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Outpace the competition with personas

Keeping an eye on competitors is an important key to success:
What are they doing better? How profitable are they and how do they do it? Who do they appeal to and how? data-driven personas helps.

Personas in competitive analysis

One of the most effective ways to get to the bottom of the competition is to know their customers intimately. If you know who buys from the competition, how these people want to be approached, and how they use the products, you have a clear competitive advantage. So what you need is personas of the competition's customers. We explain how to do that here:

First, find suitable competitors who offer the same or very similar products on a similar market as you do.
Then be clear: What do I want to know about my competitors' customers?
First of all, of course, their demographic data, their living situation, level of education and income, preferences, habits. But in order to create precise personas of your competitors' customers and address them, you also need to know which channels they use, what they comment on and how, how they react to advertising and discount campaigns, which media they consume and to what extent, and where the problem lies in the customer journey, i.e. where you can start and do better in order to tap into these customers.

Gather this data from various sources such as surveys, interviews, forum discussions, review sites, social media, etc. Social media in particular offers a wealth of insight into customers, from their workplace, hobbies, travel and buying behavior to networking, posting behavior and political views. The analysis tools of the respective platforms, but also special audience insight tools offer far-reaching and very interesting insights there.
Subscribe to your competitors' newsletters and make test purchases on their websites or in their stores. You will learn a lot about your competitors' customer approach and customer journey.
Combine these insights with quantitative data on sales figures, market trends, price sensitivity, product modifications, etc.

Tools for competitive analysis

Tools like Searchmetrics, Whatrunswhere, Spyfu, Socialblade or Buzzsumo are particularly valuable for analyzing your competitors' strategy to gain insights into their SEO performance, advertising behavior, blog mentions etc. Combined with monitoring the behavior of competitors and their customers on social media channels, you can gain insights about their CRM as well as relevant products: If a product or topic is commented on frequently, this is an indication of an interesting market. From the company's response, refine your knowledge about customer targeting and whether it's working or not. Also pay attention to what the mood of customers is, what they say about the company in question, whether this changes over time, and if so, what the reasons might be.

Working with competitor personas

Based on all these insights, you can create one (or more) fairly accurate data-driven persona (s) of your competitors' customers.
Then, together with your team, find out where there are gaps in the competitors' strategy that are interesting for these personas and where the competitors are doing better than you. It is also important to compare the personas of your own customers and those of your competitors' customers. With these insights, you can improve your own strategy and at the same time fill gaps in the competitors' strategy in such a way that you can gain their customers. To do this, also compare competitors with each other: Why does one have success with a strategy, while the other does not?

Apply lessons learned to all relevant areas: Content, SEO, social media, customer journey and empathy map, approach, overall marketing strategy, product development, etc.

If you need help with data analysis or creating personas of your competitors' customers, we'll be happy to advise you.

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