Competitor research can give you specific insights to outperform your competitors and boost your marketing results.
In this article, you’ll learn actionable ways to get the most from your competitor research, helping you identify gaps, opportunities, and effective tactics.
By the end, you'll know what steps to take to leverage competitor insights and stay ahead in your industry.
Competitor research lets you gain insights into customer behaviors, market & industry trends, pricing adjustments, and more to help you overcome your competition and market your products better.
You need to know what other companies are doing that sell products like yours in the digital marketing space. This way, you can plan to be better than them and make more ideal customers online want to buy from you. You must understand how your competitors market their products online, what they do well, and what mistakes to avoid. Then you can change your strategic business goals & plans so that you are doing the same thing or even better than them to increase digital leads & sales, and marketing ROI.
While understanding the competition can be difficult, it is necessary to succeed in the digital world.
Remember: digital marketing uses digital channels (search engines, email, social media, blogs & websites, and marketplaces) to promote products, services, and brands to a target audience.
By the way, you can understand how digital marketing should work to bring your business the best results in the shortest amount of time. 7 days in a row, you'll receive a step-by-step digital marketing strategy that you can apply to your business and increase conversions. It is an easy-to-understand guide and answers most of your digital marketing questions made by our team.
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What Is Competitor Research?
Competitor research means looking at your competitors' actions, figuring out how they market their products, and developing ways to set yourself apart.
This can help you understand market trends and customer behaviors online, allowing you to craft better digital marketing strategies & campaigns to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
When you find competitors, it is crucial to understand what your competitors are doing. Looking at their prices, the types of customers they have, and their marketing plans can help you find ways that your business can do better. Knowing how they get their information and how they make their advertising better can help you make your campaigns even better.
By the way, competitor analysis is not just limited to digital campaigns—it also plays a role in traditional marketing efforts. By gathering information about which publications your competitors advertise in or which tradeshows they attend, for example, you'll be able to target similar audiences with more effective messaging.
Let's schedule a free call and discuss any questions regarding your business and how you can improve your digital marketing to help you boost brand visibility and lead generation, which means more potential customers and sales.
Strategies For Conducting Competitor & Market Research
By following the strategies below, your business can gain valuable insights into its competition and improve its digital marketing efforts for maximum ROI.
Strategies for conducting direct competitors & market research:
- Monitor their social media channels
- Analyze their website
- Look at review sites
- Stay up-to-date with industry news
1. Monitor Their Social Media Channels
Monitoring your competitors' social media presence is a great way to keep track of the content they create and how customers interact with it.
You should monitor their page regularly to identify any changes in their messaging or tactics they might be using. You can use this information to craft more effective digital marketing strategies and determine which features are most important to your customers. You can better target similar demographics with tailored messaging.
Additionally, by looking at what customers say about the competition in their posts or conversations, you can understand how same customer feel about it. This way, you can develop campaigns that take advantage of these feelings.
2. Analyze Their Website
Check their website: User experience - A competitor's site is a good starting point for evaluating its online performance.
By analyzing a competitor's website, you can gain valuable insights into their branding strategy and the kind of content they create. This process includes their website's content audit, keyword research, and technical SEO audit. You can reach out to us and get our help doing it for you.
Examining their language on the website and the tone of voice to reach their customers can inform your messaging and help you identify which features work the best and tailor your messaging to fit your target customers better.
Analyzing the structure of their homepage or product pages can provide user-experience insight into how users interact with their site and what areas are most important to them, allowing you to craft more effective campaigns for your brand and maximize ROI.
Undoubtedly, any research project these days should begin with a simple Google search or visiting your competitor's web page. But there are also various tools supplied by Google or related to Google's search results and AdWords campaigns that might give you exciting insights into your competition. (You may find competitors that you might not have noticed before.)
We understand that website competitor analysis is a tedious topic. Since we are digital marketing nerds, we love doing it. If you feel that you don't know how to perform competitor website analysis, we can help you for free. We can perform your and your competitor's website review. Fill out the form to get a website review here.
3. Look at Review Sites
Examining customer reviews, ratings, and responses to their products or services can help you identify areas where you can improve your messaging and craft digital marketing campaigns that capitalize on benefits to your target customer.
Analyze your competitors' customer reviews, both positive reviews and negative ones.
Here's the list of the most popular reviews and rating aggregators:
- Amazon Customer Reviews
- Angie's List
- Choice
- Trustpilot
- TestFreaks
- Which?
- ConsumerReports
- Consumer Affairs
- TripAdvisor
- Yelp
- Citysearch
- Google My Business (search their name on Google, and you will see it on the right if they have it.)
- Yahoo! Local Listings
- Influenster
- HubSpot's App Marketplace
- FinancesOnline
- Compare Camp
- G2 Crowd
- TrustRadius
- GoodFirms
- Salesforce AppExchange
- Better Business Bureau
- Glassdoor
- Manta
- Capterra
- HundredX
- Facebook Ratings and Reviews
- Foursquare
- Superpages
- Top Ten Reviews
- Their website
By looking at review trends over time, you can see how changes in the industry or customer preferences have impacted their business and make adjustments to ensure your success.
4. Stay Up-to-date With Industry News
Staying current on the latest industry developments is essential for understanding your competitors and anticipating their next moves. Regularly monitoring news stories, events, and publications can help you identify emerging trends and new opportunities in the market.
Your news sources may vary depending on your industry, but here's the list of major business news providers. Even if they are not talking about your industry, you can still learn much from them. You might learn new business and marketing strategies to help you find a new way to market your brand. This could help you do better than your competition without fighting them directly.
Major business news providers provided by Alltop:
- Wall Street Journal Business
- New York Times Business
- Business Insider
- Inc
- Yahoo Finance
- Harvard Business Review
- Reddit Startup
- Reddit Business
- The Economist Business and Finance
Some of the best Twitter follows to get inspired in the marketing field by Alltop:
- Seth Godin
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Guy Kawasaki
- Small Business Trends
- Forbes
- Marketing Profs
- HR Bartender
- Caterina Fake
- Cynthia Than
- Simon Kemp
It can be helpful to keep track of what traditional media outlets or social networks say about your customer base or new approaches to it. This can give you valuable information about their habits and how they might change.
When you incorporate the right tools into your research, you may find that it's not as difficult as you imagined.
If you're unsure how to adjust your digital marketing strategy to market changes, email us for free help.
Examples Of How to Use Competitor Research Data
By paying attention to what other companies are doing, asking customers for their thoughts, and seeing what works well for them, you can find ways to improve your marketing.
Here are some practical examples of how to use competitor research data:
- Monitor pricing
- Analyze customer reviews
- Monitor product launches
- Identify potential business partners
Monitor pricing
Your business should check pricing trends to see if it needs to change its prices.
You also have to look at shifts in the market. This means looking at whether people want more or less of a product or service. With this information, your business can determine if it needs to raise or lower its prices to make money.
Analyze customer reviews
Customer reviews can also reveal information about customer pain points and preferences.
Your business can identify improvement areas to meet customer needs by understanding customer concerns.
Analyzing customer reviews can help your business understand customer expectations and ensure its products and services are priced accordingly.
Monitor product launches
Your business should also monitor product launches in your industry, as these can signal shifts in customer preferences and trends.
By staying up to date with the latest product launches, your business can identify opportunities for its products and adjust its strategies accordingly.
Furthermore, monitoring the competition can provide insights into how the market is evolving and how other businesses respond to changes.
Identify potential business partners.
It is also important to find businesses you could work with to overcome your major competitor on the market.
Working with other businesses can help both companies. It can help them get new customers, technologies, and resources. But you must be careful and ensure that the partnership will benefit both parties before you agree.
Email us if you need help understanding your competitors. It's free.
Step-By-Step Competitor Research Plan
Let's put it all together and see how competitor research should work for you step by step.
1. Identify Key Competitors & Their Strategies
Your company should also identify its main competitors and evaluate their strategies. This can help your business stay informed of the current market dynamics and help you proactively adjust its plan accordingly.
Your company must understand how much your competitors sell their products for and what deals or promotions they run (competitors offer). This information can help your company develop a better plan to compete against its opponents.
Knowing what strategies the other companies are using can also help your company predict how it might react if the market changes or the company offers new products.
Your company should take the following steps to identify key competitors and their strategies:
- Make a list of all the companies in the same industry as you. These are the businesses that you will be competing against for market share. (Direct competitors)
- Make sure that you know what other companies are doing to sell their products. This includes how much they charge, special offers, and anything else they do to make people want to buy from them instead of you. (Indirect competitors)
- Read what customers say about each competitor. This will help you know what people like or do not like about them. (Direct and indirect competitors)
- Watch how other companies do over time. If the market changes or new products emerge, change your company's strategies accordingly.
2. Analyze Competitors' Strengths and Weaknesses
Your company should analyze its competitors' strengths and weaknesses to develop a competitive advantage. A comprehensive competitive analysis should be done here.
This can be done by researching competitors' products and services, customer experience, marketing strategies, pricing models, sales process, and other investments they have made to gain a competitive advantage.
Identifying customer feedback on each competitor can provide valuable insight into how customers perceive each competitor's product or service quality.
By understanding their competitors' strengths and weaknesses, companies can be better positioned to succeed in the marketplace.
For example, if one company's product has fewer features than another but is priced the same, the first company may have difficulty selling its product.
Companies should listen to what customers say about their competitor's products. This will help them understand how customers see their competitor's products. Companies can also look at how their competitors advertise and set prices to find ways they could do better.
3. Develop a Plan to Compete Effectively Against Your Rivals
Developing a plan to compete effectively against your rivals is integral to business in the modern marketplace. You should be aware of your competitors and analyze their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses to develop a competitive edge.
A successful plan to compete against your rivals should include research into competitors' products and services, customer experience, marketing strategies, pricing models, and investments.
Once your company has researched its competitors, it must develop a plan of action to differentiate itself from the competition successfully. This may include developing unique products or services that appeal to specific customer segments or creating more attractive pricing models than their rivals.
You should also aim to improve customer experience by offering better service and using new technologies that give them a competitive advantage.
Also, your company should have a complete marketing plan that includes online and offline methods like SEO optimization, content creation, advertising campaigns, public relations outreach, and social media.
Companies can stand out from the competition and build their brand presence in the market by ensuring that all of these elements work well together.
Do you struggle with implementing competitor research strategies in your digital marketing campaign? BBW is here to help you. Contact us. It's Free.
So Why Should Your Company Have a Competitor Research in Digital Marketing?
Understanding how to research a competitor - it's an essential part of running a successful business. You can learn a lot from your competitors that can help you make decisions about your digital marketing. To know enough about your competitors, you need to look at their products and services, how they treat their customers, marketing strategies, pricing models, investments, and where they put their money.
With the right plan, your own company can use what it learns about its competitors to help it make better business decisions. This could mean making a plan to set the company's product or service apart from the competition or a complete online and offline marketing strategy that includes SEO optimization, content creation, advertising campaigns, public relations outreach, and social media engagement.
Key Takeaways: Top 5 Tips to Make the Most of Competitor Research
- Identify Key Competitors: Start by identifying your top competitors, especially those with similar target audiences, to understand the landscape and uncover opportunities.
- Analyze Their Strategies: Look into their content, SEO, PPC campaigns, and social media activities to see what works for them and identify gaps you can fill.
- Evaluate Their Strengths and Weaknesses: Understand where your competitors are excelling and where they’re falling short. Use this information to strengthen your own strategy.
- Keyword Insights: Research the keywords your competitors are ranking for. Use these insights to improve your own SEO and paid advertising efforts.
- Stay Updated: Keep an eye on changes in your competitors’ strategies to adapt your approach and stay ahead of the game.
Need help using competitor research to enhance your digital marketing strategy? Contact us today, and let’s uncover new opportunities for your business.
