Analyzing your competitors is very important for any business because it helps to determine your weak points, find ways to overcome them, and outrank the competitors. It also enables you to identify your strengths and improve them to stay on top.
There are two types of competitors.
Direct Competitors:- Companies that offer similar products or services as you are Direct Competitors.
Indirect Competitors:- Companies that offer different products or services but target the same audience as yours.
Table of Contents
What is Competitor Analysis in Digital Marketing?
Competitor analysis is the process of analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to identify areas or opportunities for improvement.
For Example, your social media posts and videos are not getting much engagement despite your efforts to create good content. In this case, you could search for your competitors on social media channels and try to figure out what makes their videos viral or what hook they have used to get the attention of most customers.
However good you are at what you do, there is always somebody who is doing it better than you. So, it is not wrong to learn the strategies behind their growth and implement them in your digital marketing strategy.
Why is competitor analysis important?
As discussed above, competitor analysis is essential to investigate what the competitors are doing, how well they are doing, where we are weak, and how to overcome our weaknesses and outdo them to increase your brand awareness, credibility, online presence, and online engagement.
Competitor Analysis helps a business to identify the following:-
Identifying market Position
By identifying the market leaders in your niche, you can discover valuable insights into how they generate revenue and remain at the top position in your industry.
By analyzing their followers, you can track the behavioral patterns of their customers. This information helps you to gain and devise accurate market tactics to acquire more customers.
Awareness of market trends
Being aware of the trends in your industry can help you make careful decisions, such as expanding your business or developing a new product, and avoid risks.
Customer Preferences
Competitor analysis helps you analyze customer preferences and deliver tailor-made services or products that satisfy customers’ needs.
Identifying new trends and best practices
With the advent of emerging technology day by day, spying on competitors helps to understand their product innovation and the use of new technology, which can cause a trendsetter. Joining the club and being one among setting* the trend saves your business from being outdated.
SWOT Analysis
Every business has strengths and a unique selling point. Analyzing your strengths and weaknesses and comparing them with your competitors can help you achieve your objectives and outperform your competitors.
To Refine your Strategies
Following the same pattern of business strategy may not always be advantageous. As customers’ preferences change, your strategies for reaching them and adapting to their changing needs are crucial for a business to survive.
As competitors race to attract customers with their competitive pricing, innovative products, and solutions to their pain points, it is always smart to refine marketing strategies periodically.
Types of Competitor Analysis
There are various types of competitor analysis in digital marketing.
Social media marketing
Analyzing the social media profiles and ad campaigns can give you information about the type of content that is liked by the target audience and engaged primarily with, their follower count, the kind of ad campaign they run, the objective of their ad campaign, their target strategies, and so on.
It helps to compare the performance of the competitors across different social media channels and benchmark against them.
PPC
Analyzing the sponsored ads of your competitors that appear on the search engine results page can give you insights about the title and meta description used by the competitor and the effectiveness of their landing page.
SEO
Competitor analysis in SEO involves analyzing everything about your competitor’s website, from the site architecture to the content they publish, the keywords they use and their interlinking strategies, and the referring domains that contribute to their backlinks.
Content Marketing
Assess the type of content they create like blogs, videos, infographics, e-books, podcasts, etc. The next step is to determine their consistency and frequency of content creation. By analyzing the topics they cover, you can identify the content gap and create content in the topics you have missed. Also analysing the quality and depth of their content and the engagement of their content on social media, you can get an idea about what good content is and how to create it.
Steps in Competitor Analysis
- Identify your competitors:- Find the top 10 competitors in your niche who offer products or services similar to you and target the same audience. You can do this by searching your primary keyword on Google and finding the top 10 results on the SERP.
- Investigate your competitors’ Social media ad strategy:-Using the Facebook ads library identify and analyze the ad strategy of your competitors.
- Analyse Google ads strategy, and the sponsored ads on Google, and analyze the PPC ad strategy of your competitors.
- Determine the Organic traffic:- Using various SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, etc, determine the organic traffic of the competitor’s website.
- Evaluate competitor’s content marketing strategies:- By analyzing the social media of competitors, assess their content marketing strategies.
- Organize all the results and identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement by doing a SWOT analysis.
Devise an improved Marketing Strategy.
After all the above analysis is done and the results are put together, the last step in Competitor Analysis is to make changes to the existing marketing strategy or devise an improved marketing strategy based on your research to gain a competitive edge.
