How can product operations conduct competitive product research and analysis?

When it comes to competitor research, I think most people will think of product managers first, and they also think that this is something that should be done when a product project is established. In fact, this is not the case. In order to keep the team sensitive and vigilant to the market, what actions competitors have taken and what changes have taken place in the market should not only be the boss's concern.

Knowing yourself and your enemy will ensure victory in every battle. The team should develop the habit of holding regular competitive meetings, and actively collect, share and learn about regularly tracked competitors and currently popular and distinctive non-competitive products. For example, the gaming industry has a strategic department that regularly shares the pros and cons and trends of mainstream games in the market. Subordinate departments also hold their own seminars on a monthly basis to keep learning about and paying attention to direct competitors.

Product managers do competitive analysis in order to provide ideas and directions when making product plans; the same is true for product operations. We often talk about product functions and operations plans. Don't just make decisions based on your own ideas or just look for cases to learn from. You may think you have saved time and money, but later you may find that online users don't buy it and you will have to redo the work sooner or later.

Have feelings for your products. First of all, before doing anything that has an impact on the product or something big, we should have the following thoughts: we need to research direct competitors, and secondly, we should also conduct backup research on non-competitive but excellent products in the market (backup research) - find out the advantages and disadvantages - think about what we should do - propose solutions - team storming discussion - summarize the results and problems at the meeting - research again and propose a complete solution - team discussion to keep information consistent - make a scheduling plan.

When you encounter work problems and lack experience or inspiration, you can answer them yourself through research and analysis. This does not necessarily have to be research on the product, it can be new media, activities, activeness, etc.

Before I wrote this article, I also searched for keywords such as operational research and analysis, but there were very few corresponding results; indeed, most of them are still based on product research ideas; I don’t know how everyone digests the process from generating ideas to implementing plans in daily operations. This time, I will briefly review and share my own experience. It may not be systematic, but I hope it will be inspiring to you.

1. Team competition and individual competition

Competitive adjustments can be large or small. As a team, we need to track competitors regularly. One type is daily dynamics, such as publishing PR articles, organizing membership activities, etc., which are relatively trivial. After following up, we can communicate and discuss in the group.

One is to output competitive adjustment PPT on a monthly basis, study and predict the recent operational or product actions of direct competitors in the market; grasp market dynamics to facilitate timely adjustment of product follow-up.

Personally speaking, because of the tasks assigned by superiors or operational requirements, we need to conduct research on a certain topic, which may be how to monetize, how to run a public account, how to do Double 11 activities, etc.; then we need to conduct research and analysis in this direction and collect ideas and inspiration.

The team regularly operates competitive topics

There are countless cases and handouts on the Internet about competitive product analysis for product managers, but it basically includes five levels: strategy level - scope level - structure level - framework level - presentation level; the specific content, analysis methods and models are not described in detail here.

Products analyze the market status and competitive functions, while operations focus on the content side, such as channel layer-content layer-activity layer-user layer-business layer, etc.; secondly, operational competition does not have good methods and model frameworks like products, and operations are more inclined to collect-refine-think and summarize.

Channel operation.

This includes the app market and online promotion. You need to have a certain basic understanding of the app market's online channels, rankings, download evaluations, keywords, etc., and the channels, materials, descriptions covered by online promotion. Part of the content included here can be borrowed from a third-party data platform, while part of it requires subjective manual collection.

How do competitors attract users externally? We all know that the most obvious way is advertising promotion, but I think many products will try to attract traffic from both inside and outside. For example, our products, in addition to product-guided sharing invitations, may also involve external cooperation with guilds, player groups, other industries, anchors, personal websites, etc. For research that requires a little effort, try to involve as many people as possible.

Content operation.

It includes official channels and self-media channels. Official channels include WeChat official accounts, Zhihu, Weibo and other platforms, the types and functions of published articles, layout settings, etc. We-media channels such as Sohu, Baijia, NetEase, Toutiao, etc., including new traffic platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, also need to be tracked to see if competitors are trying to follow up; one part is to check the topics they have released and included, and the other part is to follow up on industry information and combine it with my own use.

The content layer is actually all official channels. The division here is my personal subjective. I generally define official channels as the release of product updates, event notifications, industry information, etc. Self-media channels mostly publish PR manuscripts, event promotions, hot spot integration and other content. Sorting out definitions in this way facilitates internal collaboration on responsibilities.

Event operations.

As I mentioned in my previous article, I divide activities into product activities and marketing activities. Product activities are a series of guiding and task-based activities carried out by product-bound operations. For example, to guide new users to register, we often have red envelope rewards, and to guide users to be active, we often have sign-in and punch-in to give benefits. For example, to guide user growth, we often have newbie tasks, growth tasks, etc. These are all done in conjunction with the product, solidifying the activities into a certain process or function of the product, so I call them product activities.

There is no need to say much about marketing activities. Common ones include holiday activities, short-term activities, anniversary activities, etc. These two parts of research and collection are: one is to see what kind of operational system construction the competitors have done to guide product user conversion, and the other is to collect marketing activities of competitors. Good UI design, event themes, and process planning can all be stored in the operational case library for reference in subsequent operations.

User operation.

We certainly don’t know how competitors classify and operate their users on the back end, but through the product and external content, we can evaluate which group or market users the competitors mainly attract or serve, who are in the first tier and who are in the second tier; we also need to do some research and analysis on how to extend or layout commercially.

Secondly, as mentioned above, internally, the operational actions that guide the user life cycle include some product operation functions or system construction combined with activities, and some are in-site messages, SMS PLUSH, etc., which also require research and analysis.

Commercial operations.

This part mainly investigates competitors' revenue models, such as membership payment division, number and location of advertising spots; it also includes some business extensions, such as game accelerators; in addition to charging according to the traditional membership system, many products currently also involve router hardware, Internet cafe CPS cooperation, etc.

Generally speaking, my operational competition includes the above directions, and some content may overlap with product competition. Although product operation is inseparable, everyone’s focus and ideas are different. If you only rely on a product competition analysis, the above content may be mentioned but may not be deeply touched.

From an operational perspective, it is still necessary to take it out separately for vertical research. Don't worry about whether it is a system or lacks data support. You are not a professional third-party research organization. As long as you sort it out clearly once, it is equivalent to an overhead view. Whether you can see it clearly or not depends on your cognition.

2. Personal Task-based Competition Theme

In our daily work, we often receive some research tasks assigned by our superiors due to business needs; or because of our own work, we need to conduct research on some content that we are not familiar with or have a foundation in but lack further knowledge.

Based on our functional division of labor, the content of the research tasks will be more concrete and targeted. For example, if you are a new media operator and your product needs to build a public account or you are required to write a plan for the construction of a public account, you certainly won’t start writing while racking your brains; you must first look at what your competitors do and what the excellent public accounts you already know do - secondly, sort out their public account structure to see the logic - and finally come up with an idea or thought about what we can do.

For example, the competitive content may involve the menu bar function layout, public account introduction, guiding words, article reading volume and user preferences, public account traffic generation activities, etc.

For example, the product anniversary is coming soon, and your superior arranges you to investigate an H5 activity with the theme of guiding users' emotions to generate the effect of forwarding and sharing. There are many materials of such cases on the Internet, so you can collect several cases that you think are excellent, experience them from beginning to end and record every step; such as theme style, content guidance, presentation form, interactive design, title and copy description, picture matching specification setting, etc. Like the QQ 20th anniversary celebration that has been all over the screen recently, the team can also do a small disassembly analysis and put it into the operation case library~

Of course, if you really want to start the research, you must first sort out a framework for the analysis process, and then disassemble the modules in the framework one by one. Like the public account competition above, the order of analysis is public account positioning analysis, menu bar construction, content editing, and event dissemination. H5 may include activity theme, process logic, UI design, copywriting packaging, content emotion, sharing closed loop, etc.

Sort vertically from easy to difficult or from framework to details. Of course, in the first step, we need to cast a wide net to collect content, and then quickly eliminate competitors/cases with only basic operations or rough designs, and focus all our energy and time on a few competitor cases to help speed up our analysis efficiency.

Finally, when writing the above two types of competitive product analysis reports, I suggest using PPT to present them. First, it is clearer and more intuitive. Second, it can exercise your framework thinking, because you have to focus on screening the screenshots and information you collected and controlling the number of pages. This is another thinking question. Secondly, if the analysis framework is not done well at the beginning of writing the PPT, the PPT content will be scattered and fail to grasp the main idea, and it will be more difficult to produce it.

I think the style of PPT accounts for a very small proportion. If it is biased towards internal discussion, there is no need to worry about it; if it is a report to senior management or the boss, you can ask the UI designer to help make a version.

Regardless of whether your task is to research direct, indirect, potential competitors or outstanding market cases, its purpose is to guide the direction and ideas of your next work, that is, the purpose of competitive product analysis: who is doing it - how to do it - how well it is done - what do we have - self-answers that can be done this way.

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Author: Mao Li

Source: Operational Growth