A fair amount of companies, and in particular newbie’s to online marketing, advertise and market blindly and wonder why they aren’t achieving results or moving forward in their marketing endeavours. I can bet you that they are probably ignoring their online (and offline) competition and focusing on the wrong things, simply because they don’t know any better.
Understanding your competitors will help you better understand yourself and your unique point of value. Image Credit: Tambako the Jaguar
Why is it important to know who your competitors are and what they are doing? Businesses that don’t pay attention to what their competitors are doing, won’t recognise what they themselves are doing wrong - there is nothing to compare or make reference to. Analysing your competitors thoroughly will present you with a chance to explore your business effectively and act upon those discoveries, making changes that may enhance your business success.
So where do you start? There are loads of high end business competitor analyses out there, but most of these pertain to offline marketing strategies and can be rather complex. However, the concepts are pretty much the same all round. Here are a few tips on how to start this process in a more simplified manner:
Before you even start planning your online business strategy, you should conduct a competitor analysis. You can use the results to hone your strategy by incorporating these findings.
- Find out who you’re up against by doing a simple search on Google using your core search terms (non-brand related) and see who comes up.
- If you already have an idea of who your offline competitors are, see if they feature in the first page of search engine results.
- Categorise them into “direct” and “indirect” competitors.
- You’ll want to remember for later on, that your direct competitor’s target audience will be the same as yours, and you will be comparing your business to theirs. This may also be used as an opportunity to see if there are any gaps in your target audience that you may be missing out on.
- They will be selling/promoting the same sort of product or service that you are - so pay attention to them.
- Use your direct competitor analysis results to find your competitive edge that will set you apart from them. This will ultimately increase your service/product offering.
- Identifying indirect competitors may be slightly more difficult, but this can be used later on once your business is well established online.
- You can use analysis of your indirect competitors to find a niche angle in which to market your product/service which others aren’t doing.
- For now, focus on your direct competitors, especially if you are just starting out.
- Start looking for any features or benefits central to all your competitors that you may not offer, and try incorporate these into your business model/strategy (e.g. all of them may offer free shipping, but you may not). Start thinking about how you can combat this.
- Identify your competitors’ strengths and see if you can combat them.
- Through carrying out this exercise you will also start to recognise your own strengths. Use this as an opportunity to emphasise and focus on them.
- This is usually your unique selling point (USP), which at any time should be the driving focus of your business.
- Once you have a broader understanding of what your competitors are doing, start looking into specifics.
- If you’re competing on an SEO basis for example, you’ll want to look at things like backlinks, website design, navigation, check out point/paths, content on the site and Meta details of each competitor. How do all of these things differ from your website?
- If it’s PPC for example, you can easily see what other competitors are bidding on, and once again take a look at their website, especially if it’s tangible conversions you are after (such as sales).
- Lastly you could look into what offline marketing tactics (if any) your competitors are using to drive visitors online. How can you tap into that?
- People often exclude offline marketing altogether from the online marketing strategy. But remember top of mind can relate directly to top of “search". The Internet is the easiest place to find more information of what you’ve seen on TV, a print ad or heard on the radio.
It’s important to conduct competitor analyses regularly, at least every 6 months. The online world is ever changing and therefore markets are changing too. You need to keep up with the trends, and with your competitors. Alter your strategy accordingly.
“No company exists in a vacuum online. If you ignore your competition, you will lose the opportunity to discover your own strengths and weaknesses. Effective competitive analysis gives you the information you need to "remove the blinders" and see your company as your customers and investors do, and to tune your marketing and business strategies for success.” From Marketing Experiments, Online Competitive Analysis Tested.
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