4 minute read – Our NDIS management series provides insights and advice from experts to help you optimise organisational management and promote business growth.
Welcome to the NDIS – a new era of competition in care!
With the rollout of the NDIS, comes the introduction of a vastly different business landscape, as organisations compete for clients in a market-based model, centred on personal funding.
To help guide service providers in better defining your position in the market, finding your point of difference and identifying gaps that can be used to your advantage, we called on a marketing specialist to guide us step-by-step through a competitor analysis.
Structuring a competitor analysis
An analysis of competitors can be as superficial or as exhaustive as you choose, but the more information you have, the more opportunities you will identify.
For a simple, yet effective competitor analysis, start by drawing on the four Ps from the marketing mix: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.
- Product/Service: Begin by reviewing the product of your competitor and comparing it to the offering of your own organisation. When investigating, consider: the breadth or variety of services offered, the quality of those services (feedback and reviews), the level and nature of customer service, the entire customer experience during and after delivery, and supporting systems and structures in place to enable delivery, for example, IT systems.
- Place: In the case of the NDIS, Place is largely about how the service is secured and the accessibility of this process. This might include how your competitor enables booking, how and where the client receives the service, and if the location is challenging.
- Price: According to the NDIS website, there is no requirement for a service provider to charge at the maximum price, as listed in the price guide. This enables service providers to compete and participants to negotiate, so they can get the most from their support package.
Analysing a competitor’s promotion
A key element of NDIS management is promotion of your services.
With NDIS services similar across like-competitors, and price relatively rigid compared to other industries, one of the most effective ways an organisation can build its market share is through strategic promotion of services and brand.
When looking for growth opportunities, analysing the promotion of competitors can provide useful insights.
- Positioning and USP: A unique selling point is a point of difference between your brand and the brand of your competitors. It might be superior customer service, the lowest prices, the best technology. But a USP is not a USP if it is not unique. Analysing competitor promotion should start with identifying and understanding their unique selling point. This can help you find gaps in the market and truly differentiate your brand.
- Budget: It can be difficult to learn the exact promotional budget of your competitors, but the more you can understand about how much they are spending to ensure potential clients recall their brand before they recall yours, the better.
- Channels: Review all the channels your competitors are using for promotion, including how they are using them. Start by analysing their website and how they use it to promote their services, down to the language used and the call to action. Look at their site content and how they might provide additional value or connection to clients through articles and multimedia.
Consider social channels, the content that is posted, how much engagement posts receive, frequency of posts and any paid social advertising. Sign up for their newsletter and look over the content that is sent to potential and current clients. Analyse every channel you can find and learn from them what works, what doesn’t and what they may have missed that results in an opportunity for your brand. - Search: When searching online, more than 90% of people click on a site on the first page of results. You can use free platforms like seo moz or ubersuggest to see which keyword searches send people to your competitor’s website. You should also run the reports for your own site.
- Events and other promotion: Analysing content will often provide insights into other activities undertaken by your competitor. Reading online reviews, social media posts and conducting an image search can reveal events and sponsorships.
- PR (and online PR): Visiting competitor’s websites and news section, as well as conducting a Google news search will show you the PR undertaken by the organisation.
When reviewing any channel, ensure you are not only listing the fact the channel is used, but really analysing the content, and the level of engagement with it.
Analysing a competitor’s employer brand
When discussing NDIS recruitment, Madeline Hill, General Manager of Inclusion and Diversity at global recruitment agency, Randstad, says companies with a strong employer brand don’t have to work as hard to get better quality candidates for their vacant roles.
She also says employer and consumer brand are now intertwined, meaning an effective employer brand can have an impact on service uptake.
When analysing competitors, consider how they appear as an employer, compared to how your own company appeals to potential quality employees.
Look at the company’s careers pages, job advertisements and reviews on popular sites like Glassdoor.
Use your findings to your advantage
Conducting a review isn’t where your competitor analysis ends, in fact, the final step of bringing everything together to identify gaps and opportunities, to highlight the weaknesses of your competitors, is the crucial step.
With these opportunities in hand, review your own marketing mix, with particular focus on your promotion and support, and develop a strategy that enables you to exploit gaps to your advantage.
This is only one step in a series of steps that enable optimal NDIS management in an increasingly competitive landscape. To truly differentiate your brand and to resonate with potential clients, consider conducting an audience analysis, a SWOT analysis and benchmarking your current position so you can measure progress.
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