Why Competitive Analysis is Mostly Sh*t for Your Practice

Competitive analysis has become another useless “deliverable” in your digital agency’s bag of smoke. Mostly because it asks the wrong questions too late. 

Strategic competitive analysis should identify your competitors’ strengths so you can avoid them and expose their weaknesses so you can exploit them. 

But today’s competitive analysis focuses on identifying what works for your competitors so you can “reverse-engineer” their approach; it encourages you to compete head-to-head against your competitors’ strengths irrespective of your own strengths; and it functions as a springboard for homogeneity, not heterogeneity. Not to mention competitive analysis gets performed after you’ve already selected the tools for the job, not when it’s most useful: during strategy, when determining what tools to choose in the first place. 

“See what they post on Instagram, at what time, and who likes it so we can identify what resonates with our target patients.”

“See what websites backlink to theirs so we can get the same ones for our website and increase our search rankings.”

“See what content gets shared most often in our industry so we can develop our blog and social strategy.”

Stop right there.

Don’t use competitive analysis to ask how a doctor has amassed such a large Instagram following or ascended Google’s search rankings so that you can reverse-engineer their approach; use it to ask if you even have the time, resources, and capabilities to succeed with a certain strategy or tactic or channel to begin with. Use competitive analysis to find an opening, not a stake in the ground.

Forget what you think your competitors do well (you have no idea how their marketing impacts their bottom line). Instead, focus on what they’re not doing. 

The essence of sound marketing strategy is to define a set of openings and opportunities that both play to your strengths (not your competitors’) and allow you to stand out (not blend in).

If your competitor analysis doesn’t help you do both, save your money.