The key with competitive benchmarking and competitor analysis is to “learn”; not copy.
While it's important to learn from your competitors, it's also important to be original. Don't just copy what they're doing. Instead, use their strategies as inspiration to create your own unique ad campaigns.
Understand competitors' ads strategy, get a holistic understanding of how other businesses like you run marketing campaigns, and more.
Here’s how to learn from your competitors’ ads in e-commerce specifically:
Identify Different Kinds of Ads Competitors Run
Look for the exact type of ads your competitors run: banner ads? Gmail Ads? Video ads? YouTube Ads? Social Media Ads (including specific platforms)?
For each of the ads, creatives, and campaigns you spot, be sure to look out for comments under the ads (to get a sense for what your target audience wants).
Further, look for social Proof, the benefits of some of the products your competitors are highlighting, whether the ads are riding some new social media trends, etc.
While looking at the ads themselves, also look out for the ad angles, creative line of thought, offers, sales funnels, landing pages, and more.
You can get a snapshot of most of the campaigns your competitors run (including email campaigns, landing pages, ads, and more) by using a single tool such as Panoramata
Extract Key Insights
You’ll need a strategy to unlock competitor intelligence, and you can achieve that by taking out the time for it and with the help of several tools available (free, paid, and freemium).
The real effort kicks in when you have to extract key insights and use them to your advantage.
Using a tool like Panoramata, you can build handy lists to keep track of your competition.
Several other tools can help you with competitor tracking -- including social media listening tools, brand monitoring tools, media intelligence tools, and more.
You’d want to look for insights such as: What are the various digital channels your competitors use and how do they use each of these channels?
What are your competitors doing on social media? What kind of content are they creating, sharing, and distributing? How are they interacting with their followers?
This information can help you develop your own social media marketing strategy, for instance.
Adapt Competitor Strategies to your Own Business
Once you get a fair understanding of the various digital channels that your competitors use (and how they use each of those), you have your work cut out for you.
Launch on the channels (but make data-driven decisions about investing resources on each channel) and strive to make your campaigns better.
Are your competitors using content marketing to their advantage? Do your competitors have a leg up on Search results with dedicated work being done for their Search Engine Optimization?
Are any of your competitors also tapping into other digital channels such as using Influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, or are they focusing on developing channel partners?
By tuning in and listening to chatter on social media (about your own brand and also about your competitors, you get insights on what’s working, what your customers want, what they struggle with, and more).
By using tools like Panoramata and taking a quick look at your competitors’ email marketing campaigns, for instance, you can build out better campaigns with more compelling copy, better designs, and a calibrated (+ strategic) email marketing strategy by incorporating best practices.
Improve Over Time (Optimize + Test)
Your campaigns (across channels and for various goals) are never “one-time” work. You’d have to roll out campaigns (along with creatives, copy, funnels, offers, call-to-action prompts, and more) and then tweak and test to see what works.
With enough sample size (number of people your campaigns reach out to), you’ll be in a better position to implement advanced strategies such as A/B testing and understand what works, weed out what doesn’t seem to work, and make progress.
How, and what, do you learn from your competitors?
