How To Perform Competitive Research In Digital Marketing
Competitive research provides insight into what the competition is doing in term of marketing, what their message is, positioning, how well is it received, what part of the market they targeting, the success that is meeting online etc. When researching the competition there are three insights that you want to look for:
- Strategy: Understanding what media and content strategy your competition has adopted can help reduce friction and prevent overlapping.
- Target Market: Understanding their target audience more in-depth can provide insights on your own target audience and how it should differ, based on how your product solves the problem for them. It also can help understand the challenge depending on the similarity of your target audience.
- Message: Understanding their message will allow you to differentiate yourself from them. Brands with similar messages get less credit and visibility and bring confusion in consumer’s minds. Your brand needs a differentiation element that will make it stand out at all stage of the buyers’ journey. Ideally, your message should be better and resonate with the audience so it sticks out more than the competition.
This is the benchmark for your competition. Depending on the position of the brand on the market, you want to look at the leader, the challenger and the rest of the companies on your market and product category. Then you need to understand where your company positions itself compared to these other brands. From there, you can start drawing conclusions on what makes your brand special, preferable, more attractive to your brand audience and know where the company is on the market at the moment and what the goal is. Some questions you can answer:
- Who are your competitors?
- What products or services do they sell?
- What is each competitor’s market share?
- What are their past strategies?
- What are their current strategies?
- What type of media is used to market their products or services?
- How many hours per week do they purchase to advertise through the media used in this market?
- What are each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses?
- What potential threats do your competitors pose?
- What potential opportunities do they make available for you?
The benefits of competitive research are the identification of the customer needs by looking at how the product of competition is solving them. Find opportunities in the market, in terms of target audience and messages, but also a solution as your product might solve a problem that is not currently fully addressed by the competition. This helps to refine all your strategy and assets based on competition failure, success, and differentiation factors.
As opposed to traditional marketing, the rise of digital marketing and media has brought many opportunities to conduct competitive research. In the past you could gather information on the competition’s strategy by seeing their content, contacting the company or reading on them in special magazine or leaflets, but the work was decentralized and the information more scarce.
With digital media today, companies share such an important amount of information with their customer and are bound to more transparency required by the public. This means that more information about competitors is available, from their strategy to their financial status and the creative they used, all this is easily collectable through one place, the internet! Different platforms are involved in the collection of competitive insights:
#1 Social Media as part of competitive research in digital marketing
Similar to gathering audience insights, social media is an infinite source of insights, conversations, hashtags, mentions, reviews, comment, etc. Using dedicated monitoring tools to centralize your research can help you keep an eye on what the audience says about your competition (be it positive or negative), where they delighted the customers and where they lack quality.
Additionally, you can see how people compare your business to others, how much more volume their brand generates in terms of community density, etc. Some tools to help you with this include Twitter, Feedly and Brandwatch – all of which are designed to track conversations.
#2 Competitors Assets as part of competitive research in digital marketing
As simple as it sounds, visiting your competition’s website, downloading their white papers, quarterly reports, listening to their webcast, podcast, and participating in their online events is a great way to understand their business, how they position themselves, and how they deliver their message.
By putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes you can understand how the buyers’ journey is designed and how your competition goes on converting their audience at each stage. For example, through their blog, you can understand their primary focus and how they position themselves as experts in the market. You can also understand the traffic on your competition’s assets through software like Alexa and understand where their traffic is generated and thus refine your media strategy.
#3 Search as part of competitive research in digital marketing
Search is a powerful insight into how people find a product and what they are looking for. By analyzing searches, you can know what the problem is and how it is solved. You can use search tools such as Google AdWords or Spyfu to understand how your competition ranks for specific keywords. Are they ranked on keywords you are not using? What is their ranking? What is the advantage on these specific keywords? Additionally, you can search to keep track of new content generated by your competition by using Google Alerts.
#4 Content Analysis as part of competitive research in digital marketing
Beyond social media monitoring, tools exist for you to monitor other forms of content that your competition is distributing. This can also let you understand their media strategy. You can understand the audience their advertised content attracts with DoubleClick Ad Planner or Google Display Planner.
You can follow their newsletter with Owletter, Kompyte to track their website changes and so on. Many tools exist for you to track changes, traffic, bounce rate, click rate, reviews, etc. that are related to your competition. This can be used to understand your position and where you have to go, but can also be used to set targets if you are working as a challenger on the market.
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