7 steps to gain insights into your franchise competition

How often do you perform a competitive analysis of your franchise competition?

If the answer is "not often" or "never," your franchise business is missing out on valuable insights.

About 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies practice some form of competitive analysis regularly, and 84 percent of businesses say their market has become more competitive over the past three years, which makes sitting out the practice a riskier choice every year that passes.

A franchise competitive analysis is essentially a strategy where you identify your franchise competition and research their products or services, sales and marketing strategies. Of course, your analysis can be as simple or as complex as you need to satisfy your goals behind it.

For example, perhaps you're only interested in how your competitors are approaching the overall design and usability of their websites. Or, you want to evaluate a broader look at their overall digital marketing strategies.

It all depends on what you're hoping to discover with each analysis.

Researching your franchise competition can help you:

• Discover new trends
• Anticipate shifts in the market
• Find successful tactics
• Stay on the cutting edge within your industry

A true (and effective) competitive analysis is more than just surfing the social media accounts of your competition and subscribing to their email lists. The following are seven recommended steps you can take to start your first competitive analysis for your franchise as it relates to marketing specifically.

Step #1: Identify your competitors

You likely are already aware of your top two or three competitors. But if you're struggling to fill out a list of six to 12 for the most effective sampling in your competitive analysis, consider searching on Google, Amazon and/or even Alexa for products or services that are similar to yours.

Just make sure that the competitors you choose:

• Have a similar business premise
• Sell similar products or services
• Target similar audience demographics
• Range from well-established brands to newcomers in the market
• Are within a relevant geographical location as you (if you are a hyper-local franchise)

The more similar competitors you can find, the more relevant your analysis will be. It also helps to have a clear sense of your own target audience before you start, since that's what you're really comparing against each competitor.

Once you've identified your competitors, label them either "direct" or "indirect," where direct competitors offer a product or service that could pass as a similar substitute (like Coca-Cola and Pepsi) and indirect competitors offer products that are not the same but could satisfy the same customer need or solve the same problem (like Walmart and GNC).

This will help you weigh the insights and data you gather in your analysis. While direct competitors are a higher priority, you can still learn a ton from your indirect competition as well.

Step #2: Create a spreadsheet

Documentation is a must but can be organized in a very customized way, depending on your preferences. There are various tools and templates available online that can help get you started, or see 16 tools to make your competitive analysis easier if you'd rather not build a spreadsheet entirely by hand.

However, key pieces of information about your franchise competitors that you could include are:

• Target customers
• Main "claim to fame" (or market differentiator)
• Key features or benefits of their products or services
• Price points for their products or services
• Website features, which include the design, layout, search tools, imagery and so on
• Customer experience features, including how customers can check out, overall customer support, any mobile apps and so on
• Social media approach, such as the platforms used, posting frequency, overall engagement
• Content marketing tactics, such as blog and/or vlog topics, content types and so on
• Overall marketing tactics, such as the types of promotions being run, types of discounts (and their frequency) and so on
• Customer reviews
• Size of the franchise competitor, such as how many franchisee locations (nationally and/or locally)

Again, every franchise's competitive analysis can be different, depending on your goal. If certain information is simply not relevant, leave it out.

Step #3: Determine exactly what your competitors offer and at what price

It's important to understand the range of what is offered by your franchise competitors and at what price (and discount).

During your research, be sure to ask:

• What is their market share?
• Are they pricing differently for online versus brick-and-mortar?
• How are products and/or services distributed?

Because discounts can be at the heart of many marketing campaigns, do your best to nail down how often your franchise competitor runs sales and how much is discounted. On the flip side, rather than a discount, perhaps perks are thrown in from time to time. Either way, it helps to understand the different promos being offered to your potential customers.

Step #4: Evaluate your franchise competition's overall marketing efforts

Auditing the websites and social media profiles of your franchise competitors is one of the best ways to understand the scope of their marketing efforts.

Questions you should be asking:

• Do they publish a blog?
• Do they post videos or webinars?
• Are they offering premium content, such as whitepapers or eBooks?
• Do they have a podcast?
• What sort of visuals are they using? Stock photos? Infographics? Custom content? Something else?
• Do they have a FAQ section?
• What about a media kit or case studies?
• Any online or offline advertising campaigns running?
• What social media platforms are they using?
• How are they using social media? Are there different tactics being used on different platforms?
• How big are their social media followings?
• Are they responsive on social media?
• What coordinated campaigns can you find?
• Do they show up when you ask an AI tool like ChatGPT about businesses in your category?

The more you can understand the scope of their marketing practices, the better. But keep in mind that you'll never have an "insider perspective" of the overall strategy. However, the benefit of being the outsider is that you're likely only able to find what any other potential customer can find, and that's incredibly relevant. AI search visibility is worth checking too: a growing number of consumers now ask AI tools for local recommendations before they ever search Google, so it's worth noting whether your competitors show up there and you don't (or vice versa).

Step #5: Dig deeper into your competitors' franchise content strategy

Content is like the lifeblood of a marketing strategy. Your franchise competition could be posting a new video every day, but if the quality is lacking, it's simply not as impactful as it could be.

Take note of:

• How accurate the content is
• Any visible bylines (and whether those appear to be in-house or from contributors)
• Whether spelling or grammar errors can be found
• How in-depth the content is
• Any internal or external links being used
• Any images that are engaging or eye-catching
• Whether you can identify a singular tone that's being used. If so, what is it?
• If content is readable and/or skimmable (easy to digest)
• Specific keywords being used and how

For a deeper look at what strong content actually looks like so you have a real baseline for comparison, see our seven tips to level up your content marketing.

Step #6: Understand the level of engagement visible on your franchise competition's content

By getting a sense of the average number of comments, shares and likes (or reactions) on your franchise competition's content, you'll see if:

• Users respond better to certain topics
• The engagement actions are positive, negative or a mix
• Certain calls-to-action work better than others
• The images used help drive engagement

Of course, this research will largely focus on social media platforms, but be sure to check all published content for comment threads and so on. Our nine tips to improve social listening and gain customer insights cover this in more depth, and since the same tools work for tracking competitors as they do your own brand, it's worth setting up both at once. You can also use these 26 social media metrics as a checklist for what's worth comparing.

Step #7: Round out your franchise competitive analysis with a SWOT analysis concurrently

Yes, this basically means you're doing two analyses at once. But don't worry. A SWOT analysis is nothing more than a simplified look at your franchise competitor's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

In essence, your franchise competitive analysis will result in SWOT takeaways.

Questions to ask:

• What is your franchise competitor doing well? Any advantages over your franchise?
• Where is the weakest area for your competitor? What advantage does your franchise have over the competitor?
• What could your competitor do better with?
• In what areas is your competitor a threat?

You can keep this SWOT strictly to marketing strategies or expand to your franchise business operations at large. But the takeaways are something that you can then easily incorporate into your own digital marketing strategy moving forward.

See our Digital Marketing 101 to-do checklist that will help your franchise.

In conclusion

A proper franchise competitive analysis can take some time and effort, but the payoff in insights for your franchise can be huge.

Once you're ready to put those insights into action, see how they connect to your own performance data with how to evaluate your franchise marketing data.

Once you've executed your first franchise competitive analysis, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. In particular, we serve franchises just like you. Schedule your free demo with us today.