How to Do Competitor Analysis: A Complete Guide

When we were kids, competition meant racing to the top of the playground slide or being the first to solve a maths problem. It was straightforward: see what others are doing, then do it better or faster. But somewhere along the way, competitor analysis in business became a sterile, box-ticking exercise. Download a template. Fill in the same metrics everyone else tracks. Create a spreadsheet that gathers digital dust. Rinse and repeat quarterly.

Excuse us for being blunt, but if your market analysis consists of obsessively stalking competitors’ websites and social feeds, you’re actively limiting your growth potential…and wasting your time.

After helping hundreds of UK businesses with their digital strategies, we’ve watched too many smart marketers fall into the same trap. They perform diligent competitor analysis, gathering mountains of data about pricing structures, feature sets, and marketing channels. They create beautiful competitive profile examples with colour-coded tables and radar charts. Then they use all this intelligence to… become slightly better versions of their competitors.

That’s not a strategy. That’s imitation with a slight twist. The truth? The most powerful insights don’t come from understanding what your competitors are doing – they come from discovering what they’re missing entirely.

In this guide, we’re going to rip up the competitor analysis playbook and replace it with something much better. You’ll learn:

• Why the most valuable competitor research is happening in places your competitors aren’t even looking
• How to find “shadow competitors” that aren’t on your radar but should be
• The sentiment-mapping framework that shows emotional gaps in the market
• Predictive analysis methods that show where your industry is going, not just where it’s been
• When to deliberately ignore competitor data (yes, really)

This isn’t your standard SEO-friendly piece about SWOT analyses and Google Alerts. Put aside everything you think you know about how to do competitor analysis. By the time you finish reading, you’ll have a toolkit that doesn’t just help you compete, but enables you to make the competition completely irrelevant.

Let’s begin.

The blind spots most companies miss

Let’s start with a confession: we’ve spent countless hours reviewing clients’ competitor analysis reports, and the vast majority could be summarised as “here’s what you already knew, but with charts.”

The fundamental problem with conventional market analysis is that it’s backward-looking. You’re essentially studying what worked yesterday. But by the time you implement those strategies, the market has already moved on.

Think about it. When everyone in your industry uses the same competitor analysis techniques – examining the same websites, social platforms, and review sites – you all end up with virtually identical insights. It’s a recipe for strategic convergence, not differentiation.

We call this “competitor watching” – the business equivalent of keeping up with the Kardashians. It’s entertaining, sometimes informative, but rarely life-changing.

True market analysis is about finding the spaces between competitors, not just mapping where they are.

This is where the concept of “anti-positioning” comes in – a term coined by marketing strategist April Dunford. Instead of trying to position yourself against competitors’ strengths, you identify the gaps they’ve left open due to their current positioning choices.

Every positioning decision a competitor makes isn’t just a statement about what they are – it’s equally a statement about what they’re not. And those negative spaces are gold mines for strategic differentiation.

How to do competitor analysis through invisible intelligence

If you’re still relying on Google searches and social media stalking for your competitor research, you’re only seeing what your competitors want you to see. It’s like trying to understand a person by reading their carefully curated Instagram – you’ll get a sanitised highlight reel, not the full picture.

As we mentioned before, real competitive intelligence exists in the shadows, in places most businesses never think to look. Here’s how to access what we call “invisible intelligence.”

The customer complaint goldmine

When learning how to do competitor analysis effectively, start with this counterintuitive approach: collect and analyse the disappointments your competitors create.

Customer complaints are strategic treasure maps. Every time someone expresses frustration with a competitor, they’re highlighting a market opportunity that’s yours for the taking. But most businesses are too busy copying competitors’ strengths to notice these weakness patterns.

Some unconventional places to mine this intelligence:

• Reddit threads and industry forums (where people speak candidly)
• Customer service job reviews on Glassdoor (where employees reveal common complaints)
• App store reviews (particularly the 3-star ones, which tend to be most specific)
• Local business networking events (where candid conversations happen)
• Ex-employee LinkedIn posts (particularly those who’ve moved to non-competing industries)

The negative space method

Traditional competitor research focuses on what companies are doing. The Negative Space Method flips this by systematically identifying what they’re not doing – and why.

For every competitor action, ask: “What are they deliberately choosing NOT to do with this decision?” Some examples:

• If they’re highlighting speed, they might be sacrificing customisation
• If they’re emphasising premium quality, they’re likely creating price sensitivity
• If they’re targeting enterprise clients, they’re ignoring smaller businesses

This method reveals the strategic trade-offs your competitors have made, often unconsciously. These negative spaces represent potential blue oceans where competition is minimal.

Setting up your passive intelligence network

The best competitor analysis happens automatically. Here’s a mini-tutorial for setting up passive intelligence gathering to collect the data we mentioned above:

1. Create “competitor disappointment” Google Alerts using combinations of competitor names + terms like “disappointed,” “frustrated,” “issue,” “problem”.
2. Set up Mention.com filters (or similar tools) to track when competitors are mentioned alongside negative sentiment indicators.
3. Build a “Voice of Customer” Slack channel where your team can quickly share competitor insights from customer conversations.
4. Create an anonymous feedback form for your industry where people can share frustrations (promote it as “help us understand industry challenges”).
5. Join industry-specific communities where professionals share operational challenges.

This passive network delivers continuous competitive intelligence without the time-consuming manual research that traditional competitor analysis techniques require.

Advanced competitor research: The shadow competitor framework

While you’re obsessing over your direct competitors, your customers are quietly replacing you with businesses you’ve never even considered competition. Welcome to the world of shadow competitors – perhaps the most overlooked aspect of thorough competitor research.

What are shadow competitors?

Shadow competitors aren’t the businesses fighting for the same keywords or shelf space as you. They’re companies in completely different industries that solve the same fundamental customer need, just in a different way.

A few examples to illustrate:

• Netflix’s biggest competitor isn’t Disney+ – it’s TikTok (competing for entertainment time)
• Gyms aren’t competing with other gyms – they’re competing with home fitness apps
• B2B software companies aren’t just competing with similar solutions – they’re competing with spreadsheets and manual processes

Traditional competitor research misses these crucial players because they exist outside conventional industry boundaries. But customers don’t care about your industry classification – they care about getting their needs met.

Creating a shadow competitor matrix

To apply this thinking, you need a more sophisticated competitive profile example than the standard comparison chart. Here’s how to build a Shadow Competitor Matrix:

1. Identify core customer needs: Not just what you sell, but the fundamental need your product/service fulfills (e.g., not “accounting software” but “financial clarity and compliance”).
2. Map all solution types: List every way this need can be fulfilled, including DIY, outsourcing, or alternative approaches.
3. Identify representative companies: For each solution type, identify 1-2 companies that exemplify that approach.
4. Analyse experience differentiators: Instead of comparing features, compare how these companies create different experiences around the same need.

Let’s look at a competitive profile example for a local bakery:

This framework reveals that a bakery isn’t just competing with other baked goods sellers, but that it’s actively competing with anything that fulfills the same emotional and functional needs.

Borrowing cross-industry strategies

The real power of shadow competitor research comes from strategic borrowing. Once you’ve identified shadow competitors, you need to analyse:

• Their customer acquisition approaches
• Pricing and bundling strategies
• Loyalty and retention mechanisms
• Content and storytelling methods

Often, the most innovative ideas come from outside your industry. A B2B software company might learn more from how Peloton builds community than from what their direct competitors are doing.

Market analysis through sentiment mapping

As we’ve seen with our Negative Space Method and Shadow Competitor Framework, traditional competitor research often misses what matters most to customers. But there’s another critical dimension most businesses overlook entirely: emotions.

People don’t just buy products or services, they buy feelings. Your market analysis is incomplete if you’re only tracking features, pricing, and positioning while ignoring the emotional landscape of your industry.

Beyond rational comparison charts

Standard market analysis typically produces comparison charts of features, prices, and specifications. These tools assume customers make rational decisions based on objective criteria. But behavioural science tells us something different – people make emotional decisions and then justify them rationally.

This creates an opportunity for sophisticated competitor research that maps the emotional terrain of your market.

The emotional gap analysis methodology

Here’s how to conduct an Emotional Gap Analysis as part of your market analysis:

1. Gather emotional data: Collect reviews, social media comments, and customer service interactions for your competitors.
2. Identify emotional themes: What feelings do customers express when using these products/services? Look beyond satisfaction to more nuanced emotions like confidence, relief, belonging, excitement, or pride.
3. Map emotional journeys: How do these emotions change throughout the customer lifecycle? From discovery to purchase to usage to renewal?
4. Identify emotional gaps: Which positive emotions aren’t being generated by current market offerings? Which negative emotions are prevalent?
5. Design emotional solutions: How might you deliberately engineer your offering to create missing positive emotions or eliminate negative ones?

AI-powered sentiment analysis tools

Modern AI tools make this type of analysis far more practical than it would have been even a few years ago. Some accessible options include:

• MonkeyLearn’s Sentiment Analysis: Upload customer feedback and automatically categorise by emotion.
• Brandwatch Consumer Research: Track emotional patterns in social media conversations.
• Lexalytics:  Analyse sentiment patterns in reviews and feedback.
• Google Cloud Natural Language API: Extract emotional sentiment from large text datasets.

These tools can process thousands of customer interactions to reveal patterns human analysts might miss.

Turning sentiment into strategy: A practical example

Let’s look at a garden centre. In this example, they applied this emotional gap analysis to their business. Then, their competitor research revealed something interesting that backed up their anti-positioning approach.

Customers were happy with products from traditional garden centres, but the key emotional themes were:

• Uncertainty about whether purchases would work
• Intimidation about gardening
• Guilt about dead or failed plants
• Frustration with conflicting advice

By mapping this emotional landscape, they found no competitor was addressing these negative emotions. Their solution was about deliberately engineering emotional outcomes, not just about repositioning their products.

So, they created:

• “Plant Guarantee” program to reduce uncertainty
• “Garden Confidence” workshops to overcome intimidation
• “Plant Rescue” clinics to address guilt
• “Straight Talk” garden advice to reduce frustration

This emotional market research created differentiation was far more powerful than any feature comparison would have done.

Which brings us to the point; if you understand what your competitors make your customers feel – not just what they make them think – you can find entirely new areas of competitive advantage.

As we move on to predictive techniques, remember these emotional patterns often signal where markets are heading before rational analysis can spot the trends.

Future-focused competitor analysis techniques

Most competitor analysis methods look at the present or past, but smart businesses are developing ways to predict their competitors’ future moves. After all, knowing where your competition is going gives you time to counter their move, or go in a completely different direction.

Reading tomorrow’s news today

The most telling signs of a competitor’s future direction rarely come from their marketing materials. Look at these overlooked indicators instead:

• Job postings: Jobs reveal strategic priorities before they’re announced publicly. A sudden influx of data science roles? They’re building AI. Hiring logistics people? Expect supply chain innovations.
• Investment patterns: Follow funding, acquisitions, and capital spending. Companies spend money on their future, not their past.
• Patent filings: For product-based businesses, patent applications telegraph innovation directions 1-3 years before market launch. The UK Intellectual Property Office’s patent database is a goldmine for competitive intelligence.
• Executive movements: When a competitor poaches an executive with specific expertise, it signals upcoming strategic emphasis in that area.
• Developer resources: Check competitor API documentation and developer portals for signs of future integration priorities and platform strategies.

Building a competitive trajectory map

To turn these signals into action, create a Competitive Trajectory Map:

1. List your competitors (including shadow competitors from above).
2. For each, list 3-5 recent strategic signals from above.
3. Plot these on a timeline, note acceleration or deceleration of activity.
4. Identify convergence where multiple competitors are moving in the same direction.
5. Most importantly, spot the “white space” – where no competitor is moving.

UK-specific intelligence resources

For UK businesses, there are many resources that provide really valuable competitive intelligence:

• Companies House – Beyond the basics, their digital records show director changes, financial health scores and restructuring plans.
• UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – Tracks grant funding to businesses, often revealing early-stage R&D plans.
• London Stock Exchange RNS – Regulatory announcements sometimes include forward-looking statements on strategy.
• Beauhurst – Tracks UK high-growth company investments and acquisitions.
• Tech Nation Reports – Sector specific growth and investment trends.
• Beauhurst – Tracks UK high-growth company investments and acquisitions.
• Tech Nation Reports – Sector specific growth and investment trends.

Rediscovering the joy of competition

Remember when we started this guide? As kids, competition was wonderful – full of surprises and possibilities. But somewhere along the way, market analysis became a boring spreadsheet exercise instead of a source of inspiration.

The unconventional methods we’ve shared – from anti-positioning to shadow competitor frameworks, from sentiment mapping to predictive trajectory analysis – all have one thing in common: they bring back the thrill of real competition by showing you what others miss.

Sometimes, the most strategic move is to ignore competitor data altogether. When you’ve found a real market gap through these methods, have the guts to go towards it even when conventional competitor profile examples would tell you not to.

The best competitive strategy is about understanding the playground so well you can see the empty swing while everyone else is queuing for the slide.

Ready to put these into action? Start by understanding where your business is at. Our free SEO audit looks at over 100 key factors across five categories that impact your visibility and competitive positioning. It’s the perfect first step to implementing the market analysis strategies we’ve talked about. Until then, what playground rule will you break next?