Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing – 6 Benefits
If you don’t understand what your competitors are doing – you don’t have much of a digital marketing strategy, learn why competitive analysis is important.
Do you remember the last time your business conducted a digital marketing competitive analysis?
Do you know where your digital marketing strategies stand when compared with your competitors?
What value will you get when you monitor your competitor’s digital marketing efforts?
It goes without saying that a person should keep their friends close, but their enemies even closer! This saying is also relevant for businesses concerning digital marketing, where few things remain private, and most of them are easily gaugeable through the right tools. This is exactly the topic of this post!
Considering your competitors as your enemies, however, is not what we encourage you to do here. Instead, we would like you to focus on monitoring their digital marketing efforts through the lens of a microscope on a daily basis. Keeping a close eye on your competitors’ websites, blogs, social media accounts, paid ads, email marketing, and PR coverage will do so much more than only provide you an idea of what you are up against.
It will enable you to develop a killer marketing strategy of your own to attract traffic that was only possible in your wildest of imagination.
Furthermore, the benefits you earn with an adequately performed digital marketing competitive analysis go far beyond digital marketing itself. Today, we will discuss a few benefits of a properly conducted digital marketing competitive analysis. You can find some of them listed down below.
1. IT PROVIDES YOU WITH AN IDEA OF WHAT NOT TO DO
Learning from your competitor’s mistakes is the perfect way you can progress further in the business world.
Do you want to know why? Because your business will not have to pay the consequences for making the wrong choices. Keeping track of your competitor’s digital marketing campaigns will let you know what is working for them and, most importantly, what is not. For instance, keeping an eye on the leading market players through various competitor analysis tools will allow you to fuel your digital marketing efforts and avoid making the same marketing mistakes.
An excellent example of such a tactic is the iPhone 6 Plus bendgate case. Apple’s closest competitors took advantage of this by mentioning their products as ‘bend-free’ in their marketing campaigns.
2. IT GIVES YOU IDEAS THAT YOU SHOULD USE
Through a digital marketing competitive analysis, you can figure out which marketing strategy is worth implementing and the marketing plans you need to avoid. For example, suppose your competitors are doing well on a particular marketing campaign with which you are having a hard time. In that case, you can conduct a competitor analysis and find out what you need to do to make it more effective.
You can go on the internet and search for various digital marketing competitive analysis tools. They will let you set up alerts and provide you with notifications. Suppose your competitors get a mention from their customers about their services or products. You can also view your competitor’s comments and how they address their customers’ concerns and rule their hearts.
3. IT HELPS IDENTIFY NEW MARKET OPPORTUNITIES
One of the most vital benefits of performing a digital marketing competitive analysis is the never-ending customer insights. When properly utilized, it will provide you with substantial advantages over your competitors. For example, social media users have a knack for sharing their personal stories online. Often, these stories cover their suggestions and experiences with particular products or services. Collecting valuable feedback and opinions about your own company’s products is all well and good. Yet, when was the last time you reviewed what customers had to say about your competitors?
You can use digital marketing competitive analysis to identify gaps in your competitor’s products and services and use such insights to identify opportunities where you can get the upper hand.
4. IT ALLOWS YOU TO DISCOVER YOUR COMPETITOR’S BACKLINKS
The number of backlinks your business receives will affect its ranking on SERPs. The more authoritative and legitimate your backlink sources, the higher your business’s chances of improving its ranking with Search Engines, especially Google. Through digital marketing competitive analysis and backlink research, you can see the type of backlinks your rivals utilize and leverage them to improve your business’s online authority and legitimacy.
Various online backlink and digital marketing competitive analysis tolls will provide you real-time updates on the sources that are linking to your competitor’s website. You would only need to plug in their website’s URL, and the tool will manage the rest for you! What is more, using such a method will also improve your overall content marketing strategy.
5. IT ENABLES YOU TO GENERATE LEADS FROM YOUR RIVAL’S UNHAPPY CUSTOMERS
Well, nothing will be more beneficial for your business than to find your rival’s unhappy customers and provide them with, hopefully, better products or services. Monitoring your rival’s digital marketing efforts will let you analyze the views of their existing customers.
You can also utilize competitor analysis to gain access to these complaints in real-time and address them before one of your other rivals does. Doing so will let you convert your rival’s customers and prospects into those who will be loyal to you for a long time.
6. IT WILL ALLOW YOU TO DISCOVER THE KEYWORDS USED BY YOUR COMPETITOR’S
If you target the appropriate and relevant keywords, your PPC campaigns will have a better chance of success. Keywords are at the core of any PPC campaign. So, you need to ensure that you target the accurate ones that cater to your niche. However, it is hard to find an initial list of keywords that best suit your business when building a PPC campaign.
Notably, tracking your competition’s digital marketing efforts will give you an idea of what keywords they use and their rankings. Through this method, you can adjust your PPC campaign accordingly and target only those keywords that your competitors are successfully utilizing. Furthermore, with a competitor analysis, you can get to know about new keywords that slipped your mind when you developed your PPC campaign.
CONCLUSION
Are you still unsure whether you should include a digital marketing competitive analysis into your list of priorities? If yes, then know that the best benefit of keeping an eye on your competitor’s marketing efforts is that it enables you to avoid tons of mistakes that might cause you to close your business down.
