lack of customization of the app.
Understand Potential Threats
By performing a competitive analysis of the app niche continuously, you can come to know the challenges that are facing you and your competitors in terms of new technology, the emergence of alternative products, or shifting consumer requirements or profiles.
Keeping an eye on the constantly shifting market dynamics of your app will help you to anticipate potential changes in the market, competitor marketing campaigns that can be rebutted before significant damage is done, or other emerging threats that can jeopardize your market position. Keeping yourself updated on industry news as well as activities of your competitors on social media, and other channels can be of help. You can take the help of market intelligence tools that can automate the task and mine tons of data continuously from all conceivable sources.
The competitive analysis process is of great help to strategic planners because it allows them to consider the competitive environment and its impact on internal factors when they are formulating their strategic plans. Threats posed by the competition as well as the marketplace scenario can be more clearly appreciated to enable appropriate planning to be done.
Conclusion
There are many advantages of conducting a competitive analysis before undertaking mobile app development. However, the most stand-out benefit of the exercise is that you can understand quickly all the moves made by the competition to add product features or launch new products that give you a competitive edge in terms of functionality, quality, and price.
