Statistically analysing the marketing strategies of a given company’s competitors is a competitive analysis.
In competitor research, you can see how your competition acquires and retains customers. By evaluating various factors, the analysis uncovers the factors driving traffic to your competitor’s pages and leading to their ads. The study pinpoints the gaps and suggests how you can fill them. In this article, we talk about how competitive analysis is done.
1. Identify your Competition
Start by identifying the competitors you’re looking to analyse. In competitive analysis, you should research your direct and indirect competitors – brands that offer similar products or services to the same targeted audiences. You should be aware of competitors, who may provide a completely different service, but who solve the same problem as your ideal buyer persona.
There is a surprising amount of confusion about who brandss’ primary competitors are. Using tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, and
Facebook Ad library, you can better understand your competition and how best to compete.
2. Study your Competitors’ Social Media Advertising Strategy
It will help if you investigate what others are doing before building your social media marketing strategy. Look at their LinkedIn and Facebook sites, watch their YouTube videos, and see if they use TikTok. Businesses often use lead ads on Facebook and LinkedIn to drive visitors to customised landing pages. Conversions seem to be at the tip of your fingers with the customisation and branding options available. Explore the competition’s offers, visuals, and messaging in more detail.
3. Compare Google Ads of Competitors
Tracking your competitor’s PPC campaign is essential, but how do you do it? Here are some of the most reliable tools you can use.
Keyword Planner is free to use, but you must create an AdWords account to unlock its free features. With Keyword Planner, you can see the volumes, average costs per click (CPC), and the number of competitors in a selected region. Find out what phrases people search for related to your business, see how often they search for specific words and plan your ads accordingly.
Ahrefs can also tell you what keywords your competition is bidding on and the highest-performing landing pages they have.
Semrush is another tool, and its Advertising Research tab allows you to look at a competitor’s ad budget and strategy by entering the competitor’s URL. Ad copies can be read, live ads can be viewed, and the most profitable keywords and ad spend can be tracked. You can easily use all of this information to create a powerful paid advertising strategy, starting with a high-converting landing page to campaign structure and keyword targeting.
4. Tracking Organic Performance of Competitors Using SEO Tools
SEO experts recommend running crawlers, identifying top-performing pages and keywords, configuring visibility reports, and watching for evolving SEO trends to monitor your competitor’ organic growth.
Web spiders or crawlers can scan your website and competitors' domains to collect information. Screaming Frog, for instance, helps you identify a full range of technical problems that affect a site’s visibility on Google. The duplicate or thin content of a page can be identified and the status of all the links to the page. In the free version, 500 URLs can be analysed.
If you want to know how your competitors are doing organically, Ahrefs can help you identify which high-traffic pages they have and what keywords they are using. It is also possible to determine how well the pages satisfy the searcher’s intent by looking at them. Specialists offering local SEO services can help you with an in-depth analysis.
5. Examine the Content Marketing Strategies of Competitors
To learn more about your competitors’ content marketing strategy, you will need to do a lot of manual work. During this step, you should identify what types of content and formats the competitors use and how your site stands out.
By providing highly relevant and valuable content, you’ll be able to meet your audience’s expectations and ease their pain points. Competitors developing such strategies would be able to attract and retain visitors. How do you get started? You’ll find the answers when you map the content that appears on the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Examine whether your competitors have established pages for all three stages of the buyers’ journey. Be sure to check out how they differentiate their competitive advantage from others and communicate their unique selling proposition.
Prospects are likely to be nurtured using behavioural tactics by your competitors. If you look at similar websites, you will see that they use “the power of now”. In that case, your product pages should also have information about “instant access,” 24/7 service,” or “same day shipping” if you also offer those but haven’t explicitly stated them.
6. Conduct a SWOT Analysis to Identify Challenges and Opportunities
SWOT analysis is an essential part of any competitive analysis. Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You’ll see similar trends in your competitor’s paid and organic marketing when you go through the previous five steps of your research. Using appropriate resources, you can outperform them where they have an advantage. How can you attain your short-term goals, and what will require a long-term plan? Think about it.
Final Thoughts
Competitor analysis takes some time, as with any research. Consider doing competitor research as a regular part of your digital marketing strategy – not just as a one-off.
