Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing: Why It Matters and How To Get Started
Blog
Oct 11
Any company looking to strengthen customer loyalty and grow as a brand first has to understand how it compares to competitors. What common threads do businesses in your space all share in common? And perhaps more importantly, how is your brand setting itself apart?
A thorough understanding of competitor strengths and weaknesses tells brands where to focus their efforts for maximum impact. Read on for more on performing a comprehensive competitive analysis, including key types, tools, and advantages to keeping an eye on your competitors.
Why You Should Do a Competitive Analysis
Even the most proactive, trend-setting brands operate in markets that sometimes experience organic shifts in consumer habits. Keeping a close watch on competitors helps adapt to these changing buying behaviors quickly, and possibly even reveal gaps in the market where the competition is lacking. If a competitor makes a mistake while targeting a certain audience segment, your brand can learn from (and avoid) making any similar errors.
Competitive analysis is also a handy measuring stick for base metrics and KPIs. Your closest competitors are aiming to attract the same audience as you. If that audience responds better to certain messaging or imagery, brand marketers can further sharpen their edge by studying what makes these differentiators effective.
What Does a Competitive Analysis Include?
1. ID Your Competitors. Scouting the competition starts with defining which brands you consider direct and indirect competitors. For most companies, a simple online search is all that’s required to identify which brands offer similar services or target similar audiences. Consider what your ideal customer would type into a search bar to find your business, then pay close attention to the other options on the results page. For brick-and-mortar businesses, be sure to scour your surrounding area for companies with similar offerings.
2. Perform a SWOT Analysis. Once you know what you’re up against, your competitive analysis will base its next steps on a SWOT analysis. This is where you break down each competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Start with exploring competitor websites themselves, noting how they choose to present products and any pros or cons to the design and user interface (UI).
3. Explore Their Marketing Tactics. From there, take a spin through their social channels for insights into the competition’s marketing philosophy. Combing through competitor site content and social interactions will clarify which products or services they tend to emphasize most, and help you better understand how others position themselves in the market — plus, you can see which posts are getting the most engagement for some bonus customer insights.
4. Benchmark Your Top Competitors. Don’t forget to note the features and pricing of similar products in your space. This is a central component of “benchmarking” your competitors, the final (and often most granular) step where brands detail the quality of their competition’s products, customer service, social interactions, reputation, and general financial health. Extensive research here is required for an accurate look into how your brand stacks up (and where others may be severely lacking).
Types of Competitive Analysis
The steps above describe a more comprehensive competitive analysis, but there are specific types of analyses that can benefit brands in certain aspects of their marketing:
SEO Analysis examines competitor SEO, keyword strategies, and backlink profiles.
Content Analysis focuses solely on the type, quality, and frequency of published competitor content.
Social Media Analysis takes stock of a competitors’ social media presence, noting engagement rates and their most active channels.
PPC Analysis can help brands quickly deduce which targeting levers and ad copy draws the most attention from a target audience in a paid campaign.
Product Analysis focuses less on marketing tactics and more on the competing product or service itself, including pricing and customer reviews.
Market Positioning Analysis explores how competitors aim to differentiate themselves in the market.
Common Competitor Analysis Tools
The list of tools capable of producing a fairly comprehensive competitive analysis is full of names brand marketers are already familiar with; sites like SEMrush and Ahrefs both provide extensive looks into SEO tactics and performance. Similarweb, SpyFu, and Google Alerts likewise serve as common baseline tools for understanding where brands fall in comparison to their respective markets.
In fact, competitor analysis tools are abundant and widely available today ready to cater to the preferences of your particular brand. Other common tools in this space include:
-BuzzSumo
-SproutSocial
-BuiltWith
-Moz
-Owler
-SE Ranking
Tools like those listed above can help form a blueprint for your brand to ultimately outperform its competitors. By better understanding where you “fit” in your market and how rival brands approach digital marketing, your own business can capitalize on gaps or weak points currently going unnoticed or underserved by competitors.
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