Regardless of what your business might offer, it is assured that there will be other companies offering similar products and services. If you wish to succeed in a market, you will have to find suitable information and insight needed to gain an edge over your competitors.
Just knowing what your competitors offer is not sufficient. What’s good is that technology offers a way to know more and understand details about your competition than ever before. Hence, businesses must use technology to consistently conduct a competitive analysis for staying ahead of the competition.
In this blog, we will see how to do a competitive analysis for digital marketing. However, before that we will first begin by understanding what competitive analysis is.
What is Competitive Analysis?
A competitive analysis is a detailed strategy that helps you learn about your major competitors and research their business strategies. If a business does a competitor analysis regularly, it is easy to create reliable business strategies that help in improving upon the competitors.
Competitive analysis can also help in learning most of the things about your competition. It also helps in identifying potential opportunities that can be maximized to outperform your competition.
With competitive analysis, a business can stay atop all industry trends and ensure that a product meets and exceeds industry standards. In fact, competitive analysis is necessary to the company’s success.
5 Simple Ways To Do a Competitive Analysis For Digital Marketing
1. Find Your Top Competitors
This is the fundamental step in an efficient competitive analysis. You must be clear about who your competitors are. It goes without saying that if you are selling something online, you are competing against dozens going after the same group of qualifying leads.
Irrespective of whether you are a local, national, or international company, you must set a benchmark for yourself. Your sales and marketing teams can help in highlighting the areas that must be focused on to stay one step ahead of the competition. You will be aware of your competitors when you are active in the market and have a strong network. However, the internet is also a helpful resource in the present time.
By looking for the kind of service and product you are offering, you will see some of your top competitors on the top.
In addition, some online tools such as SEMrush can also be of help in finding your competitors. You can know which keywords other competitors are ranking for while coming up with online marketing strategies to outdo those rankings.
2. Content Analysis and Comparison
Make a detailed analysis and comparison of the content that is being published by your competitors. Analyzing this content can let you determine all opportunities you will have to outperform your competitors.
It will also give you a fair idea about which kind of content is being read and what changes your content strategy needs to get more viewers.
You can also make sure what your competition is publishing, adding, and updating. See the topics that they are discussing and the viewership that they are garnering. Sometimes it is the little things in which your competitor might be getting some hot leads.
See the blogging schedule of your competitor. In case your competition is publishing often in a week as compared to just one blog every two weeks then take note.
You must also publish often so that you can generate more traffic and leads. That said, make sure that the content is remarkable and is actually helping the readers gain insight.
3. SEO Analysis
In case your competitor has the same kind of content then make sure that you update it frequently and produce high-quality work. You may have to look more closely for finding what they are doing differently. Sometimes this can be SEO.
In case your company is blogging consistently, you would know the importance of SEO.
While conducting a competitive analysis on the kind of content your competitors are generating, it is beneficial to consider the SEO of content. Google’s algorithm BERT helps in understanding the search intent.
In case a competitor is publishing something that is outranking you, take a cue and come up with something that includes better tips and tricks.
If you make it a point to look closely at the work of your competitors, you will be able to find some gaps and shortcomings. You can then use your creativity and expertise to fill these gaps.
4. Social Media Engagement
All businesses use social media presence differently.
Social media networks are a great way for companies to interact with the target and potential audience. Hence, an important step in the competitive analysis is to find how the competition is doing on social media and integrate it into the marketing strategy.
See the kind of information that is being posted by your competitors on social media. Also, tap the frequency of this information and the photos that attract attention.
After you have checked all these things, check the engagement level that your competitors are generating.
You must know if the posts attract clicks if they have enough followers if their posts are being liked or reposed, etc. These are different factors that you can consider when you are checking the competitor’s profiles.
Always remember that just because a competitor has a profile does not mean that they are winning on social media. Keep making an effort to know what your competition is doing and what you can do to be better.
5. Look for a Special Proposition
Given all the similarities between you and your competitors, there is always something unique about each brand. This is something that can actually sketch and uplift your brand image.
The competitive analysis will give you a much better idea about what your competitors can provide. Now is the time to figure out what your competition is providing and where you stand in comparison to your competition.
You can use your profiles and SWOT analysis for finding out what you are doing that the other companies are not doing or even what they do not do as well.
This can be a unique product or a large range of products. It can also be a unique service such as technical support or customization.
Probably, your business approach is more in line with the social and environmental priorities of your customers. Regardless of what it may be, make sure that it is an honest assessment based on research and analysis performed on your competitors.
Final Words
It is of great importance to understand what your competitors are doing to develop a plan that makes you stand out. The internet makes it simple to find this information, but it can sometimes seem overwhelming in case you are new to this.
If you want to learn more about what others in your industry are doing and use that information to improve your strategy, Ranking Chief is one of the best SEO companies in USA that can help you bring in more in a short amount of time Sales and 10x revenue time.
Contact us today so we can monitor your competitor research while helping you grow your business.