The industry your business operates in is constantly evolving, changing, and growing. From product development to the stories you share; from evolving customer preferences to customer choices that change faster than you can read this.
How do you keep up? What do you do to stay competitive, to act fast, and to inch further towards success?
Here are specific ways to detect, save, organize, and act on your competition’s marketing strategy:
- Subscribe and go on their website weekly
- Simulate customer behavior on their website and track their marketing flows/journeys
- Save them into themes-tagged lists for future references
- Save their website on important marketing days (Christmas, BFCM, etc.)
- Share lists and benchmarks with your team
Subscribe and go on their website weekly
One of the best ways to learn from your competitors' marketing strategies is to become a potential customer. If you were a regular customer, just how would the brand in question work -- from the point you see an element of a campaign, all the way to checkout?
Head out to your competing brand’s website, subscribe to a coupon or subscribe to their email sequences, and look out for their ad campaigns.
Or, in all probability, you’d start seeing some retargeting ads everywhere (on Instagram? On Facebook? Elsewhere).
Notice. Observe. Learn. Take notes -- down to the details.
An easier way -- saving you several hundred hours per month -- is to sign up for Panoramata and get immediate insights on how brands do marketing. Deep dive into the exact marketing stack your competition uses, the email marketing messages brands send, and the ads these brands roll out as campaigns.
Simulate customer behavior on their website and track their marketing flows/journeys
Signed up for a coupon or subscribed to your competing brand’s email marketing sequences? Starting seeing their ads on Instagram or Facebook or even on CNN or The Washington Post?
Forget being the business owner or marketer for a while and get into a typical customers’ shoes. Notice the frequency of these ads showing up.
Better yet, take action. Simulate customer behavior (on or off their brand site) -- click on these ads, take action by clicking on one of those marketing emails.
- The ads: How are they written? What visuals do these ads contain?
- How does the voice or tone of the ads sound like, within ads or email messages? Do they write like they talk? Are they jovial, neutral?
- How is a retargeting ad different from one of their regular ads? Do these brands entice customers with any special offers on their retargeting ads?
- How are the email marketing campaigns timed? How are they designed?
- What is the list of software or marketing tools used by this particular brand? Note: We already did this work for you. Just click or tap on “Software” to see all the products and tools that your competitors use.
Be sure to take notes along the way.
Save them into themes-tagged lists for future references
It’s virtually impossible to “keep things in your head” as you head down the path of trying to learn from your competitors. Apart from the overall marketing strategy, there are distinct elements that you’d have to consider:
- Ad copywriting style
- Website or eCommerce colors and images along with other graphics used for marketing campaigns
- Email marketing campaigns -- types of campaigns, how each type of campaign is deployed, timing of campaigns, email marketing copywriting, email marketing design, and more.
- Marketing journeys and marketing workflows
- Sales funnels
- Offers and angles
All this is just for one brand you are checking out. Now, what if you had 5, 15, 25, or 50 brands that you wanted to learn from?
Create smart lists tagged by themes or tags themselves for future references. With Panoramata, easily use these “smart lists” for inspiration and learning.
Save their website on important marketing days (Christmas, BFCM, etc.)
BFCM, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other special days are big days for eCommerce. Shopify merchants alone made more than US $6.3 billion in sales in 2021.
Important marketing days (or weeks) such as BFCM, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the New Year are critical for eCommerce success.
The question is this: What changes for brands -- with respect to marketing campaigns, offers, angles, and communication style -- during those special days?
Track everything using snapshots (specific changes made to brand websites during these days), emails, ads, and more.
Do it manually, if you want to. Or use Panoramata.
Share lists and benchmarks with your team
By the end of your work (with each competitor brand or multiple brands), you’d have tons of information -- lists, notes, and more.
- Marketing benchmark lists
- Email marketing inspiration lists
- Huge collection of ads (across channels such as social ads or Google Ads), rapid changes to websites (during particular time frames)
- List of software or sets of marketing stack used by each brand
If you are working with teams internally (or with remote teams), collect more insights thanks to teamwork and organize this information in a way that you can act on.
Panoramata helps you follow specific brands and tag them. Your “themed” lists can contain all of this crucial information that you can use to learn quickly, benchmarking your marketing, get ideas for your marketing campaigns, and more.
