Summary
How to Do Competitive Landscape Analysis to Dominate a Local Market?
In local business marketing, competitive landscape analysis is a systematic deep dive that helps you identify and evaluate the most relevant competitors, what sales and marketing strategies they utilize, the scope and size of their digital marketing practices, and their industry positioning.
Key Areas of Analysis:
- Digital Footprint Mapping: Examines competitor websites, social media engagement, content strategies, SEM practices, and online reviews.
- SWOT Analysis: A structured approach to understand client strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to competitors.
- Competitive Layers: Covers direct competitors, indirect competitors, and future disruptors in the local market.
By leveraging competitive insights into marketing strategies, such as digital footprint mapping, social media engagement, SEO practices, and customer loyalty efforts, among others, agencies can develop tailored strategies that resonate with prospects and drive growth.
Navigating Local Business Marketing With Competitive Landscape Analysis
Ever had a client ask why their competitor’s parking lot is always full while theirs sits empty?
Here’s the hard truth. The difference between thriving local businesses and those that struggle often comes down to one thing: how well they and you, as a digital marketing agency, understand their competition.
While a large number of businesses still rely on gut feelings to make strategic decisions, market leaders are silently mapping their competitors’ every move, spotting gaps, and seizing golden opportunities before anyone else notices them.
So basically, understanding the competitive landscape analysis within the context of local business competition is essential for salespeople at digital marketing agencies. Here’s what top-performing agencies know: the difference between a signed contract and a “let me think about it” often hinges on one critical skill—your ability to dissect and articulate a prospect’s competitive landscape. When our team analyzed over a thousand successful agency pitches, we discovered that digital consultants who led with competitive insights had a much higher close rate than those who opened with generic marketing promises.
In this deep dive, we’re pulling back the curtain on how the most successful agencies recast standard competitor analysis into a powerful sales weapon. You’ll learn how to go beyond surface-level competitor research to attain deep market intelligence.
What Is Competitive Landscape Analysis in Marketing?
By definition, competitive landscape analysis is a core component of market analysis. It involves identifying and examining the strengths and weaknesses of business rivals within a specific domain. In simple terms, it’s about understanding what the competition is doing correctly, where they’re deficient, and discovering opportunities to gain an advantage.
When applied to local business marketing, it means understanding who the direct and most relevant competitors are, what sales and marketing strategies they utilize, the scope and size of their digital marketing practices, and their industry positioning. It’s a systematic deep dive that uncovers everything from a competitor’s Google Business Profile optimization to their keyword and advertising strategies, customer loyalty tactics, pricing strategies, and even their blind spots that your prospect could exploit.
Here’s what separates amateur competition research from professional landscape analysis: while most salespeople focus on obvious competitors, top performers are analyzing three crucial layers:
Armed with this knowledge, businesses can develop more compelling competition strategies designed to neutralize the competition and capitalize on their shortcomings and gaps.
How to Do Competitive Landscape Analysis?
Ever wonder how top agencies walk into pitch meetings and leave business owners thinking, “How do they know our market better than we do?”
While average agencies are building cookie-cutter marketing plans, the elite ones are executing competitive analysis with military precision. Let’s crack open their playbook.
1. Determining Competitors
Your real competitors aren’t always who you think they are.
While most business owners can name their three obvious competitors, they’re often blind to the real threats stealing their market share. True competitive identification goes beyond listing similar businesses.
The game-changing approach that separates the smartest agencies from the pack is their ability to track competitors based on multiple factors other than just business categories. They’re analyzing these three key dimensions among others:
This thorough tracking reveals hidden threats and opportunities that basic competitor lists miss, for example, how that high-end gym isn’t just competing with other gyms but with home fitness equipment, digital workout platforms, and even wellness apps.
2. Digital Footprint Mapping
Gone are the days when checking competitor websites was enough. Modern competitive analysis starts with a comprehensive digital intelligence sweep. Think of it as creating a heat map of your client’s market’s entire online presence. This should cover:
Marketing leaders are tracking how competitors show up across Local Business Listing sites, analyzing their search visibility patterns, paying close attention to their advertising and content strategies, and monitoring their digital engagement.
Which Tool Best Measures the Competitive Landscape of a Particular Business?
BuzzBoard, a leading AI-powered marketing and sales assistant, has made all of it a lot easier for you!
BuzzBoard Ignite assists agencies by enabling efficient and best-matched competitor analysis for their clients. BuzzBoard has its own matching algorithm to surface competitors based on physical proximity to your client’s business, its service offerings, business operations, and digital maturity.
The tool also allows users to find competitors by leveraging Google’s organic search results (SERP) directly within its platform. You can specify search criteria, such as location, keywords, or business categories, to find relevant competitors directly inside BuzzBoard Ignite’s environment. Google’s organic search reflects competitors who are currently optimizing their visibility for local customers, unlike other competitor sources such as directories, review sites, and other paid tools that can quickly become outdated. After reviewing the search results, users can decide on the competitors to review and compare against using BuzzBoard’s powerful profile building and further analysis capabilities.
3. Marketing Experience Deep Dive
Here’s what separates top agencies: they don’t just track what competitors are doing, they track what they’re failing to do. One of the most widely used and effective frameworks for competitive landscaping is the SWOT analysis. The framework offers businesses or agencies serving those businesses a structured, comprehensive approach to understanding their position within a local market. By identifying internal strengths and weaknesses and assessing external opportunities and threats, businesses and their partner agencies can develop focused, impactful marketing strategies grounded in real-world dynamics. This clarity is invaluable, particularly in competitive local landscapes, where even small differentiators can create a lasting advantage.
When applied to key strategic aspects—such as website performance, social media engagement, content strategy, SEM, and paid ads—SWOT reveals where a business stands in relation to its competitors and highlights quick-win opportunities. For instance, evaluating a website’s performance can reveal its searchability, user experience, and speed in comparison to local rivals, helping a business understand its digital strengths and any gaps to bridge. Similarly, analyzing social media presence provides insight into engagement levels and platform effectiveness, pinpointing areas where a business can capture more audience attention.
Through SEM and paid ad evaluation within a SWOT, a business can spot where competitors are focusing their advertising dollars and identify keyword opportunities to refine targeting and enhance ad performance. Understanding the technology stack of competitors also sheds light on potential efficiencies and innovation opportunities that a business may be missing.
Furthermore, evaluating eCommerce readiness, app presence, and community engagement levels allows for a precise view of how accessible, mobile-friendly, and community-oriented the competitive landscape is.
Altogether, SWOT performed with these essential attributes offers a vivid picture of a business’s marketing maturity in the local landscape. It reveals precisely where to leverage strengths, where improvements are essential, and where market opportunities can be seized. With these insights, marketing agencies can craft a competitive, adaptive, and high-impact marketing strategy that addresses current market realities for the local business.
You see, the best marketers never let slip the chance to make sense of valuable insights; they analyze the client’s current marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement. And the best part is, you don’t have to spend hours preparing for that!
BuzzBoard’s auto-generated SWOT analysis tool is fast and user-friendly, and it’s designed for trusted advisors like you! This business need discovery tool automatically generates product recommendations for your prospects that match your offerings to their needs and pain points. Produce and share with your prospects compelling SWOT analysis reports that move the conversation toward closing while adding rich competitor insights to create a powerful story.
Below is an example of local competitive analysis:
The most flourishing digital marketing agencies build the best-possible panoramic map of the customer journey.
The key differentiator? While other agencies lead with standard solutions, the best agencies deliver actionable intelligence that makes their firm indispensable. In other words, they collect data and spot patterns that reveal market opportunities. When you walk into a pitch meeting with this level of analysis, you’re a step ahead of selling marketing services—you’re offering a competitive advantage that makes your services essential.
What Are the Key Factors to Consider When Conducting an In-Depth Competitive Analysis?
You’ve learned the basics of conducting a competitive analysis, but that’s just the beginning. A truly effective analysis goes deeper, examining a range of critical factors that can shape the insights you gain. To make your competitive analysis as impactful as possible, you need to look beyond the surface and consider each element carefully. Let’s explore these essential factors to ensure your analysis is both sharp and insightful.
Now that you understand that your clients aren’t just fighting for market share but for survival, by mastering competitive landscape analysis, you can map out the battlefield, spot hidden opportunities, and guide your clients to market leadership. So, the next time a client wonders why their competitor’s parking lot is full, you’ll be ready to show them exactly why—and, more importantly, how they can change the game.
