How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices

Perform PT Practice Competitive Analysis in Three Steps

Doing a competitive analysis gives you valuable business insight into what rival companies are doing in their PT practice. This positions you to copy what competitors are doing right as well as capitalize on what they’re not doing. Here’s how to do a competitive analysis of outside PT practices in three steps. We’ll walk you through how to identify your top competitors, how to analyze what they’re doing and how to apply your analysis for the benefit of your own business.

1. Identify Top Competitors

The first step toward a competitive analysis is to identify who your competitors are. You can use a number of resources and methods to collect intelligence on your competition:

• Ask your sales team to include discovery questions about which competitors prospects are using, and track the results
• Survey your customers about which competitors they’ve used or considered
• Use search results on keywords relevant to your market space to identify competitors
• Review what customers are saying about your industry on social media
• Read market research reports
• Study industry review sites

Use these tools to make a list of your top competitors. Once you’ve identified them, rank them in order of priority. You then can focus your analysis on your most important competitors.

2. Analyze

Once you’ve identified your competitors, the next step is to perform your analysis. You can use a number of tools to research competitors. These include:

• Competitors’ websites, including home pages, about pages, sales pages and blog content
• PT session booking processes
• Social media profiles, including content and comments from followers
• Google PPC advertising

Use these resources to help you answer questions about what your competitors are doing in key areas of their business. Important items to analyze include:

• Services: What PT services are your competitors offering?
• Products: Are your competitors offering any products along with their services?
• Pricing: What do your competitors charge for their services and products?
• Marketing and sales: What methods and language are your competitors using to position their brand, generate leads, book PT appointments, close sales, offer upsells and generate referrals?
• Customer service: What contact channels and procedures are your competitors using to deliver customer support, and what support issues do they appear to address most frequently?
• Technology: What technology tools are your competitors using on their website or in their practice?

Use these types of questions to help you organize your analysis of your competition. Feel free to substitute different questions or add additional questions which reflect your needs and the points of comparison you want to analyze. Applying a checklist of questions systematically to different competitors will help you compare rival brands and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each. You can store your answers in rows and columns in a spreadsheet to make it easier to compare brands.

3. Improve Your Practice Based on Your Analysis

The next step is to apply your analysis to improve your own practice. Review your own company using the same criteria you used to analyze your competitors:

• Services: What PT services do you offer?
• Products: Do you sell any products to go with your PT services?
• Marketing and sales: How are you positioning your brand, generating leads, booking PT appointments, closing sales, offering upsells and generating referrals?
• Customer service: What support channels, methods and frequent support issues characterize your customer service?
• Technology: What technology tools do you use on your website and in your practice?

Depending on your needs, you may wish to consider other areas of your business as well. After identifying what your company is doing in various areas, you can compare what you’re doing in each area with what your main competitors are doing. Consider several main themes in your comparison:

• What are you doing the same as your competitors?
• What are you doing better that distinguishes your brand?
• What are your competitors doing better that you could emulate?

Use items that distinguish your brand to position your company in your marketing material and highlight why customers should do business with you instead of competitors. Use items your competitors are doing better to inspire ways you could improve your brand. For example, if you notice one of your main competitors is generating a significant number of leads from blog content, you might review your content strategy to see how you could improve it. Once you've identified potential areas for exploitation or improvement, create an action plan. List and prioritize some actions you could take based on your analysis. Develop concrete plans and schedules for putting priority items into effect.

The Bottom Line

An effective analysis of your PT competitors starts with identifying your competitors using resources such as data from your sales team, customer feedback and online research. Once you know who your competitors are, you can analyze them by studying their website, booking process, social media profiles and Google advertising campaigns. This allows you to identify what they’re doing in areas such as PT services, marketing and sales, customer service and technology use. Copy what they’re doing right, while capitalizing on what they’re not doing. Use this approach to competitive analysis to give your PT practice an advantage in your market space. One way to gain an edge on your competition is by using superior technology. MWTherapy provides all-in-one physical therapy software for delivering efficiency, profitability, and compliance to outpatient physical therapy practices. Watch a live demo to see how it works and how it can give your PT practice a competitive advantage.