We live in an age where you can find answers to any question you have in seconds. Almost nothing is unknowable, so why are some brands still not tracking their competitors?
All businesses have competition and these competitors may be doing something different or know something you don’t.
Each minute that you neglect competitor analysis is precious time wasted especially in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing.
Are you going to let your competitors rush past you? I don’t think so!
In this guide, I’ll cover the basics of digital marketing competitive analysis and why you should be on it ASAP. Buckle up because you’re about to gain nuggets of wisdom by the time you’ve finished reading this.
- What is a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing?
- Why Should You Do a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing Regularly?
- Evaluate your business against competitors
- Gain insights into problem-solving
- Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and stand out
- Identify weaknesses and opportunities
- Determine effective strategies and focus channels
- Who Should You Analyze?
- How to Conduct A Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing
- Set goals and identify desired outcomes
- Identify your competitors
- Know your competitor’s audience
- Conduct an audit of your competitors
- Analyze the information and execute
What is a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing?
For the uninitiated, competitive analysis involves identifying, evaluating, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors in a specific industry or market to see how competitors operate, what strategies they use, and their performance in comparison to your own business.
What you’ll take away from competitive analysis is the knowledge to make better decisions and a more refined strategy. Basically, if you want to beat the competition, you have to know their every move.
Why Should You Do a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing Regularly?
Evaluate your business against competitors
Competitive analysis serves as a benchmarking tool, allowing you to compare your progress with industry standards and competitors. It facilitates the identification of areas for improvement, especially where you may be trailing behind or not adapting to new trends in your industry.
Gain insights into problem-solving
In the course of business, both new and established, challenges arise that may require external input for resolution. Competitive analysis provides a wellspring of ideas to draw upon when seeking solutions.
Implementing fixes becomes less risky when you know they’ve been successful for others facing similar challenges, allowing you to filter out ineffective methods through the experiences of your competitors.
Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and stand out
Understanding your competitors clarifies your unique value proposition and strengths, enabling you to emphasize these in your marketing efforts and effectively differentiate yourself. As a result, you’ll become a more compelling choice for your target audience.
Identify weaknesses and opportunities
Beyond benchmarking, competitive analysis unveils the mistakes made by other companies, providing opportunities for your achievements. By capitalizing on your competitors' missteps, you can turn their weaknesses into your strengths.
Optimize your website
A valuable outcome of a competitive analysis is the insight into how competitors structure their websites.
For instance, they may offer a superior customer experience for website visitors, highlighting potential areas where your site may fall short.
Analyzing their website strategies informs changes you can make to enhance the functionality and streamline the user experience of your own website.
Determine effective strategies and focus channels
Competitors often invest time in identifying channels that yield the best return on investment (ROI). By studying the tools and channels they prioritize, you can emulate their approach and create campaigns on the same channels.
Observing their advertisements and emails provides valuable insights into what content resonates most with your shared audience, allowing you to tailor your content accordingly.
Who Should You Analyze?
Competitors come in a variety of shapes and stripes. You’ll have dozens of them but you don’t need to analyze them all.
Ideally, you should track competitors that are quickly growing, sustainably growing, or those who face the same issues or challenges as your business.
If needed, you can even segment these competitors based on how big of a threat they pose to you.
You can classify competitors into two types:
- Direct Competitors
Direct competitors have a similar product or service as you. For example, if you run an online clothing store, your competitors will be other online clothing stores.
Take note that you don’t always have to analyze direct competitors. It only matters that they are worth studying and help you achieve your business goals in the process.
- Indirect Competitors
Indirect competitors are trickier to identify because they have different products but serve the same or similar target audience as your product.
How to Conduct A Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing
Set goals and identify desired outcomes
Your first step has to do with your business. Before you conduct a competitive analysis, you should know what you’re doing it for.
You shouldn’t track competitors just for the sake of doing so. It's not just about snooping around. It's about turning those insights into your very own magic potion of success. Competitor analysis is a tool to be used for your gain.
That’s why you should first reflect on your business goals. Identify what is hindering your growth. Then, think like a scientist and come up with a hypothesis for what is causing your business problem.
You will use this information in the final stages of your competitive analysis.
Each minute that you neglect competitor analysis is precious time wasted especially in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing.
Identify your competitors
Before you can identify your competitors, you need to know who your audience is. It might seem like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many businesses neglect this part.
You can be as specific as you like with coming up with a profile for your potential customer.
For example, you might be targeting suburban moms in their early 30s who are part of a dual-income household. Your product might be catered to small businesses in rural areas with less than 20 employees.
Afterward, determine which direct and indirect competitors to analyze. A caveat: avoid early-stage companies. They’re still in the same stage as you are and experimenting so they’re not a trusted source of best practices.
To find these competitors, you can use the following methods:
- Conduct market research
- Ask your customers
- Look them up on social media websites
- Check Amazon or Crunchbase
- Google keywords and visit the websites that rank at the top of the search results
- Use online tools for competitor analysis like Panoramata
Know your competitor’s audience
Set up customer personas for the target audience your competitors are appealing to on their website, social media, blog posts, lead generation content, and reviews. This tells you a lot about their marketing strategy.
The following step will help in defining your competition’s ideal customers and what they do to attract them.
Conduct an audit of your competitors
Now we’ve come to the meat and potatoes of competitive analysis: the audit. This is where you track their activity in detail.
This step is split up into these components.
Website Performance and Rankings
Your competitor’s website tells you a lot about how your competitor frames their value proposition.
Suitable tools can give an overview of your competitor’s website’s backlinks, performance, traffic, and keyword rankings.
To see how they’re doing in this aspect, check tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. You can also double-check the web traffic volume a company has by going on SimilarWeb or Panoramata.
With Panoramata, you don’t need multiple tools to see details about a competitor’s website.
It’s automatically tracked for you and you can view all this data on just one platform, instead of hopping from one tool to another.
You can also see any changes that have been made on a website, which is a great thing to have in handy.
If your competitor is outperforming you in terms of website performance, note it down as a point for improvement. If they’re doing something effective, note that down as well.
SEO
Next step: SEO. Start to evaluate their on-page SEO elements, content quality, and user experience. By understanding their SEO tactics, you can identify opportunities to improve your own site's visibility and performance.
Content Marketing Strategy
Do a deep dive into the type and quality of content your competitors produce. A few guide questions:
- What topics do they cover?
- What is the format of their content? Are they focused on video? Do they rely on infographics a lot?
- What are the channels they use for distribution?
See if their content is resonating with their target customers and if there are gaps you can fill, something they’re not doing yet.
Email Newsletters
Sign up for your competitors' email newsletters to find out their email marketing strategies–a crucial piece of their content mix.
Analyze the frequency of their campaigns, the type of content they share, and the effectiveness of their calls to action.
Email marketing tools like Mailchimp can help you with this. Alternatively, use Panoramata to track any brand’s newsletter automatically, no email subscriptions needed.
Plus you get access to the full brand history without clogging your inbox or signing up one by one to each email list.
By understanding their email approach, you can improve your own campaigns and better engage your audience.
Ads and Social Media
Boost your ads massively by taking a page out of your competitor’s playbook.
Study their paid advertising campaigns across various channels such as Google Ads, social media ads, and display ads.
What keywords do they target? What ad copy do they use? What platforms they prioritize? This information is invaluable in refining your own paid advertising strategy and optimizing your budget allocation.
In the same vein, check out your competitors' social media presence on different platforms. Pay attention to frequency and content type as well as engagement levels, and audience size.
For this, you can use tools, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social.
SMS and Tech Stack
If this is available to you, check out your competitors’ SMS campaigns and tech stack. Their tech stack might be useful for your goals, too, and is well worth a look. Use BuiltWith to see the tools they’re using.
SMS marketing is a medium with high engagement rates and lets you see how your competitors are communicating with their customers through mobile. To view their SMS, explore their newsletters or websites. They’ll post their customer service information and SMS channels there.
Thankfully, Panoramata can track both your competitors’ SMS and tech stack for you with no additional effort needed only our part.
Analyze the information and execute
Now it’s time to gather all the data and turn them into actionable insights.
You’re probably brimming with ideas at this point. Solutions to problems your business is facing may have materialized.
The next step is to choose the best ideas of the bunch and apply them.
This might entail A/B testing the idea against your current practices to further test their effectiveness.
After you’ve finished your experiment, decide if it’s worth implementing and if your resources and budget can handle it. Weed out any ideas that don’t apply to your brand or that are a drain on your manpower or time.
Your competitive analysis should help you revise and rethink your strategy. You’ll be able to see clearer if your marketing campaigns and content align with your target customers’ needs.
And if you want to automate the entire process and save time, Panoramata gathers all you need to know about your competitors, including their ads, landing pages, emails, tech stack, and SMS.
Best of all, you can get started for free.
In the shifting landscape of digital marketing, keeping tabs on your competitors is non-negotiable.
A well-executed competitor analysis not only reveals your rivals' strengths and weaknesses but also provides insights to shape your digital marketing efforts.
By using the right tools and processes, you can succeed in this cutthroat digital marketplace.
Remember, competitor analysis isn’t a one-off thing–for sustained success, it should be an ongoing part of your digital marketing strategy.
