Studying competitors is critical. It’s a relevant strategy that must be in any digital marketing plan. It lets you learn about your competitors’ online behaviors. You aim to find their weaknesses and your strengths. You want to capture and influence customers more than your competition.
By the end of the blog, you should understand how to analyze competitors. You can use the insights to improve your product’s digital marketing.
Identify Competitors
The first step is to find whom your main competitors are. To identify your competitors, begin with a web search for your product line or your specific service. Take a look at the most visited websites and it will be useful to make notes of those companies that seem to be interested in online marketing.Â
There are also other ways such as by using Semrush, Ahrefs or SimilarWeb to search for even more them based on factors such as traffic, keywords, and ads.
Analyze Their Target Audience
You also need to know who your competitors are targeting. Or, who they are marketing to. Identify the customers they want to target on the aspects of their demographics, interests, and pain points. You can get this information from websites, their social media, and their customers.
If you know the target audience of your competitors, you stand a better chance to set your products apart from the competition. It will also be useful in your own customer targeting and content decisions.
Analyze Their Digital Presence
Next, conduct a deep dive into your competitors’ digital presence across various channels. This includes:
Website Analysis
Analyze how they have set up their website from the design and usability perspective, what kind of content they produce, and what conversion technique they are using. Try to find the area where they are strong, and there is a possibility that they are weak, find out how you can outcompete them.
Social Media Analysis
Evaluate their performance on social media, content material, audience exercise, and advertising and marketing on Fb, Instagram, Twitter, Linked, and YouTube. Find out which of the mentioned channels they are more ‘’involved’’ and how they are ‘’engaging ‘’ them.
Email Marketing
Subscribe to your competition’s newsletters and study their emails, subject lines, coupons, etc and the overall picture of their email marketing. This can help one gain insight into the kind of leads they target and how their nurture them.
Paid Advertising
Search The competitors’ paid ads using the Facebook Ad Library or Google Ads Keyword Planner. Leverage the knowledge of their ad creatives, what targeting they use, and how they bid on adverts.
Competitor Analysis Tools
To streamline the competitive analysis process, leverage the following powerful tools:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO and digital marketing toolkit that enables the assessment of organic search rivals, backlinks, and contents.
SEMrush
A similar tool is SEMrush that is an all-in-one tool that helps one to check the competitor’s keywords, paid ads, and social media activities.
Moz
Moz is another crucial SEO tool that allows users to analyze competitors’ on page, local searches, and link building.
Sprout Social or Hootsuite
Some tools can help you track your competitor’s social media. They track their presence, interaction, and content.
Conclusion
It is therefore important that a proper analysis of the competitors is done before starting the marketers digitization process. Studying competitors’ activities is crucial for adjusting your business model and detecting the gaps where you can advance and how to avoid the mistakes of rivals.
The internet changes often. So, it is useful to do a competitive analysis as often as possible.Â
People often overlook the “Opportunities” section in a SWOT analysis. Management often focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of a firm. They neglect the outbound analysis of market opportunities that fuels growth. They spend too little time and effort on this.
The key elements to focus on in a competitive analysis for digital marketing include:
- Understanding your competitors’ target customers is key.
- Look at your competitors’ website, social media, email marketing, and paid ads.
- This involves judging the quality, relevance, and performance of your competitors’ content and SEO.
- Compare your products or services to those of your competitors. Consider pricing, features, and unique value propositions.
- Customer feedback involves reviewing customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials.
Ideally, analyze the competition at least once a year. But, do it more often if changes will reshape the competitive landscape within a year.
Competitive analysis should be done periodically so that your organization can ascertain shifts in strategies that need to be employed in the digital marketing process and new trends.
