Your competitor’s online activity will give you a deeper understanding of their marketing strategy, that is if you know where and how to look.
Tracking emails, ads, and other creatives is just the start. The more important task is leveraging this data to strike where your competition is weakest and find opportunities to seize.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to spot these opportunities and use them to improve your marketing. You’ll learn the benefits of competitor tracking and why every business should get started with it if they want to get an edge over their industry peers.
Without further ado, let’s begin.
To get the most accurate data, monitor your competitors weekly. This enables you to spot trends and changes over time. A monthly analysis isn’t enough for this purpose because you will miss a lot of data.
Competitive Analysis: How to Effectively Leverage Competitor Data
- Types of Competitor Data
- Product Offerings
- Pricing Strategies
- Marketing Tactics
- Customer Reviews
- Social Media Presence
- How to Leverage Competitor Data to Improve Your Business
- How frequently should you track your competitors?
- What do you do with competitor data?
- Anticipate promotions
- Find new topics for your content calendar
- Find new audiences you can market to
- Understand which acquisition channels are working for your competitors
- Reshape your messaging and copywriting and improve your marketing automation
- Improve your new launches
- Turn their weaknesses into your strengths
- Monitor competitors with less time and effort with Panoramata
- Frequently Asked Questions
- How do you collect data from a competition?
- How is competitor data used?
- What is the purpose of the competitor analysis?
Types of Competitor Data
To leverage competitor data, it’s essential to understand the different types of data that can be collected and how each can provide valuable insights:
Product Offerings
This includes information about the products or services your competitors are selling.
Analyzing their product range, features, quality, and innovation can help you understand what they’re doing well and where there might be opportunities for you to differentiate.
Pricing Strategies
This includes looking at their pricing models, discount strategies, and any pricing tiers they offer. By comparing these with your own pricing, you can identify whether you’re priced appropriately for your target market.
Marketing Tactics
This encompasses all the methods competitors use to promote their products, such as advertising campaigns, content marketing, social media strategies, and email marketing.
Analyzing these tactics can reveal what resonates with their audience and highlight opportunities to adopt similar strategies or innovate with new approaches.
Customer Reviews
Reviews provide direct feedback from customers about what they like or dislike about a competitor’s product or service.
Social Media Presence
Social media data offers insights into how competitors engage with their audience, what content performs best, and how customers interact with their brand online.
Monitoring competitors’ social media activities can help you gauge their brand perception, identify popular trends, and spot opportunities for engagement that they may be missing.
How to Leverage Competitor Data to Improve Your Business
How frequently should you track your competitors?
To get the most accurate data, monitor your competitors weekly. This enables you to spot trends and changes over time. A monthly analysis isn’t enough for this purpose because you will miss a lot of data.
What do you do with competitor data?
Anticipate promotions
Competitor data is like a crystal ball into the future. You can use it to know upcoming promotions your competitor will disseminate.
When you’ve monitored them over time, you’ll spot patterns, and predict what they’ll do again.
For example, your competitor started running ads for last year’s Black Friday two months in advance.
That tells you that this year, they’re likely to do the same. If they held an end-of-summer sale last summer, that tells you that it’s part of this year’s marketing calendar, too.
It’s best if you can pinpoint what week or date they start talking about a promotion or sale so your insights are precise.
Find new topics for your content calendar
Content ideas can be difficult to find. The wells of inspiration can dry up. But thanks to competitor tracking, you can find endless inspiration from your competitor’s ads, emails, landing pages, and websites.
That’s not to say that you should copy their creatives outright. You can use them as the foundation to create your own materials and improve your strategy.
Find new audiences you can market to
Competitor data can tell you which audience your competitor is trying to reach with their marketing. It might be a demographic that you haven’t thought of targeting.
For example, if you have a skincare and bodycare brand that just launched a body lotion, you might be targeting 20-year-old women. However, if you take a look at your competitor, you may find that they are marketing a similar product to runners and active people.
Competitor data gives you a clue about which niches are working for your competitors so you can try to capture those customers, too.
But even more importantly, competitor data can help you…
Understand which acquisition channels are working for your competitors
On top of the above, your competitor’s activity online is a huge source of information about their most effective acquisition channels.
If your competitor is putting out a lot of ads, that could mean that this channel is working well for them. The same goes for emails and SEO. If they’re focusing on a channel, that means those channels are contributing more to their bottom line than the others.
To take this further, observe if they’re promoting different products in each channel. This will give you a lot to ponder, as well. They are doing this consciously. It’s not by accident.
For example, you may find that your competitor is marketing products with a lower price in their ads but is promoting products that favor repeat purchases in their emails.
You can use this information to understand their catalog more deeply and adjust your strategy.
Reshape your messaging and copywriting and improve your marketing automation
If you want to step up your copywriting game, look no further than your competitors.
Analyze their content strategies, including blog posts, videos, and social media campaigns. What topics are they covering? What tone are they using? How are they appealing to their target audience?
You can also review their email campaigns, paying attention to frequency, design, and content. Identify what works and what can be improved upon in your own campaigns.
Use this information to clean up your email marketing automation (or email flows) by assessing how your competitors welcome new subscribers and how they recover abandoned carts. They might have a tactic worth trying in your welcome flows and lost checkout flows.
Improve your new launches
Use information from your competitor’s catalog to brainstorm new products or features.
Identify areas where competitors may be lacking, such as missing features, poor customer service, or outdated technology. Then, see how you can fill those gaps and have a more compelling product lineup.
Turn their weaknesses into your strengths
Reading reviews and testimonials about your competitor is an excellent way to see what’s making their customers dissatisfied.
From these sources, you can find recurring complaints and compliments. You can also better understand your potential customers’ needs and pain points and use that knowledge to finetune your content.
On the other hand, if you see positive feedback about a feature or aspect of your competitor’s service, try to integrate those aspects into your marketing or your products.
Reviews are a great market research tool that will help you identify what resonates with your target audience.
Monitor competitors with less time and effort with Panoramata
Shave off time from your day by using Panoramata, which tracks any brand’s emails, ads, landing pages, SMS, and more in one platform.
You can get the most up-to-date competitor data that you can use for your competitive analysis. Spot opportunities as they come and never miss a beat. Sign up for free today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you collect data from a competition?
You can collect competitor data by analyzing their website, social media, email campaigns, and customer reviews, or using tools that track their online activities. It's important to gather information ethically, ensuring you comply with legal guidelines.
How is competitor data used?
Competitor data is used to identify market trends, refine marketing strategies, and uncover opportunities for growth. It helps you understand your competition's strengths and weaknesses to improve your own offerings.
What is the purpose of the competitor analysis?
The purpose of competitor analysis is to gain insights into your competitors’ strategies, allowing you to make informed decisions that enhance your market position. It helps you stay competitive by anticipating industry changes and customer needs.
