Suppose you came up with an idea and you have funding. What to do next? You need to know your products and marketing channels. Suppose you already have an idea for your product. You still need a sales strategy in place. There are three main elements of a digital sales strategy:
- Preferred platforms
- Target audience attributes
- Marketing tactics
The rational approach to access such vital information is to spy on your competitors. In other words, competitive analysis. Your competitor has already done the hard work for you. You need not go through a prolonged process of surveying your customers or creating a minimum viable product (MVP) to understand your target audience’s behavior.
The competitive analysis provides answers to the following vital questions:
- Who is your target audience, and what are their attributes?
- What are the preferred marketing platforms your competitor is using?
- What are the tactics they improvise for various marketing platforms?
And finally!
- What is their complete digital marketing strategy?
Note:- The end goal of a competitive analysis is to analyze competitors’ whole marketing strategy.
Here is a step-by-step guide to carry an effective competitive analysis:
- Locate competitors:-
Locating the competition is the first step to effective competitive research. There can be 100s of competitors competing in a market. You need not go after each of their marketing strategies. Shortlist this list to your direct competition. Consider product inventory and their business scale to estimate the relevance.
A direct competitor has a product or service that can work as a substitute for your own. It is better if they operate in your preferred geographical location. On the other hand, the products and services of an indirect competitor are significantly different from yours but serve the same customer base and solve the same problem.
- Analyze their product inventory:-
Product and services are the heart of the business. After all, it is what will solve the consumer’s problem. Analyze your competitor’s complete product inventory. You must emphasize the following information while analyzing your competitor’s product inventory:
- Are they low-cost or high-cost providers?
- Is their product or service better than yours?
- What is their marketing share?
- Do they focus on volume sales or one-off sales?
- Do they sell their products from a brick-and-mortar store as well?
- What are their marketing channels?
- Sales strategy:-
So you know your competitor’s product. You have improvised its intel to improve your product as well. What now? You need to generate sales to make a profit. There is no good in having an excellent product if it does not sell. Your primary focus should be on analyzing your competitor’s sales process. What are the different stages of consumer interaction? Track down the complete process from consumer acquisition to conversions. You must find answers to the following questions:-
- What are their distribution channels?
- What is the geographical location of their target audience?
- Is there business shooting up? Scaling down?
- What is their consumer retention strategy?
- What are the tactics they improvise to sell to their consumers?
Think of sales strategy as a four-stage process.
- Who is your target audience?
- What is their problem?
- How does your product solve it?
- What motivates them to take action?
It is easy to find the answers to the first three questions. However, one needs to study the market and target audience behavior to determine their deep-hidden motivations. For example, pride can be a strong motivation for a golf course maintainer. You can leverage the power of words to arouse certain emotions in your consumers that force them to take action. In other words, leverage effective copywriting.
- What is your competitor’s content strategy?
Content is among the essentials of a digital marketing strategy. It comprises search engine marketing to form organic marketing. It is to provide organic exposure to a brand and acquire consumers. Organic marketing serves long-term and is highly effective.
Content is among the most valuable assets of an online business. You can improvise some digital analysis tools to have a complete go through your competitor’s content inventory. The key findings of a content analysis include:
- Essential keywords
- Content length
- Types of content
- Frequency
Going directly after high-authority keywords can hinder your marketing efforts. A content analysis gives you insights into the gaps in your competitor’s marketing strategy. Filling these gaps is the best way to create unique content and increase brand visibility.
- Social media strategy:-
A social media strategy is among the essentials of a digital marketing strategy. It has tremendous potential as a marketing platform. Many businesses improvise social media to increase their brand visibility and strengthen their marketing strategy.
Most probably, all your direct competitors will have their social media handles. You need to identify the tactics they use to increase their brand visibility on social media.
Here are some questions you need to find answers to during the implementation of this process.
- What are their preferred social media platforms?
- What strategies do they use to increase visibility on social media platforms?
- Do they sell on social media?
- What is their social media marketing strategy?
- What kind of content do they produce on social media?
- Who is their ideal audience on social media platforms?
How to use competitive analysis for your marketing success?
The answer to this question is simple, by incorporating learnings from your competitor’s marketing strategy into yours. The competitive analysis provides insights into other business marketing strategies. You get to learn about the plus and minuses of their marketing strategy.
Include the tactics that work best for your competitor in your marketing strategy, and learn from their mistakes.
Conclusion:-
A competitive analysis is essential to creating an effective digital marketing strategy. It enables businesses to understand their industry-leading trends and improvise them to succeed in their marketing endeavors. For this, hiring a top SEO company can save a lot of time otherwise required to study consumer behavior.
The primary elements of a business are its products/services and sales strategy. Both of them are equally important. Even if it has an excellent product and not a sales strategy, it will fail its marketing endeavors. It is where competitive analysis comes into play. It provides insights into your leading competitor’s product inventory and sales tactics. Every business must conduct competitive research to attain its receptive business goals.
