Let’s say you run an established business or a growing startup. The only constant thing for you is trying to outperform your competitors. If your business is already established, you can invest in a lot of market research tools. However, as a startup, you would want to save your expenses up to a certain extent. As an owner of a business, you would want to surpass your competitors in every metric possible. To accomplish this, you need first to identify your competitors.
So, how to find our competitors of a company?
In this article, I will try to explain the method you can use to find competitors of any company. I would focus primarily on the free methods and some tricks around search engines for this purpose. These methods would aim at startups and initial-stage companies as established companies can always invest in research firms.
Why Find Out Competitors Of A Company
Before learning to find competitors of any company, you need to ask why it is important. Why in the first place you would need to find competitors of any company?
Here are situations in which finding competitors of a company benefits you!
- Understand The Market Trends
Learning about your competitors gives you an understanding of how the market works. You will realize a lot about all your potential customers and what services or products they consume. This information helps you to change or upgrade your strategies accordingly.
- Avoid Business Mistakes
When you try to find out your competitors, you get their functioning right from their starting days. This includes all the major developments including their mistakes and failures. Most companies are studying their competitors to avoid making the same mistakes and maintain a healthy position in the market. Mistakes are bound to happen in any business. However, trying to learn from others can save you from mistakes that are of certain patterns in your market.
- Outperform The Release Of a New Product Or A Service
Let’s assume your competitor launched a new product. Now, knowing all your competitors would allow you to analyze and decide how to counter this. Maybe this product is something which you can launch too. Or maybe this product may not be well handled by you if launched at the moment. Every step of your competitor allows you to decide your next step.
- Understand Their Strengths and Weaknesses
Finding your competitors is the first step in knowing their strengths and weaknesses they have. Moving ahead, you can even perform a SWOT analysis of your competitors. Knowing your competitors can help you outdo all your competitors. Understanding the weak links in the business strategy of your competitors can help you strengthen yours.
How To Find Out Competitors Of A Company
Here comes the main agenda for this article – how to find out competitors of a company. Understanding why finding competitors of any company can help you in this step. There are many market research tools and software that you can use. However, most of them are not free and you would not find them useful in their free versions.
I would like to explain certain tips to find competitors of any company using free versions of different tools. These tools are not intended for market research but they still serve the purpose for you as a growing startup.
Find Local Competitors Using Google Search and Google Maps
Many people would find this point too common. But, let me tell you it is not. Searching Google is an art. It has many methods you can use to get accurate information. Let us understand with an example.
Suppose you run a shoe-selling business. Go and search Google for “shoe-selling companies”. You will find Google showing you the top companies selling shoes. Now, these companies are competitors to you. However, they may not be relevant as compared to your business size and revenue margins.
Instead of all this, go to Google Maps and use the feature “near me”. You will find a much better list of companies in your niche. Just type in “shoe-selling companies near me”. You will get a list of multiple companies most probably at your level in the market. You can even check their websites and some of their top customers (if mentioned on the website).
As discussed, if you search on Google about “shoe-selling companies”, it will probably display a lot of top well-established brands. You need to search the way your potential customer would search. Instead of directly searching, try searching “pure leather shoe companies”. The other option can be “sneakers selling dealers near me”. Or maybe, “men formal shoes in Manhattan, New York City. This is what helps Google provide you with accurate results. You need to be more specific in your search queries.
Moreover, do not limit yourself to the top 3 pages of Google. Most of the companies you are trying to compete with are not multi-billion dollar companies. Hence, their Google rankings would not be on the first page. You need to check at least the top 10 pages for more accurate results. Going through the list of these top 10 pages would help you understand better.
Find Competitors Of A Company Using SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a tool that analyses and provides you with a list of websites similar to each other. It has a website and a browser extension as well.
Let’s say you enter “facebook.com” in SimilarWeb’s search bar. You can go to the left menu and check for competitors. It will provide you with a list of websites similar to Facebook. When I tried this, it provides me with a list of websites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and many more. You can use this same approach to finding your competitors. You can find one or two competitors by using the previous method. Once you have them, you can use their official website in the search bar of SimilarWeb. The tool will provide you with similar websites, in our case competitors to that website or company.
This method is great for finding competitors. However, there is a limitation to this method. SimilarWeb is able to analyze websites with a particular user count using its algorithms. So, if your competitor’s website is too small, it won’t be able to find the competitors for you.
However, there is a great way to beat this limitation!
Start finding competitors of well-established companies. Once you have the list, pick the company that is the smallest on the list. Now use this company as your search bar. You will get more results. You can again find the smallest company in the new list. You can carry this process again and again till SimilarWeb stops showing you results. Using this method, you can find competitors relevant to you up to a certain extent.
Here are three more tools similar to SimilarWeb that you can use
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Spyfu
Finding Competitors Using Online Surveys
The other method that works well is to ask the customers what they use! You can use multiple online survey tools to circulate your questionnaire. You can directly ask the people about the local services they purchase or the products they use. There are many tools that will let you create a customer survey form. However, many of them would require paid investment.
If you are not willing to invest, you can try Google forms. These are the best forms you can create and get responses. The only work you’ll need to do is to circulate the form among different people. For this, you may not necessarily need the customer data of your competitors. You can start with people close to you. And they can further forward your form link to their closed ones. This creates an entire chain and eventually you get a lot of data.
You can also use social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and more to put your survey form in the public domain. Many people would check out the form or forward it to a relevant person. Undoubtedly it requires manual work. But if you are low on budget, this sort of clerical work needs to be done.
Finding Competitors Using ECommerce Platforms
This method works only if you are into a business that you can sell on e-commerce platforms. Assuming as previously, you are into a shoe-selling business. You can go to any e-commerce platform and search for similar products. The way you search will determine how well you are able to find your competitors. Try using filters as per your requirements.
Here is one filter you can use.
Try filtering using the customer rating.
As a startup, you would need to find companies just starting out. These companies may have the best products, but customer ratings can tell a lot about them. New companies may indirectly mean fewer sales as compared to other established businesses. Hence, fewer customer reviews for their products. This one tip can help you find relevant competitors.
Bottom Line
I have discussed a few ways you can use to find competitors of a company. As a startup, these methods can save you money on investing in market research. However, an established company can always invest in market research tools. Hence, I aim to provide you with a few methods you can use to get started. All the methods mentioned in the article may work for some niches and may not produce results for some other niches. However, in any case, you won’t yourself stuck in any situation. You would anyways get a few competitors by either of the methods to start with.