When you’re planning a PR campaign, your ultimate goal is to drive brand awareness, grow your audience, and increase sales. But how do you know if your strategy will work? Competitive analysis is one of the most effective ways to answer that question and make sure your campaign is a success.

In a world where attention spans are shorter than ever before and consumers are bombarded with marketing messages every minute, it’s more important than ever for brands to stand out from the competition.

What is a competitive analysis in PR?

A competitive analysis is essentially a detailed look at the market to see how your company stacks up against the competition. It allows you to understand your competitor’s strategies and identify potential opportunities where you can differentiate yourself from them. 

By understanding who your competitors are and where they are strongest, you can focus on areas where you have an advantage, thus giving your PR strategy an edge over theirs. Let’s take a closer look at how competitive analysis benefits your PR campaign.

1. Helps to identify your unique selling point
Competitive analysis is an essential part of every marketing strategy, and it plays a critical role in defining your unique selling point. A benefit/feature that is only provided by you and not your competitors.

2. Know your competitors
Competitive analysis is also an important tool for understanding your competition. To do this effectively, it must be done in the context of all the other elements of your marketing mix. If you don’t understand how your competitors are competing with yours, then you will be unable to make any changes or improvements to improve your performance.

Related Read – Data Analytics in Public Relations

3. Finds out who your target audience is
It helps you to find out what makes your audience tick so that you can match the right message with the right audience. If your target audience doesn’t know what you’re doing, it is a clear signal that you need to start spending time on research.

4. Find what you hit and what you missed
 It helps you to understand what your competitors are doing and why they’re doing it. Learn from their mistakes and success. That future allows you to find out what works and what doesn’t for you, so that you can take the right action in order to achieve success.

Competitive analysis must be done on a regular basis so that you can stay on top of trends and changes in the marketplace. This keeps a constant eye on your competitors and ensures that you don’t fall behind them by simply being too busy focusing on the past rather than looking ahead at future trends.

School of Communications & Reputation (SCoRe) — India’s only institute dedicated to public relations education. Know more about our PG programme in public relations , and other activities we do to share public relations Knowledge: www.scoreindia.org