Be Like Bond: The 007 Guide to Spying on Your Competitors

Source: Neil Patel

Bond Baddie: “Do you lose as gracefully as you win?”

James Bond: “I don’t know, I’ve never lost.”

If you’ve been building your brand for years like I have, then you’ve had your fair share of wins and losses.

Social media is so crowded that it takes a lot of care and attention to stand out from the crowd.

What makes it even worse is that you’re competing.

All of the mistakes and wins are public, and your competitors will notice you.

But that’s a double-edged sword because you can see what they’re doing too.

The catch is that it’s not always easy to know where to look. Simply browsing their social profiles can give you an idea of what they’re doing, but it doesn’t really provide much detailed insight.

And when you’re trying to build a million-dollar brand, insight is everything.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways and places to spy on your competition in a format that gives you valuable, actionable information.

That’s why I’m going to show you how to look deep into your competitor’s digital marketing.

Let’s start by discussing why this is important to begin with, and then I’ll give you some tactics you can start implementing today.

Why look to your competition?

Content and digital marketing change at a rapid pace. Relying on what you’ve always done will mean you get left behind.

Keeping tabs on your competition will show you what they’re up to and give you ideas for what you can do better.

Even if you’re consistently creating and sharing content, your competitor may have a better approach.

Whether it’s the tone they use in their blog posts, the length of their video, or the guest star they had on their podcast, they’re doing it better than you.

The good news is that marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. You have plenty of time to catch up!

Getting traffic is a process that requires constant refinement. Like when I decided to change up my Twitter strategy.

I went from just over 1,000 visitors per day to an average of 4,700 just by increasing how often I tweeted. Instead of just once per day, I tweeted ten times every day.

My following exploded.

Sometimes the changes are simple like my Twitter fix, but quite often the necessary moves carry a bit of complexity that requires you to look below the surface.

That’s how it is when examining your competition.

The truth is that it’s simply impossible to know every effective digital marketing strategy.

There’s just too much information out there. There are over three million blog posts published daily, and that number is only growing.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t read three million blog posts in my life. So it’s inconceivable to think about wading through that many in a day.

To make matters worse, word counts for blogs have been continually growing too:

So it takes even longer to get through the information that’s truly helpful.

Whittling down your information intake to just what your competitors are doing will help you focus on what’s right for your business.

Staying in your industry can give you a competitive edge.

But where do you begin?

How do you know the information you’re gathering is helpful? Or even good?

You do have options, so let’s talk through a few of them.

How to watch social media

If you’re simply looking at social profiles or the top-ranking pages on Google, you’ll still have no direction or actionable feedback.

You probably won’t get much out of simply reading your competition’s post or watching their video anyways.

Chances are you know what they know.

So what’s a better way to keep tabs on them?

BuzzSumo is useful because it allows you to examine keywords in a way that gives you the information you can use.

You’ll be able to see the piece of content, how many social shares it’s received, and even the people who have shared it.

Instead of trying to collect the information for yourself, you can find it curated all in one place.

So let’s say you want to write a post on Big Data that surpasses the one your competitor just posted on Facebook.

You can take the top-performing post of all time, as seen above, and write a better post. Or even a counter-argument to their assertions.

This way you’ll have fresh, relevant content to share with your audience that can make a splash.

Not only will it rival your competition, but it could also make it all the way to the top of your specific topic.

Pretty cool, right?

It gets better though. Another great feature on BuzzSumo lets you see who has shared the article on their own social profile.

This is helpful because it gives you insight into the type of audience you’ll be writing for.

It also gives you a ready-made list of individuals to reach out to if you want to ask people to read and share your work.

So the next time you get a little envious of a great post by your rival, take action. Go write one that’s better.

But before you get ahead of yourself, there’s another option for keeping track of a broad amount of social media data.

It’s called Hootsuite Streams. It’s the perfect way to keep tabs on specific competitors all in one place and in real-time.

You can easily monitor a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, and many other profiles all in one convenient location. Like this:

You’ll also be able to see the likes, shares, retweets, comments, and many more as they’re posted.

If you see a post that’s performing particularly well from a competitor, you’ll be able to find it and pick it apart with ease.

You’ll have a steady stream of inspiration for new content. Or, you’ll be able to find some of your old content to bring back from the dead.

And of course, you can always see what customers are putting directly on your competitor’s page:

Whatever method you choose, getting direct insight into what people like and dislike about your competition’s brand, product, or service is valuable.

With this information, you’ll…

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