The rule of any business is to stay a step ahead of the competitors in the industry. Some like-minded people try to solve a similar problem in every sector or grasp the same customer base as yours. Competition is inevitable, and the best response to the contest is to learn what all good things they are doing for the consumers and replicate those strategies as your own.
There is always enough room in any sector for you and your competition to flourish. Still, things start worsening when the market begins to get saturated, and you and your competitor have to target the same customer or client. You are here to win and to get the maximum number of people on your plane. Thus, it becomes vital to track and check your competitors’ strategies. Having an eye on the competition also helps you grow dynamically and improve customer care, products, and business models.
How often should you be monitoring your competition?
You are here to build a business, improve your product and services, and innovate the business model to cope with the market shifts. Tracking the competition is necessary, but always focusing on the match could turn to be counter-positive. If you are not number one, it is evident that you are not doing something that you should have done. It would be best to dig deep into the keywords that drive the most leads to your competitor’s website.
If you are aggressively expanding and want to take a big advantage over your competitor, you could also opt to spy on their PPC and Facebook ads campaign. If you are starting your business and have a good customer response, it would not be wise always to monitor the competitor. Instead, put a major emphasis on improving the product, customer service and reducing the number of steps a customer takes to reach you.
All of your campaigns could be inspired by your competitor’s best practices, but they should be solely focused on solving the consumer’s pain points. Always focus on imparting values with your digital campaigns and be so meaningful that the customer won’t leave you in the long run.
Focus on Market Shifts
The marketing and sales have begun to transform from process to customer. The digital world has fierce competition, and the MNCs have very well utilized digitalization to expand globally. Every brand tries hard to let its customers hear its voice. It would be best to take up this challenge and create marketing campaigns that focus more on emotions than the selling process. A buyer takes a minimum of 7 clicks to your funnel before purchasing. Thus, you need to make sure that you create values every time to stay longer in the people’s minds. The market has shifted from process to emotions.
Marketing in today’s world is all about creating values in the minds of the people. Even if your competitor has a better selling process but if you can touch the customer’s feelings, there is a huge chance that they will choose you.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for “Strength Weakness Opportunities Threats.” A SWOT analysis is used to analyze the business areas that perform well compared to the competition, identifying the areas outplayed by the competition and recognizing the improvement steps. Also, it is used to look up for opportunities to expand and cope with the threats that could come in the way. Once you understand what SWOT analysis is, you could move one step ahead and brainstorm what the SWOT could be for your business and your competition. It allows you to compare the areas where you or your competitor is strong.
This brainstorming could also help strengthen your business’s weak areas and tackle the competition by knowing their vulnerable points. If you know the opportunities to expand your business, then that is good. But if you know the opportunities of your competitor and outplayed them even before they noticed, you are here to rule the game. Nobody likes threats. Thus, it is very vital to focus and put a major emphasis on removing the threat aspect to your business.
SWOT would help you understand how many more hirings you need to take full advantage of the opportunity that lies ahead, and understand how much effort should be undertaken to improve the business culture and manage the financial resources.
Put a major emphasis on creating brand awareness by Email Marketing.
Email Marketing is one of the most crucial but overlooked sections of digital marketing. It helps you stay in touch with the customer for a long time that helps in creating brand awareness. The internet world focuses on many campaigns, but they forget how important it is to gain the audience’s trust. Email Marketing could be game-changing for you in the long run. It is advisable to add an option for the audience to opt-in for future emails. If they are ready to opt-in, it means that they want to hear from you. You could use the email list to inform the audience about your new products and services. Above all, you could use this opportunity to send some valuable and informative gifts as well. It would help you last longer in the minds of the people.
According to a report by Hubspot, 73% of millennials want to hear more from the brands through emails, and 80% of business specialists believe that email marketing helps in client retention. It is no secret that selling to an existing and loyal client is way easier than acquiring a new customer. Hence, you could use email marketing wisely to create brand awareness, and repetitive sales funnel for yourself. It would also create a loyal audience base that would always choose you over your competitor.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the main way of conversing with the audience about your product or services. It is a competitive space but worth doing it. A majority of the organic traffic is going to come from search engine results. Thus, you need to make sure that you rank for the keywords related to your product or niche. A major step you could take is analyzing the keywords and blogs that bring the most traffic to your main competitors. Once you see the kind of values they provide to the user, you can decide how to add the contents to your blog that they might be missing and add more values to the user.
Also, backlinks are still relevant and a major part of SEO. Tools like Ahrefs and Spyfu can help you find the websites that are linking to your competitor. You can move one step ahead by analyzing any broken or dead link in their website and outreach them so that they could replace the broken link with that of yours.
SEO is a long-form strategy. You may not see immediate results, but you would experience a definite outcome with time. Try to improve the technical factors of your website, like mobile responsiveness and page loading speed. Once you do SEO in the right direction, you have a great chance to outrank your competition with time.
Track your competitor’s Facebook ad campaign
According to Facebook’s most recent report, there are 1.785 billion people who use this platform daily. This huge number in itself proves how potent Facebook ad campaigns could be. It is no secret that every marketer puts Facebook ad campaigns at the top to get quality leads and conversions. Hence it becomes vital to track the competitors’ campaigns and understand what performs the best for them. By competitive analysis and understanding the key metrics, you could formulate an excellent campaign for yourself.
You could watch your competitor’s Facebook ads through their Business Page or the Facebook Ad Library. To tackle the privacy concerns, Facebook released an ad-transparency tool in 2018 that allows you to see which ads a page is running. This publicized data could help you have a better understanding of what your competitors are doing and when.
At the top right corner of any Facebook ad, you would see three dots. Click on that and check “Why am I seeing this ad?”. You could use this data to understand who your competitors are targeting. It would help you analyze their campaign and plan out a better strategy for the Facebook Ads Campaign.
Analyze SEM campaigns of your competition
In Google Ads, you could review the auction insights to identify the competitors competing with you for the exact keywords as yours. The information may help you decide whether your competition is more aggressive in their bids or price range. The impression data could also help you analyze if you could benefit by enhancing your budget, quality score, or bids. Other tools like Spyfu, Semrush, iSpionage, and KeywordSpy could help you analyze competitor’s keywords, domains, ad copy, and AdWords spend.
In general, be certain that you take a look at competitor’s PPC data with an investigative eye and meanwhile have an idea about your campaign’s objectives and advancement. The aggressive study is useful if you use it as a part of strengthening your SEM campaign.
Conclusion
The competitive analysis helps you perform better in the market space. You could also analyze your competitors’ steps to create brand awareness and replicate the best practices. It is always wise to learn from the mistakes of others.
The bigger picture should always be to understand the customers’ pain points and address them like no one else. Take time to understand the steps that you have to undertake to address solutions. The digital marketing space is more effective when you understand the emotions of your customers. You don’t have to sell your products; instead, create awareness of how your products could solve a particular problem. Once you successfully create brand awareness and brand loyalty among your customers, you have already won a major chunk of the war. Also, focus on customer service and help the customers in every step with all your might. The digital world may have fierce competition, but your customer service and products should segregate you from the competition.
About the author:
The rule of any business is to stay a step ahead of the competitors in the industry. Some like-minded people try to solve a similar problem in every sector or grasp the same customer base as yours. Competition is inevitable, and the best response to the contest is to learn what all good things they are doing for the consumers and replicate those strategies as your own.
There is always enough room in any sector for you and your competition to flourish. Still, things start worsening when the market begins to get saturated, and you and your competitor have to target the same customer or client. You are here to win and to get the maximum number of people on your plane. Thus, it becomes vital to track and check your competitors' strategies. Having an eye on the competition also helps you grow dynamically and improve customer care, products, and business models.
How often should you be monitoring your competition?
You are here to build a business, improve your product and services, and innovate the business model to cope with the market shifts. Tracking the competition is necessary, but always focusing on the match could turn to be counter-positive. If you are not number one, it is evident that you are not doing something that you should have done. It would be best to dig deep into the keywords that drive the most leads to your competitor's website.
If you are aggressively expanding and want to take a big advantage over your competitor, you could also opt to spy on their PPC and Facebook ads campaign. If you are starting your business and have a good customer response, it would not be wise always to monitor the competitor. Instead, put a major emphasis on improving the product, customer service and reducing the number of steps a customer takes to reach you.
All of your campaigns could be inspired by your competitor's best practices, but they should be solely focused on solving the consumer's pain points. Always focus on imparting values with your digital campaigns and be so meaningful that the customer won't leave you in the long run.
Focus on Market Shifts
The marketing and sales have begun to transform from process to customer. The digital world has fierce competition, and the MNCs have very well utilized digitalization to expand globally. Every brand tries hard to let its customers hear its voice. It would be best to take up this challenge and create marketing campaigns that focus more on emotions than the selling process. A buyer takes a minimum of 7 clicks to your funnel before purchasing. Thus, you need to make sure that you create values every time to stay longer in the people's minds. The market has shifted from process to emotions.
Marketing in today's world is all about creating values in the minds of the people. Even if your competitor has a better selling process but if you can touch the customer's feelings, there is a huge chance that they will choose you.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for "Strength Weakness Opportunities Threats.” A SWOT analysis is used to analyze the business areas that perform well compared to the competition, identifying the areas outplayed by the competition and recognizing the improvement steps. Also, it is used to look up for opportunities to expand and cope with the threats that could come in the way. Once you understand what SWOT analysis is, you could move one step ahead and brainstorm what the SWOT could be for your business and your competition. It allows you to compare the areas where you or your competitor is strong.
This brainstorming could also help strengthen your business's weak areas and tackle the competition by knowing their vulnerable points. If you know the opportunities to expand your business, then that is good. But if you know the opportunities of your competitor and outplayed them even before they noticed, you are here to rule the game. Nobody likes threats. Thus, it is very vital to focus and put a major emphasis on removing the threat aspect to your business.
SWOT would help you understand how many more hirings you need to take full advantage of the opportunity that lies ahead, and understand how much effort should be undertaken to improve the business culture and manage the financial resources.
Put a major emphasis on creating brand awareness by Email Marketing.
Email Marketing is one of the most crucial but overlooked sections of digital marketing. It helps you stay in touch with the customer for a long time that helps in creating brand awareness. The internet world focuses on many campaigns, but they forget how important it is to gain the audience's trust. Email Marketing could be game-changing for you in the long run. It is advisable to add an option for the audience to opt-in for future emails. If they are ready to opt-in, it means that they want to hear from you. You could use the email list to inform the audience about your new products and services. Above all, you could use this opportunity to send some valuable and informative gifts as well. It would help you last longer in the minds of the people.
According to a report by Hubspot, 73% of millennials want to hear more from the brands through emails, and 80% of business specialists believe that email marketing helps in client retention. It is no secret that selling to an existing and loyal client is way easier than acquiring a new customer. Hence, you could use email marketing wisely to create brand awareness, and repetitive sales funnel for yourself. It would also create a loyal audience base that would always choose you over your competitor.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the main way of conversing with the audience about your product or services. It is a competitive space but worth doing it. A majority of the organic traffic is going to come from search engine results. Thus, you need to make sure that you rank for the keywords related to your product or niche. A major step you could take is analyzing the keywords and blogs that bring the most traffic to your main competitors. Once you see the kind of values they provide to the user, you can decide how to add the contents to your blog that they might be missing and add more values to the user.
Also, backlinks are still relevant and a major part of SEO. Tools like Ahrefs and Spyfu can help you find the websites that are linking to your competitor. You can move one step ahead by analyzing any broken or dead link in their website and outreach them so that they could replace the broken link with that of yours.
SEO is a long-form strategy. You may not see immediate results, but you would experience a definite outcome with time. Try to improve the technical factors of your website, like mobile responsiveness and page loading speed. Once you do SEO in the right direction, you have a great chance to outrank your competition with time.
Track your competitor's Facebook ad campaign
According to Facebook's most recent report, there are 1.785 billion people who use this platform daily. This huge number in itself proves how potent Facebook ad campaigns could be. It is no secret that every marketer puts Facebook ad campaigns at the top to get quality leads and conversions. Hence it becomes vital to track the competitors' campaigns and understand what performs the best for them. By competitive analysis and understanding the key metrics, you could formulate an excellent campaign for yourself.
You could watch your competitor's Facebook ads through their Business Page or the Facebook Ad Library. To tackle the privacy concerns, Facebook released an ad-transparency tool in 2018 that allows you to see which ads a page is running. This publicized data could help you have a better understanding of what your competitors are doing and when.
At the top right corner of any Facebook ad, you would see three dots. Click on that and check "Why am I seeing this ad?". You could use this data to understand who your competitors are targeting. It would help you analyze their campaign and plan out a better strategy for the Facebook Ads Campaign.
Analyze SEM campaigns of your competition
In Google Ads, you could review the auction insights to identify the competitors competing with you for the exact keywords as yours. The information may help you decide whether your competition is more aggressive in their bids or price range. The impression data could also help you analyze if you could benefit by enhancing your budget, quality score, or bids. Other tools like Spyfu, Semrush, iSpionage, and KeywordSpy could help you analyze competitor's keywords, domains, ad copy, and AdWords spend.
In general, be certain that you take a look at competitor's PPC data with an investigative eye and meanwhile have an idea about your campaign's objectives and advancement. The aggressive study is useful if you use it as a part of strengthening your SEM campaign.
Conclusion
The competitive analysis helps you perform better in the market space. You could also analyze your competitors' steps to create brand awareness and replicate the best practices. It is always wise to learn from the mistakes of others.
The bigger picture should always be to understand the customers' pain points and address them like no one else. Take time to understand the steps that you have to undertake to address solutions. The digital marketing space is more effective when you understand the emotions of your customers. You don't have to sell your products; instead, create awareness of how your products could solve a particular problem. Once you successfully create brand awareness and brand loyalty among your customers, you have already won a major chunk of the war. Also, focus on customer service and help the customers in every step with all your might. The digital world may have fierce competition, but your customer service and products should segregate you from the competition.
