In today’s business environment that revolves around digital media, you are always surrounded by competitions. This often becomes the thing that demoralizes someone who just starts or wants to start a business.
However, competitors can be something that actually helps your business grow. If we talk about digital marketing strategy, almost nothing is a secret, and you can always identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
This article will discover how identifying your competitor’s marketing mistakes can be an invaluable tool for your business.
Why Should You Pay Attention to Your Competitors?
There is that famous old saying about knowing your enemy to know yourself better. While it might sound over-the-top in this context, it actually carries a lot of context to what we are going to discuss.
There are a lot of important lessons to learn from your competitors’ strategy. Take notes from their good decisions, but also pay attention to things that they did wrong. When you take time to identify your competitors’ flaws, you will know what decisions to avoid or how to find a way to work around them.
Here are some reasons why you should pay attention to your competitors marketing strategies:
You want to be the best.
If you noticed that your competitor is doing better than you, instead of losing motivation, start identifying the reasons why you fall behind. Make a list of questions about what makes your competition good in this industry.
Take note and start finding where you can implement their strategies in your business. Find out what else you can improve. Remember that when growing your business, you can always aim further.
You want the most exposure.
Exposure is the main goal of digital marketing, and when your competition gains more traffic than you are, it is time to identify their strategies. Take a look at what media they focus on, how much they might spend on social media campaigns, and what kind of persona they try to take.
In this case, it is a good idea to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and see how you perceive your competition’s marketing effort.
You want to be one step ahead.
Once you gain enough information from your competition, it is time to implement them in your marketing effort. Remember that you are not aiming to be your competitors’ carbon copy, instead use their strategies as inspiration and improve on them.
Mix your own ideas with theirs and find the things you can do better. Since your competitors can also identify your strengths and weaknesses, set yourself far ahead and avoid stagnation.
With clear goals and objectives, now is the time to identify what effort you can make to know your competitions better and learn from them.
1. Know Who Your Competitors Are
When a high quantity of competitions surrounds you, sometimes knowing them in general is just not enough. First, you need to classify them into different categories. There are three types of competitors, they are:
- Primary competitors: direct business competitors that share the same market details with you.
- Secondary competitors: businesses that offer the same type of services as your business but not your direct competitors.
- Tertiary competitors: businesses that provide a somewhat similar or related service as your business, but you are not necessarily competing for the same target market.
Classifying your competitors into different categories allows you to know which ones need your focus more. It is also better to limit the number of competitors you are investigating to avoid spending too much time.
2. Check Domain Authority
A website’s domain authority is its reputation from the search engine’s viewpoint. When your website has a good domain authority, it has a better chance to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
You can use online tools to identify your competitors’ domain authority, one of which is Moz Open Site Explorer. By pasting a website’s URL into the available search bar, you will be able to know its domain authority core and compare it to yours.
If you find that your score is lower than your competitors, you can follow tips and tricks to improve it. A higher ranking on the SERPs will give you more chances to gain traffic and build more brand trust.
3. Inspect Their Website and Overall UX
Checking your competitors’ websites is a good step to know their competencies and how much effort they put into digital marketing. You can see how fast their websites load; the recommended load page for a website is below three seconds.
You can also check if your competitors’ websites use SSL certificates by looking at their URL and see if they begin with HTTPS. Using HTTPS shows that your competitors care about security on their website.
Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash
Another aspect to check is your competitor’s website’s overall UX. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer and see if their websites’ interface looks attractive and easy to navigate. You can also learn about what website builders they use to create their website.
Many websites builder service like Zyro builder allows you to build a website with ease. Zyro also offers super-fast page load and a vast library of templates to help you have a better UX and UI.
4. Subscribe to Their Newsletter
Subscribing to your competitors’ newsletters allows you to get useful information about their marketing strategy straight into your inbox. You can see how they design their newsletter, what kind of promotions they run, and how they phrase their CTA.
Learn and implement useful information from their newsletter, but remember that you are not looking to be a copy cat. Treat this info as inspiration and apply your own creativity when you decide to use them in your marketing effort.
5. Audit Their Blog
Your competitor’s blog post is another thing that you should inspect. Learn what keywords become your competitor’s target, check that keyword performance, and you can either make use of the same keyword or avoid it altogether if you think it is overly-saturated.
Take a look at how they implement keywords into their blog posts since they might have a good writing technique that you can use. Blog posts can also reveal if your competitor has a specific target audience that you might be missing out.
This process can be greatly simplified by using a tool like Ahrefs. With it, you’ll only need a few button clicks to learn what are the top-ranking pages on your competitor’s blog and what keywords they’re prioritizing.
6. Analyze Their Social Media
Social media platforms are undeniably the biggest channel for digital marketing nowadays. It is important to understand how well your competitors use social media to be able to actually compete with them.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Pay attention to how often they post on their social media, what tone of voice they use, and what kind of post appears to gain more engagement. Once again, compare this to your own effort and look for any flaws in their social media campaigns.
7. Try Their Products
A business’s marketing efforts revolve around its product. You can spend your time analyzing your competitor’s marketing strategies, but don’t forget to examine their product.
What makes them better than your product? What do you find lacking? Is there anything that you can implement and improve? These are the questions you should ask yourself while trying your competitor’s products.
Photo by Clarissa Watson on Unsplash
Every product has its own strengths and weaknesses; implement its strengths and find ways to avoid the same flaws from your competitors.
8. See How Customers Talk About Them
When you try to identify your competitors, it can be hard to recognize which aspects of them are considered as lacking, and you need to improve. However, there is a way to get a more direct and clear answer for this by conducting social listening and look at their product reviews.
Customers will be more likely to express what they think is good and what is lacking from a particular product or service in the review section. By looking at these reviews, you can tell which aspects of your competitors you need to pick and which ones are better avoided.
By looking at users’ reviews or conducting social listening of your competitor’s product, it is also possible to identify where their customers are coming from. Use this information to plan your own marketing strategies.
9. Track Their Activities
A marketing campaign involves many activities that go side by side with each other. You can take a look at their PR strategies and even business development strategies.
For example, see how they handle their customer support. If you noticed any unsatisfied customers, it could be your new sales opportunity. When you pay attention to what your competitors are doing, it can be really easy to develop a new idea for your marketing strategy.
10. Create a SWOT Analysis
After you gain enough information about your competitors’ strategies, it is time to make a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats (SWOT) analysis.
As the name suggests, this analysis involves you and your team writing down what you think are your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses based on your examination. You can compare them to your business and list down any potential opportunities and threats that you have to look out for based on that data.
Many online resources explain more about SWOT analysis and offer a free template for you to use if you are unsure what to do.
Conclusion
In this digital era where you have to compete with numerous other businesses that offer the same products and services as you, growing can be a real challenge. However, competition does not always mean an obstacle.
Learning from your competitors can prove to be an invaluable way to help you grow your business further. In this article, we learned that there are three main reasons why you should pay attention to your competitors, including:
- You want to be the best,
- you want the most exposure, and
- you want to be one step ahead of the competition.
These points can be achieved by practicing some measure to know more about your competitors’ digital marketing strategies; they are:
- Know who your competitors are.
- Check their domain authority.
- Inspecting their website and overall UX
- Subscribe to their newsletter
- Audit their blog
- Analyze their social media
- Try their product
- See how customers talk about them
- Track their activities
- Create a SWOT analysis
Growing a business can be jarring since it involves many trials and errors. But if you can learn from your competitors’ mistakes, you can avoid making them yourselves and figure out new strategies to achieve success.
