Competitor Analysis: “Companies that solely focus on competition will die. Those that focus on value creation will thrive.” – Edward de Bono
In an era of fierce competition in the market, it is imperative to keep an eye on how your competitors are doing business.
Analyzing competitors’ way of doing business help in identifying the appropriate digital marketing strategies for your business. But, before we move on to exploring the ways to improve digital marketing with competitor analysis, let’s clear the basics.
Table of Contents
What is competitor analysis?
Competitor analysis refers to the process of researching and interpreting the marketing strategies and business components of the companies operating in a segmented niche. Typically, it is conducted to distinguish the strengths and weaknesses of competitors. The analysis comprehensively includes your company’s position in comparison to the market players (who serve similar business offerings). The Competitor’s analysis highlights gaps and evaluates your potential and opportunities to fill them.
Why perform competitor analysis?
Understanding your competitors’ marketing practices will help you in many ways such as;
- Comparing the topics, tactics, and channels
- Find out opportunities to differentiate your brand
- Use the smarter
- Finding ways to benchmark your brand against competitors
Shortly, this analysis takes your business one step closer to defining efficient and effective marketing strategies. Also, it enables a simplistic understanding of the current market competition. And, offers insights on how your company is proposing the customers uniquely in the saturated business climate.
Now, let’s explore the best ways to improve digital marketing with competitor analysis.
#1. Get insights on competitors’ performance
This is the foremost step while performing the competitors’ analysis. Analyze their website traffic and find out major changes in the past few months. Also, look for the updates they have made for the site. Find out how they are proposing the products or services uniquely. In general, you should monitor;
- Competitive landscapes
- Current audience size of the rivals
- Key market potentials of the competitors
- Fluctuation in their market shares
Gathering this information prepares a road map to complete analysis efficiently. Moreover, you can use readily available tools for the same. Here are a few examples;
#2. Analyze opponent businesses’ SEO efforts Using Competitor Analysis
If your competitors’ are outbreaking the organic searches, definitely they are making more profit. So, monitor their organic search visibility and influence online influence.
Here’s the list of things to look for in this step;
- Expected monthly organic traffic
- Identify their most successful keywords
- Get an idea of competitors’ consumer behavior
- Total numbers of the targeted keywords
- Examine the most popular pages
Consequently, you will gain a clear understanding of how the rivals’ SEO scores. As a result, you can gauze the loops and define new digital marketing strategies to achieve your business goals.
#3. Find out their content marketing and PR strategies
This is one of the crucial steps in the competitors’ analysis. This step helps in researching relevant topics and other sources to place a backlink for your site. As content plays an imperative role in maintaining a digital presence, it is mandatory to distinguish content strategy from rivals. Also, identify the types and numbers of content they are posting in a month. Ding out how they are influencing the target audience with content marketing.
Once you understand how your opponent companies are practicing content marketing and PR, you can build your way to deal with these parameters.
Besides, make sure to use unique, compelling content across all channels. This practice helps in outshine the competition effectively and quickly.
#4. Examine their recent online ads
Reviewing the rivals’ online ads helps to discover their digital marketing strategies. Plus, you can get an overview of what is trending for online display ads. And, according to that, you can easily set up distinguished strategies for your business.
Here are the points to analyze while examining the online ads;
- Total number of keywords they are bidding on
- Estimated traffic from the targeted keywords
- Cost estimation of the paid traffic
- Uncover seasonal preferences
- Focus on display ads or other types of online ads
Hence, you will comprehend the online advertising strategies of the rivalry firms. Also, get an idea about ad spend to increase ROI and ad creatives optimization.
#5. Analyze their social media activities
Social media influences your potential customers in many ways. Once you review the competitors’ social media presence and activities, you can clearly understand their digital marketing strategies. Go through this list before reviewing the social media activities of rivals;
- Identify the social channels they are using
- Observe the flow of their target audience
- Look for the active influencers for their offerings
- Understand the types of content they are posting on which topic
- Find out how the audience is interacting with them
After analyzing the above factors, it will be easier to identify the ways to outperform the market competition on social media networks.
Apart from the above-mentioned ways to conduct competitors’ analysis, it is advisable to keep an eye on their big steps. When you understand their business practice approach, it becomes simpler for you to design your strategies smartly and differently.
In this scenario, identifying the right competitors’ is also essential. Find out for which competitors’ your business needs to prepare the analysis report;
- leading competitors’
- Aspirational brands
- industry influencers
Besides, Highlight the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business.
This helps in understanding how your brand is beating the competition.
Also, find the growth in areas such as engagement, the share of interactions on specific topics, audience size, and website traffic.
This can demonstrate how your marketing agenda is helping the company to overtake its competitors.
At last, after the completion of the analysis, it’s time to place the practical implications. you should create unique digital marketing strategies for your business.
After all, your car conducts the competitors’ analysis to beat the competition and increase profitability for your company.
Acknowledge these questions to see if you have included all the important aspects of the analysis.
- Have you identified the right competitors?
- What is the scope of competitors’ market positioning?
- How are the competitors’ are performing differently?
- What are the competitors’ past and current digital marketing strategies?
- Which social media networks they use?
Conclusion
Use this guide and create the ultimate competitors’ analysis plan that helps you in expanding your business growth effectively and efficiently!
