Why find out what your competitors are doing?
Your competitors can be a valuable source of information. Keeping an eye on their marketing strategies is a benchmarking opportunity when developing your marketing strategy. You'll learn what makes them successful and find the areas where you need to improve.
For example, knowing the Web Hosting your competitors use is crucial as you can replicate the same. This is especially true when your competitors’ websites enjoy blazing speeds. (Having a fast and high-performing website helps you rank higher in the SERPs.)
Finding out what your competitors are doing gives you a wealth of valuable information that you can filter through to see what would work for you. As such, you need to track your competition to identify strengths and weaknesses so that you gain valuable insights to form your business’s competitive advantages.
Who are your competitors?
Before you dive into analyzing your competitors, country wise email marketing database you must first know who they are. Only then will you be able to keep an eye on them, understand them, and anticipate their next move. This would put you in a more promising position, always one step ahead of your competitors to gain that much-needed extra edge to grow your business.
Google Search
All you have to do is enter the corresponding service with the name of the city in Google. Take note of the search results on the first page of Google. Pay attention to those that appear in the ads and in the map sections. This is the easiest way to help identify your competitors.
Relevant social networks and forums
You can search popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for keywords relevant to your industry. You'd be surprised at how many competitors have a similar business landscape to yours. Also, do the same with popular forums like Reddit and Quora. You can identify your competitors by examining the conversations there.
Market Research
During the sales process, you will have come across potential competitors. Plus, you can chat with your customers to find out who they were evaluating besides you. You might be surprised at how often you can come across unexpected competitors that are good to know about.
Free Ways to Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing
Now you have your list of competitors. The next thing on your mind would be to find out what they are doing. Here are some of the free ways you can employ to find out what your competitors are doing:
1. Analyze your competitors' content strategy
In this age of technology and globalization, it’s all about publishing relevant and meaningful content. If you don’t, you can bet your bottom dollar that your business will go under. As such, it makes sense to check out what your competitors’ content strategy is.
Check out their website
Sometimes it's good to get your hands dirty and check out your competitors' websites to get a feel for the approach they take when it comes to managing their content. Understand the types of content they focus on: text, media, design, blogs, forums, downloadable documents, etc.
Look at the quality of their content (the authority factor). This gives you an idea of how well-researched the content was. Also, monitor any changes that could prove useful in helping your business evolve.
Write as a potential client
You can write as a potential customer, sign up for email updates, and subscribe to their newsletter. As traditional as it may seem, emails are very effective marketing tools for generating revenue. Remember to be discreet and use a personal email address when signing up.
You will also be able to get an idea of how the organization works, its overall marketing approach, the latest developments, how frequently it updates its content and campaigns.
Watch any video content
Videos have become the go-to tool for marketers and it’s easy to see why – people are naturally drawn to visual content. Take a closer look at their most popular videos to see how they create catchy titles and descriptions. Don’t forget to read customer reviews too – they can provide valuable insights. With all this information, you can start creating your own engaging videos. Adobe Express could come in handy for editing them to perfection.
Analyze top-performing content
It would be good to know what content is working best for your competitors. Some tools can help you identify your competitors' top-performing content. BuzzSumo is one of the most popular tools to help analyze your competitors' content.
On the BuzzSumo website, enter the topic, brand, URL, or domain and see which content attracts the most engagement from your competitor. It’s that simple. You’ll find that the most engaging content is the one that gets shared and talked about the most on social media. You can also dig deeper by analyzing what makes such content stand out and what the content addresses.
You will then be able to gather meaningful insights that will help you plan better and newer content ideas to up your game. There is a free plan and paid plans for BuzzSumo. However, the free version has limitations. So if you want to have more, you will need to consider the paid plans.
