Digital presence is increasingly crucial to the success of a brand. And if you have an ecommerce site, it is absolutely critical!
One of the best strategies to ascertain whether you are doing a good job or not is to find out how the competition is positioned in the digital ecosystem.
In the digital universe, finding out what the competition has been doing is not a particularly complicated task, but it can help you understand your own strengths and weaknesses and use this information to your advantage. Let us help you define the steps you should follow when studying the position of a competitor so you can improve your online marketing results.
There are 4 key areas to consider:
1. Website
• Design: If both want to reach the same audience, you should start by comparing your website design to that of your competitors and look for similarities. Is it similar? Is it different? And would it be advantageous for you to tweak your website design in order to differentiate it?
• Navigation:: Imagine that you are a customer of that company; can you find all the information you need? Is there any feature that doesn’t work, or have you found out that their website provides better navigation? If so, you just found something to improve on…
• Contents:: How is the competition’s content organized? Do they have interesting information?
• Social Media Links:: Are these links available on the website? What social media sites do they have? Did you forget to include any particular social media site?
• User experience:: Did you enjoy the experience? Were there any problems loading a particular page?
There are other aspects to be analyzed. It is important to write down all the differences you find when studying the competition and find out which ones are working to your advantage – or, on the other hand, if there is something you should implement on your website.
2. Social Media
• Platforms:: Which social media sites does the competition use?
• Posting Frequency: How often do they post new content? At what time and on which days? When does it trigger more audience interaction? Which platform are they more active on, and where do they have more followers? Identify their social media strategy and find out whether it is better than yours.
• Interaction/Interest: Do their posts usually have lots of comments and shares? How do they react to negative comments: Do they delete them or try to solve the problem with the unhappy customer? Think about what you can learn from this…
• Published content: Do they post original content or do they share it from external sources? Written or visual content? Compare this to what your company usually does.
• Sponsored posts: Can you find out if they pay for social media ads? Does it seem like they are having good results?
If your social media results are not particularly positive, this is a good reason to study how the competition behaves and find out about their strategies, so you can change your approach according to the information you collect.
3. SEO
We are assuming that you know your business’s most important keywords. Now google them and start collecting information. If the competition ranks higher than you, it’s time to optimize your website using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.
4. Blog
Any company focusing on digital marketing should invest on a blog, since this is the perfect way to publicize topics related to the services it provides.
• Design: Is the competition’s blog template consistent with its website design? Is there an area for comments? Is it intuitive and easy to explore?
• Posting frequency: How often do they post new content? Pay attention to the public’s reactions to determine the best time to publish.
• Topics: Which topics does the competition deal with? How does the public react to each of these topics? Do the posts have any call-to-action, for example, or some openly commercial content to sell their products and services?
The more detailed your competitor analysis, the better for you. But you shouldn’t simply collect this information. You should conduct a thorough analysis, compare information and use all that data to improve your own results with an action plan for your company. So start researching today and use it to your advantage!
