Digital Marketing

How To Do Competitor Analysis in Digital Marketing

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO DEFINE COMPETITOR ANALYSIS IS-

A process to know your standing in the market, gaps in your strategies and potential opportunities that you can exploit on the basis of empirical research and analysis of the industry, market and competitors.

HERE IS WHY COMPETITOR ANALYSIS IS IMPERATIVE FOR YOU

• To be a step ahead of your competitors by measuring their strengths and weaknesses
• To accurately forecast your marketing plan
• To identify the overall industry trends and strategize thereafter
• To update your company’s marketing mix

Therefore, the best digital marketing agency does what is best for the company that hires them after a thorough analysis of what will be best for the company.

FOR DOING A COMPETITOR ANALYSIS YOU NEED TO FIND ANSWERS FOR QUESTIONS LIKE

1. Who are your competitors? The geographical area they most operate in and the pricing of their products/services.
2. What is their market share? Whether it is on an increasing or decreasing trend?
3. What is their USP?
4. Their sales volume for a particular timeframe.
5. What kind of marketing strategies are they applying?
6. The keywords for which they are ranking organically and their main PPC keywords.
7. Reviews and engagement of their customers and why do people prefer their products.

STEPS TO DO COMPETITOR ANALYSIS-

Identify your top competitors

Consider competitors you come up against on a regular basis. For instance, if you are a fairly new start-up then the leading company in the same industry as yours will not be your top competitor. You and your competitor must have similar capabilities.

Compare your market positioning with theirs

A few areas you should consider will ascertaining your competitor’s market positioning are product features, product quality, pricing and customer segments.
The most sought-after way is SWOT Analysis- You categorise your competitor on the basis of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats.

Compare the traffic and performance with their website

This will help you know the number of website visits they get on an average, their monthly unique visitors, engagement rate metrics, traffic sources, time spent on site and data on pageviews.

Compare keywords, backlinks and SEO Effectiveness

Digital marketing agencies excel at this. They find keywords that are popular with the target audience, pay-per-click opportunities, content topics that audience search for, number of backlinks available, how to generate more backlinks, traffic generated from organic and inorganic traffic, page speed and such other essential metrics.

Compare audience engagement

By understanding who their audience is, you will know what your potential target audience can be. Additionally, it will help analyse the differences in your respective audiences. Also, analyse their social media presence and engagement.

Make your final conclusion

Spend time ensuring whether you have gathered enough information to base your future plans on.

Most companies that get competitor analysis done do not realise how often they must do it. Doing a thorough analysis in one year will not be applicable after 2 years. Like all your new plans, your analysis must also be up-to-date.