Use Competitor Analysis to Improve Your Digital Marketing

Understanding how your competitors market their digital products is the first step to creating a successful marketing strategy for your business. This doesn’t mean keeping tabs on every single social media post and website page, but rather understanding how they are doing it and how you can improve your strategy to compete with them. This is especially important for smaller businesses that may not have the budget or staff resources to research and analyze every company that competes with them in the marketplace. In this article, we look at some of the best ways you can use competitor analysis to improve your marketing strategy and drive more customers to your business’s website.

What is Competitor Analysis?

Competitive analysis is the process of examining the performance of other companies in the same industry to understand how you stack up against them. It includes both market research and competitor analysis, which we’ll discuss below.

Why Does Company Analysis Matter?

If you’ve been running a business for any length of time, you’ve probably observed that there’s always room for improvement. Competition is a key driver for growth, and competitors can help you identify your biggest opportunities to take advantage of new market trends and gain an edge over your competitors.

#Help You Find your Audience

To begin the process of competitor analysis, you’ll want to find out who your potential audience is. You can do this by using your business’s name or some relevant language. Next, think about what type of customers you want to attract.

Can Be Very Profitable

It’s important to note that while competitor analysis may not pay much today, it has a long and rich history as a profitable endeavor. In fact, analyzing other companies’ digital strategies is often a core competency for marketing and business development managers. If you consider yourself a business developer, you may spend the majority of your time analyzing competitive strategy, but it’s also important to keep an eye on your own industry to see where your company fits in.

How to Do Competitor Analysis

While you may have heard about competitor analysis through the media, or read articles about it in books or online, in truth, it’s not as complicated as it might sound. Companies use different tactics and strategies in their digital programs, and it’s important to understand how your competitors are doing it in order to better your own strategy. Competitive analysis is essentially the process of looking at how other companies market their products or services and figuring out your best course of action. It is not an easy task, but it can be done by anyone with a little bit of knowledge about marketing and the competitive landscape. To get started, you’ll want to figure out who your potential competitors are and then conduct a keyword research exercise. Keyword research is the process of finding the most popular keywords for your niche or industry and dummy text for your business’s name. You’ll want to make sure that the keywords you select are relevant to your business, but they shouldn’t be the keywords people are using already.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Content and Brand Strategy

In addition to keyword research, you’ll want to analyze your competitors’ content and brand strategy. This is the interrelationship between your competitors’ content and the way they market their products or services. It’s important to note that you don’t have to copy and paste your competitor’s website information into a tool like a reveal, but rather take note of the most important data points that are relevant to your business.

Identify the User Behavior You Want to Copy

After you analyze your competitors, it’s time to think about what you want to do differently. For example, one large company may have a great digital marketing strategy, but they may have a sales team that’s under-trained and unaware of how to implement best practices for lead magnets. A better strategy would be to first identify the lead magnets that work for your business and then create a marketing campaign around those lead magnets. You may also want to look at your competitors’ revenue-generating strategies to identify what revenue stream you’d like to tap into.

Create a Company Culture conducive to Customer Loyalty

When you start to look at what makes your competitors’ customers loyal, you can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Competitive analysis is a process of examining what other companies are doing, and you can adopt similar practices to try to gain an edge over your competition. Rather than trying to copy and paste your business’s names and logos everywhere, try to create a company culture that prompts your potential customers to remain loyal customers. For example, let’s say you sell kitchen appliances. You could have a great digital marketing strategy focused on getting new customers, but your products would be pretty unappealing if nobody ever bought them. By changing your company culture to one where customers are highly satisfied, you can make your brand more attractive to a wider audience. Keep in mind that this will take some time and effort, but it can pay off in the long run.

Set Up a Marketing Automation Platform

To make the most of competitor analysis, you’ll want to set up a marketing automation platform to help you collect and analyze data. This will make it super easy for you to look at the big picture of your competitors’ digital efforts and see what you can learn. You can use the data collected to create better content and schedule relevant social media posts. For example, if you look at the most popular content your competitors are posting, you can see what topics they seem to be covering. You can then create content that’s relevant to these topics and schedule a social media post for every day that showcases your company culture.

Define Your Market and Competition

Now that you’ve got an idea of how competitors to market, it’s time to define your market and see where you fit in. First, you’ll want to take some time to understand who you are and what you do. For example, if you sell car insurance, who are your target customers? What are the different types of insurance? What are the top issues people face when choosing car insurance? Beyond that, you’ll want to take a look at your competitors’ best-selling products to determine where you can steal some of their thunder. For example, if you sell home insurance, what are some of your competitor’s best-selling products?

Final Words

As you can see from the list above, competitor analysis is not an easy task. It requires an understanding of how your competitors market, as well as your ability to analyze and steal some of their thunder. However, with a little bit of effort, you can create a successful marketing strategy that flaunts the same successful practices your competitors have been using.