It’s a challenge for any business to stay on top of their competitive market. That’s why it’s important to know what your competitors are offering that compete with your business, what their price point is, how they’re reaching their target market (and yours) and how they set themselves apart in the market. To stay competitive, you need to keep an eye on your competitors and learn how to market against them.
Whether you do an in-depth dive into the different marketing tactics of your competitors, or do a more basic overview of each, you should have a feel overall about who they are, what they offer, what their pricing is, and how they market themselves. You also need to know how you stack up to your competitors through your SWOT analysis. Having such insights will help you better prepare to compete against any competitor of any size in your market and adjust your messaging accordingly. You can play up your strengths against what your competition offers and downplay those components where they excel over your company.
We love SEMRush! SEMrush is a fantastic tool that helps you to conduct competitive research on any competitor’s domain and to use the data to optimize your marketing campaigns. This tool helps you accomplish four things:
You’ll get a pretty nice glimpse of these using their free tool. If you want to dig deeper, sign up for one of their paid plans; it more than pays for itself!
Need a little insight on what you should be targeting in your paid search campaigns? Then you have to use SpyFu! With SpyFu, you can search for any competitor, download their keywords and just like that, you have gold that you can use for your own efforts. It’s that simple. Learn your competitors’ PPC and SEO tricks and avoid their mistakes.
Buzzsumo is a social network tracking tool that helps you find the most shared content for a given topic or competitor. It’s handy because you can see what kind of content is resonating with their audience and create similar content to attract more traffic to your site or more engagement to your social channels. Use the tool to research content for a specific keyword phrase such as “small business marketing consultant” and see what they’ve created and how well it’s done.
One simple way to keep track of your competitors’ online activity is by taking advantage of Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, you can set up email alerts based on specific search terms and preferences, allowing you to get important updates about each of your competitors. Just go to the site, enter the competitors name and you’ll start receiving alerts whenever there are mentions of them online. You have the option of choosing what kind of alerts you get and how often. Great information sent right to your inbox!
Competitive research helps you understand why customers choose to buy from you or your competitors and how your competition is marketing their products. Over time, this can help you improve your own marketing programs. It’s important to keep an eye on your competitors for more effective marketing, so make sure competitive research is a part of your overall marketing strategy.
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