Marketers: 4 Insights to Look for When Doing Competitive Research

Marketers: 4 Insights to Look for When Doing Competitive Research

Marketers: 4 Insights to Look for When Doing Competitive Research. However, many neglect to consistently gather competitive intelligence and analyze how the competition is better serving the customer. How frequently are they posting to a blog, and what kind of content, i.e. lookbook, video how-to’s? Do they promote customer reviews or have a customer spotlight? Evaluate Site Traffic Take your website auditing to the next level and dig into your competitor’s web traffic. Insights into your competitors’ web traffic can help you create a strategy and investment plan for the kinds of content that appeals to prospects. Beyond what platforms they use, also dive into the content format, frequency, style that is shared and most importantly, the consumer engagement level with the posts. Specific things to observe include: The number of page “likes” or followers your competitors have to track audience growth trends Their frequency of posts per day/week/month The average number of post likes, shares, re-posts and comments they receive The type of content your competitors are posting including video, lifestyle images, customer content of their product in use How your competitors are responding to and engaging with their consumers If they use direct messaging to convert interest to leads If they use Facebook ads to boost a post These factors combined will provide a different perspective that can be leveraged for a fresh new approach to your social strategy. Keep Your Customers Close, Keep Your Competitors Closer Knowing how you stack up against the competition can shape your marketing strategies to improve your online store and gives you a bigger picture to potentially capture greater market share. Brookes also led marketing and communications at Vitrue before it was acquired by Oracle in May 2012.

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Marketers: 4 Insights to Look for When Doing Competitive Research

Guest Post written by Erika Jolly Brookes, chief marketing officer at Springbot

The number one rule in marketing is “know your customer.” But what about your competitors?

Online retailers invest a lot of time and money analyzing customer behavior trends, reconciling aggregated data to create customer personas for drip programs and ad retargeting. However, many neglect to consistently gather competitive intelligence and analyze how the competition is better serving the customer.

If you are in this camp, it’s time to go beyond setting up Google Alerts for the occasional read on your competition. If you are not in this camp, but find yourself aimlessly clicking on your competitions’ Facebook posts, we have a plan for you too. It is time to dive deeper into your competitor’s marketing efforts.

When you evaluate your rival’s marketing strategies, you can identify which ones were successful and use them to further your own campaigns. Likewise, you can alter the ineffective marketing techniques to avoid making the same costly mistake as your competitors.

Here are a few tips to help you get a more comprehensive, but not overly time consuming approach to navigating your competitions strengths and weaknesses.

Scour Websites for Strategy Intel

If you haven’t done a website audit on your competitors, this should be your first step. While looking at standard things like pricing and the product lines they carry, from a pure marketing standpoint, question:

  • What is their messaging?
  • Are they heavily promoting a certain product or line?
  • Do they have a newsletter? A blog? How do they capture new subscribers?
  • How frequently are they posting to a blog, and what kind of content, i.e. lookbook, video how-to’s?
  • Do they promote customer reviews or have a customer spotlight?
  • How are they linking to social media and what channels?

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