Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs to Include Competition Monitoring
A solid marketing strategy isn’t complete without analysis of your competition. It may seem weird to spend precious working hours looking at your competitors, but it’s a strategy that can pay off big time.
When you monitor your competition, you’ll be able to do the following.
- Discover what works among your target audience. You’ll see what products, social media posts, blog content, and so on that resonate with them. Once you figure out why those work, you’ll be able to integrate those tactics into your strategy and strengthen your business. Remember when Apple made the iconic “1984” commercial for the Super Bowl? That was the first time a commercial aired only during the Superbowl. Its stellar success caused other advertisers to take note, and now it’s common practice to make a commercial tailored to the Super Bowl airing.
- Identify what does not work among your target audience. Just as important as know what to do is to know what not to do. The wisest leaders learn a lot from mistakes, including mistakes made by others. Remember the hashtag #susanalbumparty? It was intended to promote Susan Boyle’s album party, but quickly trended on Twitter for its entirely different interpretation. Lesson learned by advertisers everywhere: always see if there is any other possible way to interpret a hashtag.
- See what you’re not doing, but you should. Analyzing your competition can show you what products/services you should be offering, what marketing tactics you should employ, what relevant industry topics you should write about, and a whole other host of information. It can also be the creative spark you need to generate new ideas. Do what your competition does, but better.
- See what they’re not doing, that you can. Analyzing your competition can also illuminate holes in their products/services offering, marketing tactics, etc. You can be sure to be where your competition isn’t to help your organization stand out.
You can monitor anything your competition makes/produces/distributes. Below are some useful avenues to monitoring your competition.
Monitoring Competitor’s Social Media
When monitoring your competitor’s social media, you’ll want to ask these questions:
- What causes their posts to get high engagement, and how can I replicate that?
- How often are they posting?
- What pages are they sharing posts from, and should I also be engaging with them?
- What are they doing that’s unique or effective, and how can I replicate it?
- What mistakes are they making that I should avoid?
- What can I do to provide even more value to the audience?
To monitor competitors’ Facebook, use Pages to Watch. It allows you to select pages to monitor, showing you their total page likes, percent increase in page likes from last week, number of posts, total engagement, and top posts.
To monitor competitors’ Twitter, create private Twitter lists. You’ll be able to see all their tweets without needing to follow the accounts.
To see which content from your competitor is shared most on social media, enter in their website link to BuzzSumo.
If you’re considering launching a new social media account, see how your competitors are doing on that platform. If they all see thriving accounts, it’s likely somewhere you want to be. If their accounts are limping along, you’re probably fine skipping that network (unless you’re convinced you can do it really well, then you can reach new customers with little competition).
Website Monitoring
Nothing like a grade to help you make an easy comparison. Website grader (https://website.grader.com/) is a free tool that grades websites. You can see what areas your competition is doing well and doing poorly, monitor for changes in the grade over time, and compare it to your own site.
If your competitor hosts a blog, you can gain valuable insight from it by asking yourself these questions:
- What topics are they covering that I should be as well?
- What topics can I cover that they are not?
- What did they forget to mention?
- What can I write to be more in-depth?
- What can I write to be more current?
- What can I write to offer a unique perspective?
- What are customers saying in the comments? Is this information resonating with them? Are they asking questions I can answer?
You can use Feedly to easily organize blog posts from all your competitors in one place.
News Coverage
Create Google Alerts for your competition to find out when they are mentioned online. If you see a news story about them, identify who the journalist is. They’ve already written about your industry, so they could be a good resource for you to pitch a story to. This approach takes way less time than trying to identify journalists who might be interested.
Email/Newsletter
If your competitor offers an email or newsletter subscription, sign up. You’ll be able to see topics from the consumer point of view and gain insight on what the organization is doing, gaining more valuable ideas on what to implement and what to avoid.
Products and Services
Keeping up to date with your competitor’s products and services helps you know what they are offering that you should too, what you offer that they do not, and what you both offer that you can offer better. You can get this information from exploring their website and by visiting their booth at event and trade shows.
Competition monitoring is an important part of your business strategy. If you don’t have the time, considering hiring Quick Business Resolutions to assist you! We love taking tasks like these off the plates of busy business owners to free up their time. Check out our administrative services option today.