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Have you ever been playing a game with your loved ones and you have to look around to suss out the competition?
Whether you currently own or you’ re looking to start your own business, you need to do the same thing.

A competitive analysis will help you identify your competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you’ ll learn your place in the market, how to differentiate yourself from your competition, and how to improve on their processes.
Below, let’ s learn what a competitive matrix is, and review some templates and examples.

Before you dive into the world of competitive matrices, it’ s important to understand that there are different types that you can use to compare your company to your competitors:

Features and benefits analysis
SWOT analysis
Competitive strategic overview
Content marketing strategies
Review tracking

Essentially, you can use a competitive matrix to compare any characteristics of your company with a competitor.
Sometimes these matrices will be more visual in nature (a plotted graph), but sometimes it’ s just an excel doc with the information listed in columns.
The goal of the competitive matrix is to be able to see at a glance the competitive landscape and your position in the marketplace. This will help you see gaps in the marketplace and hone in on your unique value proposition.
Perhaps, after looking at a competitive matrix, you brainstorm new product ideas, or new tools or features that you hadn’ t considered before. Or maybe you come out of it with a ton of ideas on how to improve your content marketing strategy.
Regardless, you can use a competitive matrix for a lot of reasons. You can use it to develop new ideas, or you can use it to train sales staff on how to differentiate your company from the competition.
After figuring out what you’ re going to do with the information, make sure you write down your ideas, develop KPIs, and regularly conduct this analysis so you can stay up to date with your strategy.
Now that you know what a competitive matrix is and how to use one, let’s review some templates that you can use for your own strategy.

Competitive Matrix Templates
1. Two-Feature Competitive Landscape Chart
One type of competitive matrix you can do is a simple comparison of features. You can use this information to plot where your company is compared to competitors.
The features could be something like price or customization potential. Then, you’ d place the logos of each company (including yours) on the graph depending on how well a company executes a certain feature. The point of this matrix is to visualize who does what better, so you can see what you have to work on and how to differentiate yourself against the competition.

Download this Template
2. Content Marketing Analysis Template
As a content marketer, this is my favorite template. With this template, you can compare social media followers, blog strategy, email strategy, SEO, etc. This will help you decide where you need to focus your content strategy — should you place an emphasis on Twitter, rather than Facebook? If you download this template, it also includes a graph and more strategies to analyze.

Download this Template
3. SWOT Analysis Template
A basic competitive matrix is the SWOT analysis. Conducting a SWOT analysis will help you identify areas where you could improve. You should conduct a SWOT analysis for yourself, but also for your competition. Knowing what weaknesses your competition has will help your sales reps and help you make improvements in those areas.

Download this Template
4. Review Tracker
A review tracker matrix will help you see at a glance the types of reviews you get versus your competitors. It’ s important not to forget about reviews because they can have a big impact on a business. With this template, you can also use a scoring system to normalize the averages.

Download this Template
After reviewing those templates, it’ s time to see what a competitive matrix looks like in action. Let’ s see some examples below.
Competitive Matrix Examples
1. HubSpot

This is a public HubSpot competitive matrix comparing the overall pricing of our CRM versus Salesforce. This is a standard matrix that’s meant to help people see the difference between the CRMs at a glance.

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2. SugarSync

This is a great example of what a feature matrix might look like. SugarSync compares its feature offerings against the competition in an easy-to-understand visualization.

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3. 360iResearch

In this example, 360iResearch reports on survey management software. This is a plotted graph showing which companies have the best product satisfaction and business strategy.

Image Source
Competitive matrices are great tools to help you uncover how you’ re different from your competitors. You can learn your unique value proposition and identify areas for improvement.

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Coffee and donuts. Sonny and Cher. Sherlock and Watson. 
The most legendary teams are great individually, but truly magnificent together.
That holds true for some of the world’s most powerful, most popular business technologies, too. Campaign Monitor’s flexible, intuitive email marketing platform is a potent marketing tool on its own. But when we join forces with the legendary Salesforce CRM, together we become an unstoppable revenue-generating machine.
This is no ordinary martech pairing. The Campaign Monitor + Salesforce integration is the highest rated ESP on the AppExchange.
Campaign Monitor for Salesforce is easy, fast and seamless to integrate. It has enabled us to really reach out and get to know our clients. The customer service is brilliant; it’s responsive, helpful and personal, by people who really know their product and care about their customers.
– Paul Easto, CEO Wilderness Scotland & Wilderness Ireland
The Salesforce email integration dovetails the platforms seamlessly, helping you save time, send more relevant campaigns, track success more meticulously, and drive greater ROI. Watch this video to see just a few of the ways you can start taking advantage of it right away.
Watch the email integration in action

If you already use both these tools, here are some great ways to translate the Salesforce integration into tangible benefits for your email strategy. And if not, consider it a list of reasons to consider taking on two of the most trusted, effective customer engagement tools on the planet.
Design and build out email campaigns directly from Salesforce
As your technology stack broadens, it becomes tedious and even confusing to constantly jump between a growing list of marketing, sales, and operations platforms. The Campaign Monitor for Salesforce email integration streamlines your process, allowing you to orchestrate and execute your email strategy without having to leave your Salesforce instance.
You can even directly access our library of scientifically designed, mobile-ready templates, and modify them with our intuitive drag-and-drop builder. It’s all in one place, so you save time and keep your workflow simple.

Automate data management and synchronization
Integrating your customer and marketing data systems means you can spend more time being creative and analytical, and less time wrestling with technology and performing menial transfer tasks. 
The integration adds a level of seamlessness. The participant list for our bike ride is updated every hour, so I can just create a segment saying everyone who’s raised, say $100, show them this copy. It’s so easy. I’ve got more time to think in those strategic ways because I don’t have to be manually handling data.
– Amy Mulder, Communications Coordinator
Connecting your accounts lets you automatically synchronize your contact and campaign data so you never miss a new contact (or changes to an old one). And since you can dynamically map data from any Salesforce object to Campaign Monitor’s custom fields, personalizing your emails becomes easier and more powerful than ever.

Simplify permissions and opt-in management
The world of permissioned email marketing continues to become more important—and more complex. The Salesforce email integration keeps your customer and subscriber preferences aligned across systems and keeps your audience in control of how and when they hear from you. That not only means happier customers; it also makes staying compliant with opt-in laws and regulations easier for your team.
Stay in control with smarter data dashboards
Synchronized data gives you deeper insights into subscriber behavior and helps you track customers from first touchpoint all the way through the purchase funnel. Custom reports and dashboards that update in real time with data from both platforms can help you measure the success of email campaigns in driving engagement and revenue.

You can view who is engaging with your emails and who is not, and track your subscriber lists—all in one place.
It is great to be able to schedule the data import to automatically run a couple of times a week to send contacts to CM based on SF report criteria. Also the mapping fields fields functionality can keep fields updated between the two. Using both of those functions we are able to confidently have up-to-date recipient segments whenever we are ready to send an email.
– Rachael Arnott, System Analyst, on the AppExchange
Wrap up
Integrating high-powered business technology is a great way to improve results and save time. But not all integrations are created equal: some, like Campaign Monitor and Salesforce, fit together like paired puzzle pieces.
Integrating your Campaign Monitor and Salesforce accounts means you’ll save time and get better performance through superior data analysis and personalization capabilities. 
You can try this Salesforce integration free for 14 days. Check it out here, and don’t forget to browse our App Store for other ways to connect your email marketing with your favorite business tools.
 
The post How to Save Time and Drive Revenue with the Highest-Rated Salesforce Integration for Email appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

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Thinking about using email marketing for your hotel? Check out our 6-step process for doing successful email marketing for hotels.

​ I work in B2B education. We sent out a Padot email and I can see the results but I’m keen to see which types of users clicked the various links. Eg how many of them were teachers, how many librarians, how many principals/head teachers etc. How do I do this? Thanks
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