Competitor Analysis in Saudi Arabia: A Step-by-Step Guide

Most competitor analysis guides start the same way: list your rivals, count their followers, compare their posting frequency and likes.

In Saudi Arabia, that gives you a tidy spreadsheet and the wrong answer.

Your competitor's official page is where they speak. The market decides what it thinks somewhere else: in replies, creator videos, review pages and long threads, mostly in Arabic and much of it in Saudi dialect. If you want to understand a competitor's marketing strategy, and whether it is working, you have to read that conversation too.

Here is a six-step way to build a competitor benchmark that holds up in the Saudi market.

Step 1. Choose 4 to 5 competitors, in three rings

More than five and the report turns into noise. Pick from three rings:

• Direct: same category, same customer.
• Indirect: a different product competing for the same budget or attention.
• Aspirational: the company your leadership keeps quoting in meetings.

In Saudi Arabia, make sure the list includes regional and local players, not only the global names. They often own more of the Arabic conversation than their size suggests.

Step 2. Build the Arabic keyword list for each one

This is the step most benchmarks skip, and it decides everything after it.

For each competitor, list:

• The company name in Arabic and English.
• Product and model names, plus the ways people actually spell them.
• Common misspellings, short forms and nicknames.
• Franco-Arabic spellings (Latin letters mixed with numbers).
• Arabic campaign hashtags, not just the English ones.

An automotive example: a rival's new model may be discussed under three Arabic spellings, a nickname and a Franco-Arabic version. Track only the official name and you undercount their buzz. We cover that case in Your Best Car Content Isn't Yours.

Step 3. Measure their owned channels with efficiency metrics

Raw totals favour whoever has the biggest page. Compare what is comparable:

• Engagement per post and engagement rate, not total likes.
• Posting frequency and format mix (reels, carousels, live, static).
• Response time to customers, and whether they reply in Arabic.

This tells you how well their content performs. It does not yet tell you what the market thinks of them.

Step 4. Measure the earned conversation

Now look beyond their page:

• Share of voice: your share of the whole category conversation against each rival, not just page activity.
• Owned vs earned: how much of each competitor's conversation happens on pages they don't control.
• Sentiment: whether the tone around each rival is positive, negative or neutral, and what is driving it.
• Creators and review pages: who carries each competitor's conversation, and how their audiences react.

This is where a competitor's real position shows. A rival with a quiet official page can still own the conversation through creators.

Step 5. Map the Saudi moments

Conversation in Saudi Arabia moves around a known calendar: Ramadan, Founding Day, National Day, Riyadh Season, back to school, and each company's own launches.

Track how each competitor's share of voice and sentiment moved around those moments. Who showed up, who was ignored, and whose campaign became the topic? That is their marketing strategy, seen from the outside.

Step 6. Turn it into a monthly report that drives decisions

A benchmark earns its place when it changes what you do next. Keep one format every month so trends are visible, and answer three questions:

1. Where are we losing share of voice, and to whom?
2. What is working for a competitor that we can answer?
3. Where is a competitor's audience unhappy, and is that a gap we can fill?

The payoff is volume as well as quality. A leading Saudi sports, entertainment and hospitality enterprise got 24x more actionable reports per month with dima.

What actually decides it

Every step above depends on one thing: reading the Arabic conversation correctly. If a rival's model name is misspelled, it drops out of the count. If sarcasm in Saudi dialect is read as praise, their sentiment looks better than it is. If only tagged posts are captured, their earned conversation disappears. A competitor benchmark is only as honest as the mentions it captures and how accurately it reads them. Capturing that conversation completely, and reading it in the dialects your market actually uses, is the specific problem dima was built to solve.

When did your last competitor report change a decision, rather than just fill a slide?

Build your competitor benchmark on the conversation your Saudi customers are actually having.