A very successful strategy for business growth is to stay one step ahead of the competition. To surpass your competition and engage and influence customers, it’s important to understand your competitors’ inner workings.
A crucial element of any digital marketing plan is a competitive study of the online industry. To maximize your strengths and minimize your flaws to develop and expand, it assists you in comprehending the digital methods of your rivals. In addition, everything may be done internally if you know how, saving you money on pricey third parties.
What is a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing?
Competitor research is done as part of the competitive analysis process in digital marketing to determine strengths and shortcomings.
It looks at the tactics businesses employ for marketing, pricing, product creation, and distribution to obtain insights. You’ll can stay abreast of industry trends and spot digital marketing tactics that can increase brand recognition, client loyalty, and—most importantly—revenue.
Why conduct competitive analysis in digital marketing?
What does competitive analysis serve to accomplish? Your competitive analysis’s scope might change according to what you want to learn. You can be as general or as specific with your analysis as you wish.
For instance, you could concentrate on website optimization. To do this, you would examine your rivals’ websites’ content, user experience, and lead-generating tactics. You may then use what you’ve learned to implement fresh CRO tactics.
Advantages of doing an analysis:
- Determine a market’s potential and obstacles
- Describe your value proposition and how it differs from rivals
- Point out any areas where competitors fall short or have flaws.
- Focus on the most successful digital marketing techniques in your industry.
- Identify new clients and regions
- Recognize market tendencies
- Recognize the possibilities of a fresh good or service
- Choose a standard against which to compare your performance.
What does a competitive analysis include?
In digital marketing, the competitive analysis examines each competitor’s various platforms to see how they impact business growth.
In the end, everything comes down to benchmarking versus your rivals.
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Determine competitor types
Different competitors should not be treated equally.
Sort them into groups according to how competitive they are.
Primary: These are your direct rivals who cater to your demographic by offering a comparable good or service, such as Asos and Boohoo.
Secondary: These businesses, like Target and Gucci, provide a comparable (low- or high-end) version of your product or service to a different market.
Tertiary: These companies have a connection to you but do not compete with your audience or line of business, such as Red Bull and Patagonia.
You may better understand how your rivals relate to your business by segmenting them in this way.
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Profile your competitors’ target customers
Knowing your rivals’ target market will reveal a lot about a company.
You will better understand their target audience and the efficient digital platforms they employ to reach them.
Determine who the brand appeals to in order to learn more about their customers. To learn this, you may look at
- Their “About Us” or mission statement
- Interaction and messaging on social media
- blog posts and free downloads of resources
- Podcasts or webinars
- User feedback or other user-generated material
You may discover more about your rivals’ audience by looking at their objectives, content, and user interactions.
This will assist you in creating strategies that set you apart from the competition.
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Apply the 4 Ps of marketing
Any digital marketing plan must include the entire marketing mix.
You may learn more about your activities by looking at your competitors’ marketing strategies.
PRODUCT: What kind of product are they offering? What features of their product or service do customers enjoy best? What characteristics define successful goods or services? What advantages do they have over mine regarding features or product(s)?
PRICE: What pricing strategy do they employ? Is it a one-time fee or a monthly fee? What about the pricing is appealing?
PROMOTION: How do they advertise their products and brand? What digital platforms do they actively promote? What strategies do they employ to advertise?
PLACE: The location where they sell. Do they operate a website or have physical locations where customers may visit them?
Focusing on the topics you’re interested in learning about will help you learn a lot from this approach. Include any quantitative data you want to use in conjunction with the qualitative data.
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Find best practices
Because they have continuously tested and improved their strategy across several digital channels, your top rivals are successful for a reason.
This indicates that they have created best practices that you may use.
Your rivals may be successful in marketing on TikTok. You may observe your rivals’ presence through competitive analytics; if most of them use it, you should consider it.
Or you can observe that some of your rivals have improved their positions on search engine results pages like Google or Bing. This indicates that they are employing SEO to optimize for prominent keyword and phrase searches.
Advice: Check out this SEO keyword research toolbox to find out how you can do the same!
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Use a framework for analysis
Depending on what you want to learn, you may utilize various techniques to study your competition. Once you have all the information, you can utilize SWOT analysis to find new market opportunities or threats.
You may also use this to determine your strengths and weaknesses.
Porter’s Five Forces is another framework to take into account.
This examines the market forces at work in an industry, including the danger of new competitors and replacements, the negotiating strength of substitutes, the competition between businesses, and the bargaining power of suppliers and potential customers.
Additionally, you may utilize a growth share matrix created by Boston Consulting Group to compare your goods and services to those of your rivals. Based on growth and market share, this is divided into four categories (Star, Question mark, Cash cow, and Pet) to aid in analysis.
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Organize your data for analysis
Any information you get about your rivals should be structured.
You can then review any data points to gather knowledge for the next digital actions. This is especially crucial when collecting information from several rivals since it will enable you to compare areas of similarity and find chances.
Price range, social media activity, lead generating strategies, content marketing projects, first-time visitor offers, etc., are among the factors to be examined.
What are the types of competitive analysis?
There are several types of competitive analysis depending on your company and needs. Each one will focus on a niche area you want to analyze and improve to drive targets and KPIs such as leads, revenue, and brand awareness.
These are the main types that focus on key digital marketing channels, but you can also analyze email (check out our ultimate guide to email marketing for guidance) or the UI and UX of a website.
PPC competitor analysis
Discovering the keywords or phrases your rivals are bidding on is part of a PPC competition study. The end objective is to develop PPC ads that outperform your rivals and produce results. You can look at the kinds of advertisements they run and the networks or platforms where they run them.
Do they pay for pricey keywords or phrases intended to increase conversions? Or is brand recognition the main goal of their PPC campaign?
To examine the messaging and CTAs on their landing sites, study them. Are they using a few money pages or designing unique landing sites for each campaign? Knowing this can help you understand your competition’s goals and spending plans.
Here are a few methods you may employ:
- Compare website functionality, such as page speeds
- Look for keyword gaps
- Compare the sources of backlinks.
- Examine their tactics for ranking for extra keywords, such as whether they have a blog or a resources section.
- Look at popular pages and traffic
Social media competitor analysis
Any business may benefit from using social media to increase consumer interaction and generate leads (especially since social commerce has become more widespread). Knowing where your audience hangs out can help you effectively target them on social media.
By conducting a competitive analysis, you may learn more about your rivals’ social media presence, as well as their target audiences and number of followers. Aside from post frequency and timing, you should also consider the sort of information uploaded, such as videos or blog links. Additionally, peek at their content themes or buckets to discover what subjects they cover.
Customer interactions through comments may be enlightening, and engagement rates can show you which content is more popular with their audience.
Competitor analysis tools
There are several tools available to you for competitor analysis.
Your data collecting will become easier, more precise, and more effective.
Here are a few instances of the top tools for several crucial areas:
SEO Analysis:
- Ahrefs – see any website’s best performing keywords and estimate keyword traffic
- SE Ranking displays the effectiveness of sponsored and organic search results and keywords.
PPC analysis
- SEMRush – performs site audits, displays competition keywords, and analyzes backlinks
- Spyfu investigates the most lucrative keywords used by your rivals in PPC advertising.
- You may compare your results with other businesses participating in the same auctions using Google Ads Auctions Insight.
Keyword research
Similarweb gives engagement metrics, keyword trends, and web and channel traffic statistics.
Social media analysis
- Sprout Social allows you to track the performance of funded content as well as follower growth, engagement, hashtag trends, and conversions.
- You may search the Facebook Ad Library for advertisements that appear on Instagram, Facebook, and other Meta products.
Become a Successful Digital Marketing Strategist
Put digital techniques at your company’s core to increase leads, sales, and awareness. You may improve your ability to manage finances and teams, utilize your digital channels to their full potential, and develop into a digital leader with the aid of Brandz on Web.