competitor analysis in digital marketing

Competitor analysis in digital marketing

Many companies start competitor analysis when they develop a digital marketing strategy. and never get back to it later. This is an oversight because in many cases a timely update on your rivals’ online moves. this could help you adjust your campaign mid-way and help it to perform better in the end.

What Is Competitor Analysis?

It is the process of researching and analyzing the marketing strategies and business characteristics of the companies operating in a given market. Competitor analysis is typically carried out to identify the strengths and weaknesses of other market players, define your company’s standing about them, highlight gaps and estimate your potential to fill them.

 

Who Should You Analyze as Competitors in Digital Marketing?

Online competitor analysis should cover the above, plus one more group of rivals: your brand competitors that fight for the same users like you. They don’t necessarily need to sell them a similar product or service, but they want to get their attention.

Why You Need an Ongoing Competitor Analysis?

Your main competitors are most likely to stay the same as when you developed the strategy, but their positions and the general situation in the market are constantly shifting.

Here are the key reasons to check up on other market players regularly:

To review benchmarks

From monitoring your internal stats, you know which channels perform best — but what if your competitors have managed to achieve even better results? You need to know this.

To catch up with industry and market trends

Some seasonal trends reoccur every year — and there are peaks and declines in demand that you will be prepared for only if you monitor the competitive landscape. Make sure to stay alert.

 

To learn the best new practices and the mistakes to avoid

Sometimes it’s better to let your competitors test new channels than go there yourself and waste your budget. Learn from other companies’ experiences.

 

To update your marketing mix

From digital marketing campaigns, you can get some important news on your competition, such as a new product launch, and get ideas for your own company’s development.

 

To refine your goals

As the situation in the online market changes, you may need to adjust not just your strategy, but also the objectives you previously set.

How Often Should You Review Your Digital Marketing Strategy with the Help of Competitor Analysis?

You can check and analyze other companies’ metrics frequently, or only when you’re ready to make adjustments to your campaign.

How to Do Competitor Analysis regularly: The Key Points for Digital Marketing

Competitive analysis may seem like a dreary and endless task to marketers. To help you stay focused, we will walk you through its key aspects, and cover the process of generating insights from core digital channels.

 

1. Stay Updated on Competitors’ Market Positions

If you want to stay sure that your strategy will help you beat your rivals online, you need to stay up to date on their latest digital marketing moves and your performance compared to theirs.

For our competitor analysis example, let’s take Wayfair, a home decor e-tailer that wants to catch up with its rivals’ online performance. For a better understanding of the market, you may want to start by checking up on the overall market landscape. In Market Explorer, you only need to enter one website in the search field, and the tool will conduct a complete competitor mapping for you.

 

Competitors’ Market Positions

With this tool, you can: visit

Map out the competitive landscape in a comprehensible form of a Growth Quadrant.

Qualify your competitors by their current audience size and market potential.

Get a dynamic view of your closest rivals’ online market shares and changes in their market positions over time;

Hand-pick your closest rivals based on traffic and market share numbers, and create a Custom market to explore the marketing strategies and keep a constant watch on the competitors that matter.

Then, for a more granular analysis, turn to the Benchmarking report to get a breakdown of the market’s key patterns for audience generation:

2. Check Your Rivals’ Choice of Platforms for Advertising and Media Placements

Next, move on to Traffic Analytics to take a sneak peek into which platforms might bring the most value from paid and organic marketing partnerships.  Start with checking out which sites your rivals’ shared audience visits most frequently when surfing the web. Go to the Audience Insights tab and simply enter up to five competitors:

3 Get Insights On Competitors’ Top Marketing Campaigns

There’s another factor that never remains constant within competitor analysis — your rivals’ top offers/products and marketing campaigns.

The Traffic Analytics tools.Top Pages report shows the most visited pages of the competitors’ site — out of this overview, you can pinpoint your rivals’ most popular offers and campaigns. Click here

Competitors’ Top Marketing Campaigns

In terms of top offers, their credit card solution seems to attract over 20% of the brand’s audience:

4. Analyze Your Competitors’ SEO Efforts

If other companies are outranking you in organic search, they must also be getting more clicks, generating more leads, and gaining more revenue. There can be 200+ reasons why it happens, but, usually, it’s not all that complicated.

With the Organic Research tool, you can monitor a target website’s organic search visibility. We will continue our example analysis and see what’s up with homedepot.com in organic search:

At a glance, you can discover:

 

The target website’s total number of keywords with organic positions (in Google Top 100), presented visually;

Expected monthly organic traffic from those keywords;

The estimated price of the given organic keywords in Google text Ads;

Estimated branded and non-branded traffic.

You can get into more detail on your rivals’ keywords that let them take top positions in organic search:

 

Discover their most successful keywords;

Get an idea of consumer behavior, based on search volume;

See the most popular pages that users found with organic search;

Outline initial ideas on how you can optimize your campaign to increase your rankings and conversions.

Rival’s most successful keywords

You can also get content marketing strategy ideas with insights from Keyword Gap.