The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis for Language Schools
When you want to grow your business, you can’t ignore your competitive landscape. Whether you’re deciding on what courses to offer in your school, the pricing, or the marketing strategy, it is crucial to look around and find out what others in the industry are doing.
A competitive analysis allows you to figure out what are your strengths and areas to grow. It also helps you to learn from the mistakes of others and see which ideas work well in your industry and which are not worth the effort.
Simply knowing that your competition exists is not enough to help you make good business decisions. Of course, you don’t need to spend as much time on analyzing the market as million-dollar corporations, but a proper and thoughtful analysis is a must-have if you want to plan the long-term growth of your language school…
What is Competitive Analysis and Why Do You Need to Conduct it?
So, what is a competitive analysis exactly?
Competitive analysis means gathering important information about your competitors’ businesses such as their offer, pricing, or marketing strategy, and researching and understanding the current situation in the industry. The goal is to figure out how your language school looks compared to others and to identify areas in which you need to make improvements.
Here is why you should consider taking the time to do a competitive analysis for a school:
Researching your competitive landscape is a great source of valuable information to help you make decisions regarding your business. Whether you’re deciding on pricing for your language lessons, or maybe starting a course for a new language, you first need to know about the current educational market to estimate what will work well and what will set you up for failure.
Looking at other people’s marketing strategies and their results can save you a lot of time in working out why you’re not getting as many new students as you expected and what types of marketing methods work for the educational market. Thinking about your industry during your competitive analysis can inspire you to come up with new ideas by finding unutilized areas. That can be the one extra step that drives the success of your language school.
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis for Language Schools?
Competitive analysis definition centers around researching your competitors and your industry and that is the main task you need to start with.
Of course, its goal is to drive smart decision making but to conduct competitive analysis, first, you need to enter your super-spy mode and gather all the crucial information 😎
Here is a list of key things to look at in a competitive analysis:
1. What competitors do you have?
Identify what are other language schools in your area that are direct competition. Create a list. You can also find successful schools farther away from you – it can be an additional source of ideas. If you want to think more long-term, you can also check out your indirect competition, meaning substitutes that solve the same problem as your language courses. It could be things like online lessons, audio language courses, apps, books, etc.
2. What courses or products do they offer?
Find out what types of language courses they offer and what their ideal student is. Is there anything unique about their offer or a certain way their offer is planned out? What is the quality of their courses?
3. What type of sales tactic do they use?
Are they generating a lot of revenue? How do they sell their courses? Are they offering any discounts, free trials? Are they expanding their business (new locations, more courses)?
If you can’t find much online, maybe you can ask a student that considered their school before and ask them about the sales process.
4. What is the pricing?
Look at the prices on the competitor’s offer page, check if they had any discounts (was it a seasonal or a referral discount?), bonuses like free trials, loyalty programs, etc. It is crucial to find out where your pricing and quality sit compared to others and what types of perks boost sales.
5. Are there any additional costs or drawbacks?
Think about other things that may be a factor in choosing between offers of different schools. Maybe there’s an additional cost of commuting to a certain location or a necessity to buy expensive books. This can often be something overlooked that will sway people to choose one school more often.
6. How do they market their courses?
What forms do they use to talk about their school and courses? Are they writing blog posts, do they have an FAQ section, a video, photos? Do they have an ad campaign?
7. What is their content strategy?
How much content do they put out? Is it up to date and interesting? How high is the quality of the content? Do they have a quality graphic design?
8. What methods do they use?
Are they advertising their courses talking about a specific teaching method? Or maybe they conduct classes in a certain way? If there’s no info in the description, you can read customer reviews or even job offers to find out what their approach is.
9. How much engagement do they get?
What posts get likes or comments? Are the responses positive or negative?
10. How do they market their content?
Is it optimized for search engines? Are they using any particular keywords? Is their content shared by other people?
11. Do they have social media?
What platforms do they use? Do they post regularly, and do they write their own posts or just share from other sources? Please do not look at the number of their followers or overall engagement, as potential students more often than not use social platforms of language schools more as a place where they verify whether this school is for them or not – they rarely engage with content or decide to follow profiles of language schools.
12. Create a simplified SWOT analysis for them
What are their advantages? What are their weaknesses? Is there something that makes them stand out that you could implement in your school? Are they a threat to you? Write down important conclusions.
What are the Different Types of Competitive Analysis Techniques Available?
When talking about competitive analysis you can hear terms such as industry comparison and competitor comparison. But what exactly is the difference between an industry and a competitor analysis?
Industry analysis for language schools
Industry analysis focuses on the industry in a broad sense and the external and internal forces that shape it. What are the characteristics of this industry? Is there a lot of rivalry, is it a growing industry or is it threatened by substitute services? What are some current cultural or economic events that may influence it?
For industry analysis, you can use techniques such as Porter’s 5 Forces which gives an impression of the industry by focusing on describing its:
industry rivalry;
the threat caused by entrants;
bargaining power of the supplier;
bargaining power of the buyer;
the threat of substitute services or products.
Other industry analysis techniques include Broad Factor Analysis focusing on analyzing four external influences:
political,
social,
economic,
technological.
You can also use a well-known SWOT analysis to identify:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
for the industry as a whole.
It may seem a bit too broad for a small business such as a language school, but it can immensely help you! Maybe you realize that there’s a new cultural trend and suddenly offering Korean lessons will be a massive hit? Or maybe the current economic situation means you should scale down?
Competitor analysis for language schools
Competitor analysis on the other hand focuses on researching other companies and strategies they use. It helps to find out what works and what doesn’t, and it gives you ideas on what to improve.
For competitor analysis you can also follow the bullet point lists above or you can use techniques such as a SWOT analysis for individual competitors. If you like visuals, use perceptual mapping where you position your competitors as dots on a blank graph with two axis such as low to high price and low to high quality. Then you put your school on the map as well. It will help you visualize how your school looks compared to its competition.
How Does Industry-specific Competitor Comparison Help You Make Decisions Regarding Your School's Direction & Strategy?
Choosing the right competitor comparison strategy can help you make decisions about your language school in the future. Identifying what others in the industry are doing can show you where you fall short compared to others and how you can boost your sales.
Instead of applying a trial-and-error method, you can base your decisions on seeing what works for others and what will be a waste of time.
If you ever wondered how to do an industry-specific competitor comparison, now you have methods you can use to work out the competitive landscape of your local educational market.
Thinking about the industry as a whole can help you identify areas where you can grow, and where you should scale down in the future. It also helps you gain insight into the dynamic between companies and customers that can be helpful in thinking of new sales strategies.
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
Conclusion: How You Can Leverage Competitor's Strengths & Improve Your School's Mistakes and Areas of Strength
Finding out that your competitor’s social media strategy is a success doesn’t mean you should give up and cry!
When you finish your competitive analysis, you will see which tactics give results to others and which don’t work. And that can help you make up your mind on what elements of your marketing you should ditch and which you should develop even more.
If you see that a certain social media platform gives people great numbers, and they have high enrollment each year, maybe it’s time to get to work and take care of that platform you’ve been neglecting? 💪
The process of competitive analysis will give you the necessary insight into what’s going on around you and it will help you figure out what you want to include in your marketing strategy and what you definitely don’t want.
