Competitor Analysis Business Plan Template

Competitor analysis, also known as competitive analysis, involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors and analysing their strengths and weaknesses against your own. 

Conducting a competitor analysis is essential to understanding other businesses in your market. It forms an important part of your business plan – a vital document designed to help you secure investment during the pitching process. As part of your business plan, you’ll need to show investors that you’ve conducted an in-depth analysis of your direct and indirect competitors and demonstrate how your business differentiates from them.

Our simple competitor analysis template allows you to identify and analyse the competitors within your market in a clear, organised and digestible way. 

Our dedicated template for competitor analysis is designed to help you identify areas in which you have a competitive advantage and where you may be weaker than your competitors. Pinpointing areas of weakness is an essential part of competitive analysis because it allows you to take action and improve or develop particular areas of your business. 

Our free competitor analysis template will help you gain insights into your competitor’s capabilities and determine where you sit within the current market landscape. 

Analysing your competitor’s strengths and weakness allows you to create and implement tactics and activities that will help you improve your offering within the market.

By comparing your business to your competitors, you will be able to identify your core strengths and areas of your business that need development or improvement. It will also reveal opportunities and threats, and how your business can better serve prospective customers.

A competitive analysis should include important details about competitors’ businesses, from product/service information and key selling points, to target audience and marketing strategy, to pricing and market share. 

Our competitor analysis template includes the following crucial categories required to conduct an in-depth competitive analysis:

• Company Overview
• Market Information
• Product Information
• Promotional Strategy
• Brand
• Team
• Technology
• Sales
• Competitive Edge

The core categories contain sub-sections, allowing you to dive into more detail when analysing each competitor. For example, the ‘Promotional Strategy’ category contains dedicated sections to help you map out information about your competitor’s digital marketing activities, key website features, social media accounts, offline marketing activities and PR coverage. 

Competitor analysis is a key part of your business plan because it shows that you have a comprehensive understanding of the market and your position within it. Competitive analysis grants you insights to help you make informed decisions about every aspect of your business, including your products/services, sales and marketing strategies, and more.

There are many benefits to conducting a competitor analysis, including:

• Identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, and comparing them to your own
• Gaining a comprehensive understanding of your market
• Spotting industry trends
• Setting benchmarks for future growth

While a competitor analysis is an essential part of your initial business plan, it is also something that should be conducted at every stage of your business. This will enable you to:

• Identify any changes or advancements to your competitor’s products/services
• Monitor and act upon industry developments 
• Spot potential threats posed by new market entrants or products/services

You can use our free competitor analysis template to conduct a comprehensive analysis on all core areas of your competitors business. We’ve also provided a few extra tips to help you conduct a competitive analysis:

Direct competitors offer similar products or services to your business. Indirect competitors offer products or services that are completely different to yours, yet serve the same need or provide a similar solution.

While there may be a few obvious competitors, you should also try to identify those which you haven’t yet considered. To locate competitors, you need to think like your customers. Ask yourself, who would your customers turn to if they didn’t purchase from you? 

You can also find out who your competitors are by conducting online searches using similar product/service keywords. If a certain brand is appearing for the same terms that you’re also ranking for (or should be ranking for), they’re probably a competitor.  

It’s important to analyse both direct and indirect competitors to help you establish a competitive advantage, and to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the market.

Once you have your competitor list ready, start by researching the basic details of their businesses. For example, take note of their website, social media profiles, location and company size. From there, you can find more granular information to help you conduct a truly in-depth and accurate review.

Find people who are currently experiencing the problem you’re looking to solve and speak to them about it. Interviewing potential customers can help you acquire some valuable insights including, what they’re currently buying. It’s important to gather feedback from customers to find out why some customers choose one solution over another and what influences their decisions.

For a full breakdown of how to do competitor analysis, read our complete step-by-step guide to conducting competitor analysis.