How Competitor Analysis Leads to an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy?

How Competitor Analysis Leads to an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy?

As a leading digital marketing firm, SkyTrust believes in conducting thorough competitor research and analysis for curating an effective marketing strategy. It is the best way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and grow your business.

What is competitor analysis in digital marketing?

Having a constant check of your competition and staying ahead of it is the best way to grow your business. Competitor analysis is the best way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and plan your strategies accordingly.

It is essential to perform a detailed market analysis to stay on top. This strategy involves researching your significant competitors to gain insights about their services, products, sales, marketing tactics, strategies, and ways to capture maximum market shares. It also helps you stay updated on industry trends and ensures that your products or services consistently meet or exceed industry standards.

How to do competitive analysis?

As a leading digital transformation firm, SkyTrust believes in having thorough competitor research and analysis for curating an effective marketing strategy. Paid or organic, every performance needs to be tracked using the right tools and steps. Below is a six-step process for having actionable and comprehensive competitive research.

• Identify your competitors – To begin with, keep a constant check on your direct and indirect competitors – Brands that provide similar products or services as yours and those that provide an entirely different service but target the same problems of customers as yours. Online marketing companies spend a handsome amount on competitor analysis and identifying their real competitors. You can use the right tools, like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc., to better understand your competitors’ social media platforms and strategies.
• Check their social media ads strategy – It is advised to create your social media marketing strategies only after investigating your competitors’ social platforms. The Facebook Ad Library tool helps you know about all the active ad campaigns of different brands only by searching through keywords or brand names. Social media competitor analysis through various tools like Facebook and LinkedIn lead ads offers customized landing pages, which increases the chance of conversions.
• PPC competitor analysis – Tracking your competitor’s PPC efforts through Google’s keyword planner shows the volume and average cost-per-click of the keywords your competitors are targeting. You can also discover the targeted demographics across not just the US stats but also the global cities, and public searches on certain keywords. Ahrefs is another such tool that allows marketers to know about their competitors’ best-performing keywords and landing pages.
• Tracking the organic performance through SEO – One of the best ways to track your competitor’s organic performance is by running an SEO competitor analysis. Experts prefer running crawlers, making visibility reports of the top-performing pages and keywords, checking the SEO trends, and Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T) signals from the content standpoint. The crawler’s free version can analyze up to 500 URLs, and detect duplicate content & technical issues hampering the page’s visibility. Measuring organic performance also considers other factors like mobile-friendliness, site speed, trustworthy domain, and removal of page errors; Google offers many free tools to measure these factors.
• Content marketing evaluation – In addition to SEO and PPC, it is essential to keep a check on your competitor’s content marketing strategy by analyzing the content style and format. Whenever doing a content marketing competitive analysis, one must review the main navigation page content, interlinking pages on the website, how the products and services of your competitors are showcased, content formats used for marketing, gated and non-gated content resources, and main topic hubs. To keep up with your customer’s expectations, pain points, and intentions, you should focus on providing highly relevant and valuable content.

What are the Types of Competitive Analysis?

There are 7 types of competitor analysis frameworks, namely – 

1. SWOT Analysis – Talking about the good old method, SWOT analysis organizes a company’s information into four main categories – Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It helps identify the competitive advantages and find more areas of improvement.
2. Porter’s Five Forces – This framework was created by Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School to analyze the competitive structure of an entire industry. Whether considering SEO, PPC, website competitor analysis, or any other, this structure is a great way to shape business strategies and create targeted goals. The five key market forces examined under this framework are – Threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the intensity of competitive rivalry, the bargaining power of new buyers, and the threat of substitutes.
3. Strategic Group Analysis – As the name suggests, it categorizes competitors into groups based on their pricing strategies, performance marketing tactics, and offers. Also, place your own company into the analysis report to identify your most profitable group’s strategy. For example, if you discover that the top three companies of your niche are grouped into the same category, you will have to identify if it benefits you or not.

• Stars – Products with high growth and market share
• Question Marks – Usually new products with high growth but low market share.
• Cash Cows – Products with low growth and high market share.
• Pets – Products with low growth and low market share

4. Perceptual Mapping – This competitive analysis framework analyzes the company’s perception and its competitors on a plot graph. The two factors used for comparison are quality and price. It reports how customers perceive your company in comparison to your competitors.
5. Growth-Share Matrix – This type is most useful for big companies with an extensive portfolio of products or services in identifying priorities. This chart divides your products into four quadrants –
6. Business Model Canvas – This model helps identify the most important factors to focus on and improves business clarity. This framework is divided into 9 elements – Customers, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, activities, resources, partnerships, and cost structure.
7. Customer Journey Map – Also known as a user journey map, this framework gives a visual story of a customer’s interactions with a brand. If you are looking for tips about gaining insights into your customer’s pain points and ways to improve them, one of our competitive analysis digital marketing tips is to map out the customer channels, their journeys across each channel, how a brand responds to every customer’s concern, and the opportunities to improve every channel’s experience.

Conclusion

Competitor Analysis can help you amplify your business the right way, especially if you take professional help from an expert like SkyTrust. With an experience of more than a decade, our team of digital transformation experts can help you take the leap of faith toward a technologically advanced tomorrow. Join forces with us to get started today.