Marketing campaigns without data can be like a case of the blind leading the blind.
Before you sink tons of money into a marketing campaign, you have to make sure your efforts are backed up by data.
What’s the best source of data for this purpose?
Your competitors.
Your competitors’ moves are easy to track and contain a goldmine of ideas. Best of all, you can see the results of those ideas without testing them yourself and biting your nails to see if it even works.
Reverse engineering a competitor’s campaign just means taking a successful marketing campaign or strategy and working backward to determine the steps that led to its success.
However, you don’t have to be a copycat. Put your own spin into the techniques and content that have worked for your competitors. The idea is to borrow ideas, not steal them.
Look for areas where you can make the most impact and where you have an edge over your competitors. You’re not making guesses anymore. Your decisions will be backed by data and you’re now free to decide where you will invest your resources.
We suggest taking the following steps for effective campaign monitoring and analysis.
How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Marketing Strategy
- Identify your competitors
- Analyze their online presence
- Monitor their social media
- Observe their content marketing campaigns
- Follow their email marketing newsletters
- See what keywords they’re targeting
- Monitor their advertising
- Conduct a SWOT Analysis
How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Marketing Strategy
1. Identify your competitors
Start by making a list of your main competitors. These could be direct competitors, who offer similar products or services, and indirect competitors, who serve the same target audience.
If you need help finding your competitors, this article might be useful.
2. Analyze their online presence
Next, check out their website, particularly elements like design, layout, and content. What keywords do they use? How do they structure their URLs?
Other things to look out for are recurring calls-to-action (CTAs), lead generation tactics, and other engagement strategies.
3. Monitor their social media
Check out what your competitors are doing on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc.).
Notice the type of content they share, posting frequency, and engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares). Evaluate any social media advertising campaigns they may be running.
Most importantly, determine what social media channels your shared target audience uses most often. It’s a waste of resources if you’re running campaigns on a platform that your target consumers aren’t active on.
4. Observe their content marketing campaigns
Determine their content types and the quality of content they put out.
These can be blog posts, videos, newsletters, carousels, infographics, etc. Get a feel for how often they update their content and what channels they use to distribute them. Take note of the topics that your shared audience is engaging with.
This will give you clues into your competitor’s funnel and lead generation techniques and help you understand your audience better.
5. Follow their email marketing newsletters
The next step is to subscribe to your competitor’s newsletters.
This will give you a glimpse of the all-important piece of the puzzle: their email marketing strategy. As you did for their other content, identify the content types, frequency, and scheduling of their email campaigns.
Things to take note of are personalization, flows, discounts, promotions, urgency creation techniques, and special offers.
6. See what keywords they’re targeting
Next, head over to their website and use tools to analyze their SEO performance. Identify target keywords (useful for PPC and SEO analysis) and their backlink profile.
Through this step, you’ll better understand your target audience’s search habits and how they look for a solution like your product.
You’ll be able to estimate the resources you need to compete with their rankings for a keyword.
7. Monitor their advertising
Monitor their advertising campaigns on platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or other similar channels.
Find out where your competitors are advertising and what their strategies are.
Things to look for are ad copy (particularly the hooks they use to draw in the viewer), design, and how they present their value proposition to their target audience.
This will help you come up with ideas for your campaigns, potential advertising channels, and budget estimates for each channel.
8. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
Now you can put it all together through a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.
Your aim is to assess your competitors and solve your business problems using informed decisions.
By this point, you know your competitor’s marketing strategy like the back of your hand. You have a good grasp of their funnel.
Go back to the drawing board and take a look at your business. Identify your strengths and weaknesses. Ask yourself: What internal factors are helpful or detrimental to your goals?
These can be
- Budget constraints
- Manpower
- Income sources
- An email list
Meanwhile, opportunities and threats are external factors or things you don’t control.
For example:
- Changes to algorithms
- More competitors
- Expensive materials
- Increased consumer demand
Look for areas where you can make the most impact and where you have an edge over your competitors.
You’re not making guesses anymore. Your decisions will be backed by data and you’re now free to decide where you will invest your resources.
9. Put it all together and start reverse engineering!
You’ve taken the time to know your fiercest competitors. You’ve also done some reflection on your strengths and weaknesses.
And hopefully through this process, you know what kind of content performs best and strikes a chord with your target audience.
Let your competitors serve as inspiration for your email marketing, blog posts, SEO, and advertising.
Comparing yourself with your competitors makes your deficiencies more apparent but don’t let this get you down.
You can use your findings for good – to solve growth problems your brand is facing and achieve your goals without spending a fortune.
Here’s the right way to do it.
Start by the end of the funnel: identify the bestseller product/offer your competitor is promoting – you might already know which one it is, but it’s usually the one they’re promoting everywhere, of course.
Then, to reverse engineer the process, start looking at their product pages, their landing pages, their ads, their campaigns, etc. but solely look at what’s relevant for this bestseller, as you’ll get a more comprehensive overview of their strategy this way.
Look at the different landing pages and ads they’re using. Observe the different angles and audiences they’re talking to.
Take advantage of this knowledge to understand which audiences they’re tapping into and which proposition value they’re using. Try to come up with your own ideas, using these learnings and insights.
Experiment and make tweaks. Keep improving.
The great thing is that you’re coming from a place of awareness because you know what works and what doesn’t. You’re not fumbling in the dark anymore. When you reverse engineer your competitors’ strategy, you are finally stepping into the light.
