How To Use Airtable for Competitive Landscape Analysis
Taking your place on the market is a bit like trying to get a drink at a crowded bar. After your company grows to a certain point, you’re going to start rubbing elbows with other players. This is when your focus starts to shift from just making the best product you can to keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to. For that, you should build a competitive landscape analysis.
Read on to learn what a competitive landscape analysis is and how you can use Airtable to build your own.
What is a competitive landscape analysis?
A competitive landscape analysis is a business process used to analyze your competition. The end result of this process is a map or database that your organization can use as a reference when trying to differentiate your product from your competition. It can be useful for product teams planning out their roadmap or sales reps answering prospect questions.
When researching competitors in this way, you’ll typically pay particular attention to their mission, the way they price their service, as well as how similar or different their products are to yours. After you’ve performed this analysis, you’ll know what differentiates you from your competitors and how they’re different from one another.
What is Airtable?
Airtable is the all-in-one solution that aims to replace the spreadsheet once and for all. While Airtable’s bases look a lot like spreadsheets, they’re the building blocks for a low-code platform that’s incredibly flexible and powerful. People use Airtable in tons of ways, from storing data to building apps and managing entire projects.
At Unito, we use Airtable in a variety of ways. We use it for customer research, to catalog new features, as a database for marketing content, and more. It’s a flexible platform that effectively has replaced spreadsheets for all but the most diehard aficionados.
One of the ways we’ve used Airtable is to store our own competitive landscape analysis. Here’s how you can do the same.
Creating a competitive landscape analysis in Airtable
With Airtable, creating a base can be done in just a few clicks. Adding new fields is just as easy; right-click on any existing field and click Insert left or Insert right and a new field will appear there. As long as you get your fields right, adding in info about your competition can be done by just about anyone in a few minutes. You can also use Unito to integrate Airtable with other work management tools to streamline this process even further. Here are a few tips for building your own competitive landscape analysis in Airtable.
Choose your fields
While there are many ways you could build your own competitive landscape analysis, there are some general aspects you should definitely include. Note that our analysis is built from the perspective of a software company, so you might have to tailor your competitive landscape analysis to your industry.
- Name: You need to know who you’re talking about. A single line text field will do for this.
- Type: This will take a bit of research, but you’ll want to find a few categories you can use to classify your competition. This can help you highlight similarities and differences between them. For instance, Unito’s competitors could be qualified as workflow management platforms, automation solutions, or business process management solutions. You can use a multiple select field for this.
- Description: How do your competitors describe themselves? Just grab a few lines from their homepage or about us page and paste them into a long text field.
- Pricing model: Your customers care about how much they’ll pay for your service compared to the competition. A long text field will do fine here.
- Pricing metric: How do your competitors decide upon their pricing? Look for the pricing plans on their website and find the metric they’re using to justify a move up to a different plan. In our landscape, these metrics might be active users, number of actions, or number of integrations. A multiple select field is your best choice to track this.
- Threat score: This is a composite metric you can use when trying to decide which competitors you should be focusing on. Depending on your industry, the way you quantify this will vary. Some of it will be based on deep research, whereas other aspects may be nothing but a gut feeling. Unito’s own competitive landscape has several of these metrics, represented by a series of number fields in our Airtable. Some of these include funding, employee count, revenue, user count, importance, and more.
- Key stats and notes: Is there any additional information you want to add to your competitive landscape? With this long text field, you can grab important statistics from your competitor’s website — such as how many customers they have — or just leave notes for other people in your organization.
You don’t have to follow this list exactly, but this gives you a general idea of how you can use Airtable to create your own competitive landscape analysis. Start with these fields, experiment, and you might be surprised by what you can get out of Airtable.
Integrate your other tools for a free flow of information
Now what if you could take your competitive landscape analysis one step further? Imagine if you could automatically populate your Airtable base with information sourced from your project management tools?
With a workflow management solution like Unito, you can take advantage of the deepest integrations on the market to create workflows encompassing Airtable and your project management tool of choice. How?
Say you typically use a Trello board to coordinate work between your partner marketing team and your direct marketing team. In the course of their regular work, they identify new competitors, collecting information within the confines of their Trello board. Now say they want to make sure that information is collected somewhere. Usually, they’d have to jump into Airtable manually to update their competitive landscape analysis. But with Unito, all they need to do is slap a “competitor” label on the Trello card with the appropriate information. It will automatically be synced over to Airtable, filling out the associated fields without any input from them. And if any updates are made in Airtable, the Trello cards are also updated automatically.
And it doesn’t stop with Trello. Unito’s integrations include the top work management solutions on the market, including Asana, Jira, GitHub, ClickUp, and many more.
Want to see how this works? Find out how we used Unito to sync our competitive landscape analysis in Airtable to an Asana project.
All’s fair
There’s nothing wrong with a little competition. If you want to excel in your field, you need to have an idea of who’s competing for the same customers. Once your research is complete, you can use Airtable to create a competitive landscape analysis in a few minutes. Combine that with Unito, and you’ll have an automated analysis that everyone can contribute to without learning a whole new tool.