Online it is perhaps more important than offline to understand what promotion strategy the competition has approached, to be able to get ahead of them in organic searches, on social media, and subsequently get better results on the sales side.
The analysis of the competition will help you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the competition in promoting them through digital marketing. Also, using spying tools you will be able to estimate allocated budgets, you will see who their suppliers are in various online visibility segments, and understand how your offer differs from that of competitors so that you can then express this differentiation clearly, in a sentence. Focusing on a single competitive advantage will bring you the following benefits:
- Simplify the audience's perception.
- You occupy a clear place in the minds of consumers - you succeed in differentiating your brand from competitors' brands.
- You manage to make your competitors irrelevant by positioning yourself differently and uniquely.
Why should you do a digital competitor analysis?
- For strategic decisions – you adapt to the market and identify growth potential.
- Reduce costs - spot savings opportunities.
- Increase sales and profits - optimize prices, and identify trends.
- You minimize risks – you are connected to market changes, and you can take a stand quickly.
Relevant competitive analysis techniques:
- SWOT analysis– will help you identify your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, understanding your next steps.
- List your differentiators – write down what your competitive advantages are: Why should customers choose you over your competitors?
- Evaluate the market slice you already occupy, to know how much you still have to grow and what is, in general, the potential of the market you are in.
Here's what data about competitors you can find out using online spying tools:
- The websites they advertise on, where and what ads they place, and what collaborations they have with news sites, classifieds, or HR sites.
- What types of events, workshops, or webinars do they organize?
- What types of campaigns do they run, how often, and when do they run?
- The keywords relevant to their business and the top keywords accessed by their website visitors.
- Read their customer reviews and feedback/comments.
Only after you have checked these key features of your business, you can proceed to the next stage, namely: establishing the marketing strategy.
Online competitors' advertising can be spied in the following way: for Facebook Ads: facebook.com/ads/library, for LinkedIn ads on the competitor's page you look at "Ads", for YouTube ads you can use the Chrome extension - SwipeTube.
Top tools for spying on competitors in the virtual environment:
With these tools, you can find out information about: competitors' search engine positions on various SEO keywords, how much traffic they get from these positions, competitors, paid advertising, and backlinks.
BuiltWith is a detector that discovers what type of CMS a website uses but also installed tools, themes used in the CMS, installed modules, widgets, SSL certificates, scripts used, etc.
SimilarWeb is a digital intelligence software platform that allows users to track their:
- Website and App Traffic
- Page performance
- Keyword performance
- Audience values.
Companies can use SimilarWeb's market intelligence to gather information about competitors and their audience, potential customer behavior, keywords used, and competitor traffic sources.
Ahrefs.com explores everything we need, from anchor texts and links to the power of backlinks. Here one can also do a complete analysis of the competitors, find out what keywords they are using, and determine the search engine keywords and phrases as well as what keywords are being used for advertising and marketing campaigns. You can also see the organic and paid traffic data your competitors are getting.
SEMrush is a set of tools that provide multiple data about the health of a site. In the SEMrush reports we find the major errors of our site or the sites of competitors.
Types of reports generated in SEMrush:
- Monthly SEO report which includes: Site Health, Site Audit, Traffic Analytics (site visitors), positioning on various keywords in Google, and Backlink Analysis.
- Organic Search Positions report: Monthly search volume, Keyword difficulty, CPC, URL to site from keyword with positioning
- Backlinks Full Report: Total number of backlinks, type of backlinks, Referring Domain (sites with links to the analyzed site).
- Monthly Competitors Analysis: Top channels that bring traffic to competitors' websites, competitors' traffic by country of origin, etc.
Books/inspiration for more comprehensive competitor analysis and a better understanding of brand differentiation:
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant - Kim, W. Chan;
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Al Ries, Jack Trout.