If all you did was to check out your competitors’ website and social media presence and pass it off as a way to analyze your competitors’ marketing strategy, you are missing out on the big picture.
When you do competitor analysis, it has a few juicy benefits:
- You can identify your major competitors (and know who you are up against)
- Take your time to research their products, sales, and marketing strategies.
- Learn the nitty-gritty of how your competition works, what they do, and how they achieve their own goals.
- Give you insights on where you stand, what you are stacked up against, and,
- Help identify opportunities that you could be missing out on.
- Identify gaps in the market, create new products or services, or position your products and services in a way to garner a larger market share.
To truly analyze your competitor’s marketing strategy, you’d need to dig deeper. Here’s a step-by-step primer on how to analyze your competitors’ marketing strategy:
Identify competitors, their products (or services)
Your business can have both direct competitors (those who provide a similar basket of products and services) and indirect competitors (those who provide other products and services that’ll still be able to serve your target market and solve the primary problem your products help solve).
Identifying only your direct competition (while ignoring the indirect competitors) is a big mistake. Once you identify and mark both your direct and indirect competitors, take note of their products, services, their unique selling proposition, and how their products and services are positioned.
Ask yourself questions such as:
- Who are your competitors with leading market share, and how did they get there? How long have they been in business? What’s the general pulse of the market that use their collective base of products?
- Are any of your competitors providing a distinct USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
- How are their products priced? High-cost (with a higher perceived value), low-cost (focusing on volumes)?
- How are your competitors positioning their respective brands against the known needs of the target market they cater to (which is incidentally the same market you’ll cater to)?
- What kind of issues or problems does the intended target customer base still have, despite a sea of offerings that already exist in the market?
Asking yourself these questions immediately puts you in a position to think about how to price your products, how to position your brand, the unique selling proposition that you can boast of, and more.
When you are ready, you know exactly how to align your marketing strategy and the steps you need to take to carve out your own space in the market.
Do your research: Sales Tactics, Marketing Strategies, & Branding
This is where you put your head down to the drawing board. It’s time to find out just how your competition goes about doing its business. What are the sales tactics they use? How does your competition do marketing?
Start with their websites, check out their social media presence, see if they use digital marketing strategies such as a comprehensive content strategy (including eBooks, videos, podcasts, PDF documents, online courses, workshops, etc.), SEO, and paid online advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or any other forms of online advertising).
Spy on their landing pages, sales funnels, email marketing strategies.
How do you do all this? Start with a general preview and research on what’s already visible to the entire world (websites, social presence).
Then, with careful research and the right benchmarking tools or software, you can dig deeper into the nitty-gritty of their marketing campaigns (including their exact SEO keyphrases, SEO strategies, backlinks, traffic, email marketing design, email marketing messages, ads, and more).
Analyze Your Competitor’s Technology Stack
How your competition uses technology to further their business tells you a lot about where they’ll go. Technology has the power to make (or break) a business.
Choose the right technology stack and you are well ahead of the market and your competition already.
- What platform is their website based on? Which CMS does your competitor use to run and manage their blog?
- What software tools does your competition use to manage social media, email marketing, lead generation, and more?
- Does your competition use CRM at all? If yes, what CRM do they use?
- What other tools do they use for web presence, marketing, sales, customer service, operations?
Using simple tools, you can easily find the answers to those questions above. You’ll get most of the answers to the questions above such as the CMS (Content management system that powers your competitor’s website), the platforms they run ads on, other software tools they use, and more.
Once you have all the answers you need, you’ll know:
- Who are your competitors & how do they market their products?
- How do they build their respective brands?
- What’s their respective USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
- The products or services they offer
- How do they position their products and services?
- The price they sell their products and services at, and
- Whether or not they can serve their intended target customers well enough (including the usual slew of complaints, issues, and problems that are still not being resolved).
Knowing all of the above and the willingness to act on this information can put your own business in a better position.
Interested in benchmarking your email marketing campaigns? Would you like to know how other businesses run email marketing campaigns within your industry instead of individually signing up for every email marketing campaign that your competitors run? See how Panoramata can help you save time, provide you with insights and inspiration, and put you on the fast lane to email marketing success.
