The world moves fast. And chances are, so does your competition.
What’s a team that wants to stay competitive to do? That’s right. You probably know what I’m about to say.
One of the best ways to know what your next best step should be is to work through a competitive analysis. This ensures that you are taking a holistic view of your market and the competitors in it.
To help you with this, check out the list of 10 free competitive analysis templates for Excel and ClickUp. These templates make it simple to track, compare, and learn from your competitors, giving you the edge you need to be the best. 🥇
But first, of course, let’s start with a clear definition.
- What is a Competitive Analysis Template?
- 10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates
- 1. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template
- 2. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Pricing Template
- 3. ClickUp Competitive Tracking Template
- 4. ClickUp Competitive Market Analysis Template
- 5. ClickUp SEO Competitor Analysis Template
- 6. ClickUp Comparison Matrix Template
- 7. ClickUp Product Features Matrix Template
- 8. ClickUp Comparative Market Template
- 9. Template.net Competitive Analysis Template Excel
- 10. SlideTeam PowerPoint Competitive Analysis Template
- Benefits of Using a detailed Competitive Analysis Template
What is a Competitive Analysis Template & Why use it?
A competitive analysis template is a ready-to-use document, spreadsheet, slide deck, or task list that’s designed to help you gather and analyze information about your competitors.
By looking at the different aspects of another business—like products, funding, market share, pricing, and marketing strategies—a competitive analysis template lets you record insightful information. These templates provide board members, leadership teams, or individual contributors with a sortable and easy-to-digest report on your competitors.
This valuable knowledge then helps you make better decisions and plan your own business strategies around your competition.
What makes a good competitive analysis template?
A good competitive analysis template is clear, easy to use, and comprehensive. It should include relevant categories and fields that allow you to collect and compare information and gather the pros and cons of your competitors.
A useful template should be adaptable to your specific industry and your target audience. It’s always a plus when your competitive analysis is visually appealing, though that’s not necessarily a requirement.
You do want to make sure your analysis is organized and that’s where a template saves you tons of time. Ultimately, a high-quality competitive analysis template lets you gain valuable insights into your competition and supports informed decision-making for your business’s growth and success.
10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates
Competitive analysis is valuable for businesses looking to get ahead in their industry and learn about their direct competitors. By using these free Excel and ClickUp templates, you’ll be on your way to understanding your competition and making smarter decisions that boost your business.
Here’s a list of some of our best competitive analysis templates to start using today.
1. Template.net Competitive Analysis Template Excel
This Excel-based template from Template.net offers a familiar and easily customizable format for teams looking to analyze their competition. By tracking competitors’ data in Excel, teams use built-in features like charts and pivot tables to visualize and analyze their findings.
A finance team might use this template to compare key financial metrics of competitors, such as revenue growth or profit margins. But that’s only one example—keep in mind that Excel is flexible.
2. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template for Social Media
Try out ClickUp’s Competitive Analysis Whiteboard Template! The elements can be freely added, modified, and positioned in this interactive view. Based on your set metric, each quadrant depicts how each element performs. It even includes a legend for each quadrant.
Use this comprehensive template to stay informed about their competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. It’s also possible to identify areas where teams excel and areas for improvement by tracking key metrics, such as market share and product offerings.
For example, the marketing team could use this template to compare social media engagement between competitors.
3. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Pricing Template
With two statuses and one view, this analysis template helps you investigate your main competitors to learn more about their goods, sales, and marketing strategies as a way to gain market share.
Use ClickUp’s Competitive Analysis Pricing Template to make data-driven decisions about your own pricing models, ensuring you remain competitive while maximizing profit. A retail business, for example, could monitor competitors’ discounts and promotions to optimize its own pricing strategy.
4. ClickUp Competitive Advantage Tracking Template
Track your competitor’s products!
With ClickUp’s Competitive Tracking Template, teams monitor competitors’ activities and progress over time. By staying up-to-date on competitors’ product launches, marketing campaigns, and customer feedback, adapting their strategies to stay ahead becomes that much easier.
Once you create it as a shared doc, the whole team is able to stay informed on what products are currently out there. For example, a software development team might track rival software updates to ensure their product is able to compete.
5. ClickUp Competitive Market Analysis Template
How well does your product measure up in the market? Try a competitor analysis complete with matrices that help you visualize where you stand in the market.
The Competitive Market Analysis Template is designed to help teams spot trends and use the information to come up with innovative products or services. A startup, for example, might use this template to identify an underserved customer segment and create a targeted offering. It’s also important to detail your direct and indirect competitors.
6. ClickUp SEO Competitor Analysis Template
Organically ranking in search engine results pages is one of the most cost-effective ways to gather leads, build brand awareness, and grow your market share!
Try ClickUp’s SEO Competitor Analysis Template out to improve your own SEO efforts and drive more organic traffic to your product website. A content marketing team could use this template to identify high-performing keywords and create engaging SEO-friendly content—giving you a competitive advantage.
This way, you ensure your keyword strategy is organized and you keep track of all of your content creation efforts in one place for all your SWOT analysis.
7. ClickUp Comparison Matrix Template
ClickUp’s Comparison Matrix Template enables teams to compare multiple competitors across various factors in a visually appealing matrix format for detailed SWOT analysis.
Maybe you need to compare multiple competitors across a handful of factors in a way that’s visually appealing and easy to digest. If so, the ClickUp Comparison Matrix is the perfect template for you.
Make informed strategic decisions by identifying competitor weaknesses. For example, a sales team might use this template to identify areas where their product outshines the competition, allowing them to emphasize those features during sales pitches.
Check out these product comparison templates!
8. ClickUp Product Features Matrix Template
This Product Features Matrix Template by ClickUp helps teams compare their products or services with those of their competitors. By highlighting key features, benefits, and pricing, teams can better understand their position in the market and make necessary adjustments.
A software company, for example, could use this template to compare the features and functionality of competing applications. This gives you a competitive advantage across your direct and indirect competitors so you better identify market trends.
If you’re looking for more examples, check out our list of the best Matrix templates!
9. ClickUp Comparative Market Template
ClickUp’s Comparative Market Analysis Template is designed to compare the performance of various products, services, or strategies against predetermined criteria for the ultimate competitor analysis.
Use this information to identify your competitive advantage and the most effective approaches and make data-driven decisions. A product development team could use this template to evaluate and compare prototype designs before selecting the final version.
Additionally, a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) template is helpful for tasks like determining a house’s value using recently sold, comparable properties.
10. SlideTeam PowerPoint Competitive Analysis Template
This PowerPoint competitive analysis template helps teams present their target market findings in a visually appealing and digestible format.
By transforming raw data into engaging presentations, teams communicate their insights with much more clarity. A management team, for example, could use this template to showcase the competitive landscape during a strategic planning meeting without spending hours in front of a computer creating a presentation from scratch.
Related: Balanced Scorecard Templates
Here’s Why Competitive Analysis is Crucial for your Business
What’s so great about running a competitive analysis as part of your greater business strategy?
You learn a lot more about your market
Competitor analysis helps teams understand their industry and target market better. This knowledge equips them with the information they need to come up with a strong plan of action.
For example—through a competitive analysis—a software company might identify trends in customer preferences, helping them align their product with the demands of the market. 🎯
It uncovers better opportunities for your business
By examining competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, teams uncover potential opportunities for growth and expansion. This process may reveal gaps in competitors’ offerings, which means you’ve just uncovered a chance to introduce a unique solution.
For instance, a fitness app developer could discover that rivals lack comprehensive nutrition tracking, thus deciding to incorporate this feature into their app and highlight it as a feature that sets them apart.
It can drive the quality of your products or business strategies
Teams analyzing competitors’ products and services refine their own offerings and set themselves apart. Why is this? Studying competitors enables them to identify best practices and innovative features. From there, it’s just a question of adding them to your own products.
A clothing retailer, for example, might observe that a competitor offers personalized style recommendations through a style quiz and decides to implement a similar experience to enhance their customers’ experience.
Knowing your competition’s strategies and tactics gives you an edge, no doubt. Gaining insights from competitive landscape templates allows teams to develop better strategies across multiple aspects of their business.
By understanding the competitive landscape, teams make more informed decisions on marketing, product development, pricing, and customer engagement. Strategies around customer engagement, sales and distribution, and even marketing and advertising are all improvable with a thorough competitive analysis.
You create more informed goals and benchmarks
With a competitive analysis template in tow, teams have an easier time benchmarking their performance against current market standards. The comparative nature of a competitive analysis allows teams to set realistic goals and measure progress against those goals.
As an example, a digital marketing agency could evaluate its competitors’ client retention rates and set targets to surpass them, ultimately driving business growth. 📈
Where is your brand positioning in relation to your competitors and your overall target audience? It’s a critical question that a competitive analysis helps you answer clearly. By understanding the unique selling points of competing brands, teams are able to emphasize their own strengths and develop a compelling brand identity.
For example, an eco-friendly cosmetic company could highlight its sustainable practices and natural ingredients to differentiate itself from rivals after finding out that no one else in the cosmetic industry is using this angle.
Anticipate Your Competitor’s Moves
Analyzing competitors helps teams anticipate their moves and stay ahead of the game. The thing about competitive analysis is that it helps teams uncover patterns and potential opportunities.
This helps teams prepare for potential challenges that may lie ahead, or it may inform how they’ll run their marketing campaigns for Q4. The main benefit of a competitive analysis lies in the seemingly endless possibilities in terms of what you can do with the data you uncover.
Let’s say you’re a marketing team at a beverage company. You notice a trend toward low-sugar alternatives and develop new product lines just in time for the holiday season, staying ahead of the competition.
Identify potential partnerships and collaborations
Who doesn’t love mutually beneficial relationships? Competitor analysis templates may reveal opportunities for collaboration with other companies in your industry.
A competitive analysis framework uncovers competitor strengths that complement your own. For instance, a tech startup specializing in AI-driven analytics could partner with a larger company offering complementary services like B2B data delivery, ultimately expanding its reach and improving its offerings. 🤝
Enhance The Customer Experience
By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, teams first have to identify areas of improvement to then be able to enhance the customer experience.
For example, a product team for a subscription box service might learn that competitors have more efficient shipping processes, prompting them to streamline their own logistics to ensure timely deliveries and satisfied customers.
Track Competitors with Competitive Analysis Templates
Competitive analysis is a crucial tool for any business looking to stay ahead of the game. By using one of these 10 templates, you get major insights into your competition and the market, allowing you to make more informed decisions about your own products and services.
There’s nothing more valuable than information about your direct competitors, so why not get tracking to get that competitive advantage?
Start identifying areas for improvement and growth, capitalize on new opportunities, and ultimately achieve greater success. So if you haven’t already, consider incorporating these competitive analysis templates into your business strategy—your bottom line will thank you.
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