How To Use Competitive Analysis To Upgrade Digital Marketing

Competitors are an amazing source of great marketing ideas, and not necessarily in the sense of copying them. Through competitive analysis, you use someone else’s strategies as a point of comparison to find areas where you can grow. This is an essential step in digital marketing success.

Here are seven tips for competitive analysis that every Chicago digital marketing agency has for you:

1. Pinpoint your primary competitors.
2. Investigate their websites.
3. Inspect their social media profiles.
4. Review their paid marketing plans.
5. Check out their marketing emails.
6. Learn about their approach to search engine optimization (SEO).
7. Look for any gaps you can exploit.

Get ready to take notes because there is much to discuss.

Let’s go!

Are you looking for a full-service digital marketing agency? See the DAP difference below!

What Is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis is the process of studying your competitors’ business strategies to adopt the elements that make them successful into your own approach. In other words, it involves watching them from afar and taking notes on how they run their businesses in order to improve yours.

Competitive analysis applies to many strategies and follows processes that best fit a given strategy. For example, competitive analysis for SEO uses page-by-page analysis, which does not apply to other types of digital marketing. You can, however, use it in other ways.

With social media or paid ads, you can analyze the content they publish one by one to gain more insight into what makes a compelling post or ad. Competitive analysis is flexible and can change to fit any target goal that you might have.

Learn more about how to apply competitive analysis below.

Seven Ways To Use Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a strategy that employs websites, social media, and videos to reach people. Depending on your preferred channels, you can use competitive analysis to upgrade your digital marketing strategy in a few ways.

You do not have to adhere to all the suggested methods here. Instead, choose the ones that most apply to avoid wasting time on too many tasks. If you want better coverage, consider a Chicago digital marketing agency to reduce your workload.

     1. Pinpoint Your Primary Competitors

The goal of a competitive analysis is to help you match or overcome your competitors — both direct and indirect ones. The former includes businesses that offer products and services similar to yours. The latter refers to businesses that people might consider as alternatives to yours.

Having an accurate sense of your main competitors is critical. If you look in the wrong direction for analysis, you risk wasting your efforts. For example, a landscaping service in Arlington Heights shares its market with florists and big-box stores, but not department stores.

     2. Investigate Their Websites

After identifying your biggest competitors, one of the first steps to take is to thoroughly investigate their websites. By this point, you should start to make conscious comparisons between your efforts and theirs. Ask: How and why do they succeed?

Pay close attention to how they use call-to-action (CTA) buttons and landing pages to attract conversions. You should also examine how their design choices and navigation affect the user experience (UX). You can use tools such as Google Analytics to monitor their traffic data.

     3. Inspect Their Social Media Profiles

Reviewing your competition is relatively easy through social apps, including TikTok, Facebook, and Reddit. Use social listening to learn more about your competitors' major selling points — essentially, the positive qualities that make your shared market choose them over you. 

Any good business has some level of social media presence. Comments are some of these, giving you added data points to compile and analyze. They tell you what customers like and dislike about your competitors. These are insights that you can use to boost your business.

     4. Review Their Paid Marketing Plans

Besides websites and social media profiles, your competitors rely on other strategies to connect with customers. One paid marketing strategy is pay-per-click (PPC). The more you know about how their marketing ad copy, landing pages, and keywords work, the better you can perform your competitive analysis.

Use SpyFu and similar tools. They can identify and monitor your competitors’ target keywords and conversions, among other aspects of their ad campaigns. Use that information to generate original ideas that can work better for your business.

     5. Analyze Their Marketing Emails

Email marketing is an efficient and reliable way to reach hundreds or thousands of people with little effort. Signing up for a competitor’s email newsletter gives you free access to some of their critical marketing materials, such as seasonal campaigns, sales, and other offers.

This tactic should allow you to analyze the type of content, frequency, and methods your competitors use to generate and convert leads through email. For instance, a company’s marketing emails might contain examples of services they provide for potential clients or offer discounts for new ones.

     6. Learn About Their Approach to SEO

Taking a more holistic approach to competitive analysis serves you well. You can learn about your own strengths and weaknesses when you analyze what your competitors do better, including their approach to SEO.

For example, ask: What patterns can you discern from their website content? How does that affect the way that people respond to their brands? Identify the top keywords they rank for and see how you do in comparison. Tools such as Ahrefs make tracking this information quick and simple.

     7. Look for Any Gaps You Can Exploit

After employing all of the steps outlined above, the last course of action is to look for gaps in what your competitors are doing or failing to do. Finding their flaws is possible when you know how to find them.

If you are unsure about conducting this analysis yourself, consulting with a Chicago digital marketing agency is a sure way to gain perspective. The primary gaps are in products, services, and pricing. If you find a gap in UX, too, that is all the better for you.

Summing Up

Your business can stagnate for many reasons, especially when your digital marketing plans become stale. When that happens, employing competitive analysis is a reliable solution.

Investigating your biggest and closest competitors can give you a better perspective on how to improve your digital marketing. For instance, social listening gives you clues to where and how your competitors succeed as brands. You can also learn from their weaknesses and mistakes.

Do you need help running a thorough competitive analysis for your business’s digital marketing strategy? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.