Compare your business to others
Analysing your competitors means researching and evaluating other businesses that offer similar products or services to yours.
It helps you see how your business compares in areas like pricing, customer experience, marketing and product quality.
By studying the competition, you can understand their strengths and weaknesses, discover industry trends, and find opportunities to improve or differentiate your own business.
These insights allow you to make more informed decisions about everything, which helps you stay competitive and continue to evolve to meet your customers' needs.
How to analyse your competitors?
When analysing competitors, it’s important to consider both quantitative and qualitative factors to get a complete picture of how your business compares.
Quantitative data such as pricing, customer numbers, revenue or social media followers provides insights into performance. However, these numbers don’t tell the full story.
Qualitative factors, like customer reviews, brand reputation, product quality, and the overall customer experience, offer valuable context that helps explain why a competitor is performing well or may be struggling.
By combining both types of information, you can make better and more informed decisions about how to improve your own business, identify gaps in the market, and create or maintain a competitive edge.
Understanding the differences:
Evaluating these factors often involves reviewing a competitor’s customer feedback, browsing their social media comments, becoming a customer yourself to see what the experience is like and paying attention to how the business presents itself.
By looking at these things, you can identify opportunities to stand out even if a competitor appears stronger on paper.
Statistics and benchmarking
Understanding other businesses like yours
Competitor analysis
Want to make competitor analysis easier?
Templates can help guide your research with all the important things that you need to look at – from pricing and marketing, to customer reviews, and which products/services your competitors offer.
Using a template can save you time and ensure you get all the information you need to make informed decisions.
A great place to start is the Australian Government’s competitor analysis tool, which is made just for small businesses.
Other resources
- Find more information on benchmarking your business
- The Australian Taxation Office has a range of information to compare your business to others just like yours
- For detailed guidance on how to do market research, analyse competitors and benchmark your business
Our advisors in the New Business Support Service and Tasmanian Business Advice Service can assist you with accessing benchmarking data for your business.
To register for advice, visit businessadvice.tas.gov.au or phone 1800 440 026.