As a marketer, you can get wiser with each passing year.
This is especially true if you gain knowledge and understanding of your market and competition by looking back at what happened last year.
The success of last year's marketing campaigns can be repeated again and again. The moves that resulted in not-so-good outcomes can be reverted or improved. You can extract wisdom from your mistakes and carry that knowledge as you move forward.
Do you know that you can get a year's worth of wisdom on a single platform?
You can get this with just a few clicks on Panoramata’s date range selector.
In this article, we'll show you important techniques you can use to refine your approach and gain a competitive edge regardless of your industry.
The ultimate goal is to help you acquire insightful data from your competitors and translate them into effective marketing for the future.
Benefits of Knowing What Your Competitors Have Done Last Year
A year is a long time in marketing. It consists of dozens of campaigns, updates, strategy shifts, and ideas put into motion.
Looking at what your competitors have been publishing and releasing to their audience should be a priority because it tells you a lot about what they’re thinking.
By studying your competitor's past behavior and preferences, you can guess their next moves. You can get a glimpse of what works for them. It will help you recognize how you can enhance your own marketing strategy.
If you are struggling with planning your promotional campaign and are hesitant to try new ideas because you're afraid they might flop, learning from history is the first step to take.
How did a competitor promote similar products during a given period or season?
For annual big marketing events like Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Labor Day, etc., how did they create a buzz geared toward their brand?
How active were they in pushing their content on different channels?
What are the things they did last year that you didn't?
The list of questions goes on…
But the good news is that you can have the answers handy with the right tools on deck.
You can develop foolproof techniques inspired by the leading player's previous approaches.
In the following sections, we'll be sharing several cases in which you can use Panoramata to track the marketing assets and related data of your competitors last year.
The examples might be similar to the marketing issue you’re facing or you might have different use cases.
Whatever you’re mulling over, you can take advantage of the features offered by Panoramata.
How to Find Your Competitor on Panoramata
Before we go into details, here's a quick guide on how to access the profile of a brand or a company you're eyeing.
First, go to Brands Search from your dashboard.
Type a keyword or keywords. A keyword can be the name of the brand or company, a website URL, or the main or specific industry you belong to.
You can use filters below the search bar (i.e. Industry, Language, Country, Softwares, Sub-Industries, Sector) to refine results.
Then you'll be directed to the brand's page. It will look like this:
How to Check Your Competitor’s Campaigns and Activity for the Past Year
Here's where you can check your competitor’s (or any brand’s) activity on Panoramata.
Newsletters Sent to Their Email List
If you want to see what emails your competitor sent last year, it's easy and automatic on the platform.
You have the Emails section that displays thumbnail-sized copies of emails arranged from most recent to oldest ones, by default.
Since you're looking for actual emails sent last year, you can simply select a date range from the field provided.
For example, you want to know how Semaine promoted their products during the fall season, or anything where they mentioned the term "fall" or "autumn" last year.
You can type in the related keyword and select the desired date and year.
Here, you have four results.
By clicking on the thumbnail, you can go into the details of an email.
These include the subject line and subheader, the body of the email as if you received it in your inbox, and important metrics such as email score.
What other email campaigns do you want to spy on from last year? An important holiday or a big marketing event, perhaps?
The possibilities are endless here.
Ads Published on Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest
You can search for advertisements your competitor published during an important period from last year.
Do this in the Ads section where you have several filters to make the process easier and more specific. (i.e. date range, active status, asset type, paid media network, and a way to sort chronologically, or by the number of times the copy was repeated).
You can do keyword or campaign-specific searches similar to the example above.
You might also want to gain other insights for your marketing (for instance, if you're looking to improve your marketing performance results in the coming last quarter of the year).
Here's an example where you can see the Meta advertisements published by Onnit from October to December of last year.
Download it to store on your device, and/or save it to a list you created on the platform for a more organized reference.
SMS Delivered to Their Text Subscribers
Many brands include SMS as part of their marketing mix as it yields significant result for their branding and promotions.
If you want to check the text messages a competitor sent last year for a specific campaign, you can view them either by going to the SMS section of a brand page or by looking it up using SMS Search.
Here, we want to check how Inno Supps promoted their products by SMS during Black Friday last year.
Products and Collections They Launched and Pricing Updates
You can also track what products were launched by your competitor during a certain period of time.
Viewing the Catalog section of a brand will tell you exactly what products were launched and have been available in a given timeframe, along with the updates on pricing over time.
For instance, this example shows that Graza launched 2 products in September of last year and two in October.
Overview of the Brand's Activity
It is also a good practice to check the overall activity level of your competitors in terms of emails and paid advertisements.
By doing so, you can gain pertinent details about their presence on these important channels.
You can use the Calendar feature to gauge how active your competitor was last year.
In this example, we can see that Emmiol was present in their subscribers’ inboxes almost every day during the last two quarters of last year.
The success of last year's marketing campaigns can be repeated again and again. The moves that resulted in not-so-good outcomes can be reverted or improved. You can extract wisdom from your mistakes and carry that knowledge as you move forward.
Learning from your competitor’s history can help you formulate a data-backed marketing plan and help you create better, more engaging campaigns that are proven to resonate with your audience.
Learning from the past is key and what better way to learn than from your competitors?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it crucial to see what your competitors have done in the previous year?
It is important to know what your competitors did last year to gain insights that will inspire your next marketing moves.
For instance, if you've seen how they promoted on newsletters, ads, and SMS last Halloween, you'll be able to predict their approach this year.
You will also be able to spot opportunities for improvement to consequently outdo the competition.
Is it difficult to track competitors' data from the previous year and older?
Doing it manually is painstaking. With the proper tools in place like Panoramata, it is relatively easy to track the history of your competitors' marketing.
It helps you spend less effort trying to dig through and have more time actually marketing.
