Competitor analysis helps you understand your own position in the industry. It also gives you insight into your competitors’ strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. By analyzing the competition, you get valuable information and data on what’s working and what isn’t. This helps you move forward in the right direction without having to test different strategies yourself. However, how do you do a competitor analysis? Let’s find out.
How to Analyze Competitors in Digital Marketing
What is a Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis is the process of gathering competitors’ data in order to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and marketing strategies. Digital marketers then use this information to inform their own strategies. This includes their target audience, advertising efforts, product offerings, branding strategies, and more. The goal of a competitive analysis is to learn effective growth strategies from other businesses in your industry or market.
How to Do a Competitor Analysis?
Here’s a step-by-step process for doing a detailed competitor analysis.
Identify Your Competitors
The first step is to identify your top competitors in the market. Look for businesses that offer similar products or services as your brand.
Gather Information
The second, and probably the most important step of competitor analysis is gathering information about those businesses. This can be accomplished in a number of ways and using different tools depending on your marketing goals. The most important thing you need to understand about your competition is their target audience. This will also help you identify the platforms you should be focusing on. You can identify the target audience of a brand by looking at their:
- Website “About Us” section
- Social media interactions
- Blog posts
- Podcasts and webinars
- User-generated content (Reviews and testimonials)
Evaluate their Strengths and Weaknesses
Analyze the data you’ve collected to understand competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. For instance, where do they get traffic from? Or, what keywords are they targeting with Facebook advertising?
Develop a Competitive Advantage
Use the information you’ve gathered on your competitors and come up with a strategy to effectively compete with them moving forward. For instance, analyze their pay-per-click campaigns and create better ones for better results.
Monitor Your Competitors
Last but certainly not least, monitor your competitors. Competitor analysis isn’t a one-time process; you need to regularly do it to remain ahead of the curve.
Analyzing the 4 Ps of Marketing
Use the 4 Ps of marketing, product, price, promotion, and place to understand your competitors’ marketing tactics.
Product
Understand the qualities of the product your competitor is selling. What makes it more successful than yours?
Price
Are they using a one-time payment pricing model or a subscription model?
Promotion
What platforms and tactics your competitor uses to promote their product?
Place
Where does your competitor sell their product? Do they have a brick-and-mortar shop as well?
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Types of Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis can be divided into three main types. The right type depends on where your target audience hangs out. Let’s dive into each type.
PPC Competitor Analysis
Pay-per-click competitor analysis refers to analyzing your competitors’ campaigns. The goal is to find the keywords they’re bidding on and create a campaign around those keywords. The objective, of course, is to outrank the competition on paid search engine results. Study the type of ads they’re running on platforms like Google and Facebook. Are they trying to build brand awareness or generate conversions? Landing pages are another important aspect of a PPC campaign. Analyze their content and CTAs to get an idea of their PPC goals.
SEO Competitor Analysis
SEO analysis includes finding the keywords your competitor is ranking for. It also refers to understanding the backlink profiles of your top competitors. SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush give you detailed backlink reports on any domain. This allows you to outrank your competition with a more powerful link-building strategy. Other SEO analysis techniques include:
- Comparing website speeds
- Comparing the quality of content
- Finding keyword gaps
Social Media Competitor Analysis
Social media is a great place to create brand awareness and improve conversions. Competitor analysis is an effective way to identify the most relevant social platforms for your business. The demographics your competitors are targeting can help you identify your target audience. Also, you can track the frequency, timing, and type of posts. In addition, look at the engagement rates of their top-performing posts. Focus on the type of content that’s generating the best results for your competitors. With all that out of the way, let’s talk about some popular free and paid competitor analysis tools.
Best Competitor Analysis Tools
The tool you should use for competitor analysis mainly depends on where your target audience hangs out.
SEMrush (SEO + PPC)
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO, PPC, and social media analysis tool. With it, you can understand your competitors’ backlinks, keywords (Organic and paid), and social media strategies.
Ahrefs (SEO)
Ahrefs is arguably the best competitor analysis software as far as SEO is concerned. It tracks everything you need to understand your competitors’ SEO strategies. For instance, the backlinks analysis tool gives you a complete list of competitor backlinks, including where they’re coming from.
Sprout Social (Social Media)
Sprout Social is an amazing social media automation and tracking tool. It lets you measure conversions, follower growth, content performance, and more.
FAQs
How Do You Analyze Competitors in Digital Marketing?
Start by analyzing your competitors. Then, gather information on their promotion, content, pricing, SEO, and other marketing strategies.
What is the Tool to Analyze Competitors?
There are plenty of free and paid tools to analyze competitors. One of the best, free tools is Google Analytics.
How Do I Check My SEO Competition?
Find what keywords you should be ranked for on Google. See which websites are ranking on the first page for those keywords. These are your competitors.
How to Analyze Competitors: Wrapping Up
Competitor analysis is an important part of every successful digital marketing strategy. It gives you the information and data you need to effectively compete in the market. It can also help you stay up to date on the latest industry trends and identify growth opportunities to stand out from the crowd. And that’s relevant whether you’re just starting out or trying to improve your existing digital marketing strategies. So, before you create a digital marketing strategy for your business, identify what’s working for your competitors.
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