If you are running an online business for a while, chances are you already know the importance of competitors’ analysis. You must have heard the saying “stay ahead of your competitors”. Whether you have just started your business or running an established brand website on the internet, competitor analysis will always remain the most integral part of your digital marketing strategy. The question is “how do you get an edge over your competitors”? In other words, how to find out what your competitors are up to and do it better than them?
Well, that’s exactly what competitor analysis helps you achieve. It gives you an insight into your competitor’s marketing strategy, keywords, promotional offers, and the techniques they use to attract your target audience. Your competitors offer the same products and services as you. So, how do you make sure your audience will choose your company over your competitors?
Competitors analysis helps you identify traffic generating strategies that you might be missing out on and also to develop your brand’s Unique Selling Point (USP). It allows you to give customers a reason to pick your services over your competitors. Before we discuss the ways to conduct competitors’ analysis, let’s have a look at its meaning and importance.
Competitor Analysis – Why its required?
Simply put, competitive research refers to the practice of collecting information about rivalry firms. It helps you find out the marketing strategies of your competitors and the threats they pose to your business. According to this research, approx 41% of the online businesses agreed that competitor analysis is important for the growth of their firm. Regardless of the size and type of your business, every brand needs to perform competitor analysis. Here are the things a competitor’s analysis will help you achieve:
- Come up with better offerings and marketing plans
- Identify keywords that your competitors are using
- See what banner and text ads your competitors are running along with bids
- Then find out their ad placements to identify what has worked for them.
- Spy on where they rank on SERP for the keywords you target and keep an eye on their movement.
- You can also compare your level of visibility with your competitors for a given set of keywords.
- Streamline your sales funnel and guide customers throughout their purchase journey
- Outdo your competitors with better and well-researched plans
- Improve your presence on social media and search engines
First things first, competitors’ analysis isn’t as simple as identifying your competitors. In order to grow your business in today’s competitive market, you need to adopt the strategies to out-compete your competitors. Shoppers prefer established and trusted brands. They like to shop from stores that have a high SERP ranking and positive reviews. Competitor analysis helps you identify the current market trends.
Gathering insights and information about your competitors is extremely important in today’s crowded marketplace. As mentioned above, just knowing your competitors and the services they offer will get you nowhere. Let’s discuss the steps to conduct an in-depth competitor analysis.
The most important skill for a product leader is active listening. Be a good listener and you will naturally build trust across individuals, teams, and disciplines.
InHype
Steps to Conduct Competitor Analysis
Gone are the days when it was nearly impossible to predict your competitor’s marketing strategies. Today, you can gather a significant amount of information in simple clicks. For example, keyword analysis will help you get an insight into the top industry-related keywords your competitors are ranking for. You do not have to rank for the same keywords. But, your keyword and SEO strategy needs to be somewhat similar to your competitors’ keyword planning.
Let’s check out some easy tips for conducting competitor analysis.
1. Identify Your Competitors
No matter what products and services you sell, chances are hundreds of online businesses are offering the same services. This means they are after the same group of an audience as you. You may not know it, but you are probably competing against tons of companies that offer similar services.
Competitors can be classified into two types: direct and indirect competitors. As the name suggests, direct customers are those who sell the same products and services as you. Indirect competitors, on the other hand, offer different services but cater to a similar audience or solve the same problems. While your main focus is direct competitors, it doesn’t mean you should ignore the indirect competitors.
Identifying your audience is the easiest step in competitor analysis. All you need to do is type your products in the search bar and hit search. Google will return with the top companies that sell the same products. These are your competitors. A simple Google search will help you identify the top 10 competitors. If you are still not sure how to start, we recommend you sign up for SEMRush. It is an advanced competitors’ analysis tool.
2. Check and Compare Your Competitors Content
Once you know who you are competing with, the next step is to analyze and compare their content. The content analysis helps you know what your competitors are ranking for and how they are building their content marketing strategies.
Are they focussing on blogs or text content? Are they using statistics to get people to their websites? Are they adding video content to boost customer engagement rate? The content analysis gives you a glimpse of the type of content they are focussing on. It helps you find out the content quality and the subjects they are talking about. Here are a few questions you must answer when conducting content research.
- Do they optimize their content for readability and SEO?
- Do they write in-depth and comprehensive posts or small and relevant blogs?
- How customers can relate to their content?
- Do they mention the author or writer’s bio?
- Are their blogs promotional or generic?
It’s important to know how often they publish and update content. Maybe, your competitors are drawing the attention of your target audience by publishing high-quality and relevant case studies regularly. Maybe, they are publishing 3-4 posts every week. Simple changes in your content marketing strategy like updating your content more frequently or discussing the most-asked question can give you an edge over your competitors.
Your content needs to be unique and interesting. Just adding random blogs to your website is not going to work. You need to post high-quality, engaging, and informative content to bring people to your website.
3. SEO Analysis
Let’s say your competitors follow a common content strategy and post as frequently as you do. You are going to need to research their marketing strategy more closely to know the difference. Perhaps, it is their SEO. The search engine optimization technique of your competitors is as important as content marketing. With the Google algorithm updates releasing every now and then, comparing your SEO with your competitors has become more important than ever.
Stuffing your content with keywords will not guarantee success. It will rather lower your website’s ranking. Easy ways to improve your SEO is by updating your outdated posts, researching your competitor’s keywords, adding quality links to your posts, adding quality keywords, and writing in-depth and comprehensive posts. SEMRush will help you conduct SEO analysis on your competitors. Not only does this tool help you identify your competitors, but it allows you to identify their content marketing strategies and the keywords they are ranking for.
SEO analysis will involve research on your competitor’s keyword, on-page and off-page SEO tactics, backlink strategy, and other factors that affect the search engine ranking of their website. What’s working for your competitors will not necessarily work for you. But, it will give you a glimpse of your competitor’s SEO strategy that is improving their ranking in the search engine.
4. Online Advertising Analysis
You do not have to think about designing a new advertising campaign. You can conduct customers’ ad analysis to get inspiration for your advertisement campaigns. It gives you a clear picture of your customers keywords strategy, the average amount of traffic they are generating from the ads, paid traffic cost, platforms your competitors are competing with, and some historical information that suggest the overall ad performances of your competitors.
- Text or Search Ads Analysis: Know about the keywords your competitors are using in the ad copies to get their advertisement published on the top of the search result. This research will include all the words, terms, and phrases they are using to target your audience.
- Display Ads Analysis: To analyze the audience your competitors are targeting and the location of their advertisements and banner ads, you are going to need to conduct display ads analysis. It helps you ascertain the placement of your rivals’ banner ads. Moreover you can locate their advertisements easily.
With the help of SEMRush, you can easily identify your competitor’s advertising strategy with simple 2-3 steps. Explore this free tutorial to know the details about online advertising analysis.
5. Social Media Engagement
Social media has become an important channel for brands to communicate with their audience and engage them. Each company is using social media strategies in a different way. Another important competitor’s analysis step is to identify their social media marketing and find out how they are integrating it into their digital marketing strategies.
Here, you are not only supposed to find how many competitors are using social networking platforms. But, you need to check the content they are posting on these channels. You need to know how they are engaging their audience. Do they have authentic followers? Do they reply to each comment? How does the audience interact with them? Do they get retweets? Do they often post brand-related content? Do they offer giveaway and other promo deals to attract a larger audience?
Many brands have social media profiles. But, that doesn’t mean they are doing great. It is important to know what your competitors are doing on social media and how you can out-compete them.
6. Identify their Offerings
With several options to choose from, it gets quite overwhelming for the audience to select the best service provider. In order to stand out, most companies attract customers with special promotional deals. Now, the interesting part is that you can easily identify these offerings by visiting the official website of the company. They clearly mention the giveaway offers, discounts, coupons and vouchers, and other such promotional offers.
Remember that a crucial component of marketing is promo deals. Even something as simple as FREE shipping is enough to grab your audience’s attention. They will love to shop from an eCommerce store that offers free delivery services. Besides, competitor’s analysis will help you find out the products and services your competitors offer and their pricing strategy. If you are new to the industry, you can offer the same services at a lower price or a discounted rate. These simple promotional offers can enhance customers’ experience and increase your customer engagement and retention rate.
7. Research their Sales
While keywords, SEO, and social media research seem quite easy, tracking your competitors’ sale can turn out to be a challenge. It is important to know their sales volume, the tactics that grow their conversion and engagement rate, reasons why customers shop from their websites, the discounts and promo offers they use to attract the target audience and more. It also involves thorough research on the competitor’s sales funnel. From bringing people to the website to getting them to complete the checkout and confirm the order, you need to research your competitor’s entire sales process.
There can be many reasons why your prospects switch from your website to your competitors’ eCommerce store. For instance, customers are likely to abandon the websites that have a long and time-consuming checkout process. Likewise, there is a chance your competitors are driving your audience’s attention by offering the same products and services at a discounted price. You can conduct open surveys to collect your prospect’s feedback.
8. Run a SWOT Analysis
Once you know your competitor’s marketing strategies, you can perform a SWOT analysis. SWOT-analysis helps you gather information about your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. This means you have to find out the areas your competitors specialize in. It can be marketing, SEO, content, social media engagement, and product offerings. Similarly, you need to find their weaknesses i.e. where do you have an advantage over your competitors? Where could they improve?
This will help you identify your position in the market. A SWOT analysis is a comprehensive research. As important as it seems, identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can be super challenging. If you don’t know where to start, consider using SEMRush. The tool will allow you to uncover the areas you need to improve.
9. Identify the Areas You Need to Improve
Once you are done conducting competitive analysis, you will have a better idea of how your competitors are drawing the attention of your target audience and what marketing strategies are working for them. Gather information about different competitors. As mentioned before, it is best to research the top 10 competitors. Check what’s working for them. Proper research will help you identify the areas you can improve.
Conclusion
All information you need about your competitors is available on their website and social media accounts. But, if you would like to conduct an in-depth analysis, then third-party competitor analysis tools, such as SEMrush, are highly recommended. It helps you find out your competitors, their content, SEO, social media engagement, keyword strategies, product and services, promotional offers, and other marketing goals.
The more you know about your competitors, the higher the chances you can out-compete them. Hope you liked the post. Rest assured that the above-mentioned tips will help you perform an in-depth competitor analysis. So, why wait? Start your competitor’s research NOW and develop better and effective marketing strategies.
