In business, you need to keep a close pulse on your competitors to identify how they capitalize on different parts of the market. Knowing your competition will give you insight into how successful competitors are positioning themselves to your patients which can teach you how you can improve your optometric practice  and marketing strategy to see more patients and make more money.

This post talks about a few ways that your practice can develop competitive analysis to grow your practice.

3 Steps for Creating an Optometric Practice Competitor Analysis

Identify Competitors

When getting started, the first thing you’re going to want to do is look at your practice and the competitors in your marketplace. You want to look at your primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors. Your primary competitors are your direct competitors. The secondary competitors are practices or companies that may offer similar products or services, but either sell different frame lines or speacialty services. And, tertiary competitors are businesses that have products or services that work with your practice.

For example, if you’re a privately run practice, your three levels of competitors could look like this:

• Primary: Other private ODs in your community
• Second: Corporate OD practices
• Tertiary: Online retailers

By looking at your primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors you will be in a better situation to deliver more strategic messaging that may attract patients to your practice over your competitors.

Investigate

Now that you know who your competitors are, you can begin to examine the companies and practices that you compete with. Fortunately for you, you can learn a lot about your competitors online.

When investigating your competitors you can find information from:

• Company Websites: Look at their “about me” page, identify if the competitor specializes in anything, and try to find if they have any promotional deals.
• Review Sites: Online review sites provide a lot of information about the strengths and weaknesses of a company. Look at your competitor’s ratings and customer comments on review sites regularly to find strengths and weaknesses.
• Social Media: Looking at the competitor’s social media profiles can give you insight into how much traction they have (looking at followers or likes), any promotions they’re offering, and what their customers think of the practice.

Document

After identifying this information, it’s important to document your findings to make it easier to track your competitors over time and identify any common trends between them. BigCommerce offers a free, downloadable Competitive Analysis Template spreadsheet that you can use to track your competition.

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