Leena Guha Roy
Competition comes when God wants you to be blessed. If there is no competitors, it indicates that there is something wrong in your business ideas; or none believes in the possibility of making money in this business areas. So, if there is competitors, start believing that you are in the right path of your business and there will be whole lot of things to learn from your competitors. Competition is not something which inspires you fear. Your competitors may be good at something which you can adapt in your marketing, else they can even cause you to go broke. Choice is yours!
Here goes the list of kick-ass techniques to spy of your industry competitors and their digital marketing activities. You must find out in which activities your competitors are performing better. If you thoroughly check their strategies, you may find their loopholes also. Instead of getting afraid of competition, let your team be empowered and emboldened by it. One thing you always need to remember that spying on your competition is not a one time job, it is a continuous process to following them online to check their activities in various digital marketing areas such social media content, website design and technologies , SEO and SEO keyword targeting, their backlinking strategy, artwork style and many more.
Here we will explore how you can get a thorough look at your competitors on each of the following areas:
1. Social Media Marketing
2. Website design and techniques
3. Search Engine Marketing and Website traffic
4. Search Engine Marketing and Display ads (PPC)
5. Blog Content
6. Email Marketing
7. Branding approach
Social Media Marketing
Let us start with organic content marketing on Social Media. First, make a list of your immediate competitors and find them out on various platform. You need to understand which social media platform they choose to be for marketing, what type of content topic they are talking about on Social Media, how they are engaging the audience on the platform, how they are dealing with negative comments created by unhappy customers, how they introducing new products on social media. You can also monitor all their hashtag-based campaigns and how they feed content for each campaign.
Website design and techniques
Here you need to thoroughly check your competitors’ website URL. The purpose of the checking their website is to understand what technologies they have used on their website, what features they are using to engage their website visitors, if they have implemented contextual marketing tactics, how they have planned the content to get better engage, evaluate their website content and try to understand how they are presenting the brand through the content. If you get to know their brand identity you can either emulate it or make your different. Here you can take a thorough look at their product or service pricing as well as USP of their business or revenue model.
Search Engine Marketing and Website traffic
There are huge number of things to check when it come SEO and website traffic analysis for competitors. Don’t worry, everything you have do perfectly buy using tools. There are ridiculous number of online tools (both paid and unpaid) to dig down into your competitors’ SEO strategy. Which keywords they are using to bring organic traffic to website, how is their website domain authority, how strong they are at backlinking, how they are managing the online brand reputation – all of them you can spy on using various tools like SEMRush, MOZ, Rank Tracker etc. You can also create Google alert for the keywords your competitors are using and thus you can directly check what type of content they are posting on their blogs.
Search Engine Marketing and Display ads (PPC)
Here you can use Keyword tracking tool to check which keywords your competitors are using for SEM and PPC campaign. This type of tool can even give you a fair idea of more keywords related to the one chosen by your competitors. Then you can use Adword keywords planner to estimate your campaign budget and search volume for the keyword chosen by us. Thus you can discover keywords worth bidding to run the campaign.
Blog Content
Blog is the crucial part of your marketing activities like social media. Similarly, your competitors also take this activity seriously. Now your job is to check out which topic they are talking about on their blog, how they are mapping their content to their buyer persona, how they are engaging their visitor on the blog section, apart from content, what else they are offering to the visitor to fulfil their search need.
Email Marketing:
When it comes to email marketing, first thing you need to do is to subscribe their newsletter. If they have a good marketing strategy, they must have newsletter subscription feature for visitors on the website. You just subscribe it and wait for their newsletter or EDM or any other promotional mail. You can check how they promote their business, how they use personalization field in the mail, how they write subject line for mailer, how frequently they release the mail, how they use content to differentiate company newsletter or any promotional mail or holiday wish for their subscriber.
Branding Approach:
This is the most challenging, rather tricky task when you want to spy on competitor’s marketing approach. Don’t just follow their marketing activities, monitor their brand. If you just follow, what marketing trend and practice they are doing, you may miss out what their audience is saying about them and how they deal with it.
Your real job starts now. You just out the strength and weaknesses of your competitors and plan for a marketing campaign in each area of marketing. You need to find our immediate failure of your competitor that can surely give you success. And that is the clever way.
If you wish us to handle all these tasks on behalf of you, you can contact us.
