Glancing over at your competitors can be a wonderful, if unexpected, way to improve your own digital marketing. Here’s how to take a creative look at your market to improve your understanding of your audience and find new ways of reaching out.
There’s no substitute for originality
Keep that in mind.
Being imaginative, proactive, and creative in your digital marketing is essential. Simply copying trends is not enough. However, watching your competitors can be helpful—especially in learning from their errors. With some consideration, you can discover fresh link-building chances, new outreach methods, and new platforms to promote your strengths.
Finding your indirect competitors
You know who your primary competitors are. You might already be watching what they do online. But what about your indirect competitors? That’s where you can pick up some digital marketing tips. An indirect competitor is a business in your field that targets the same audience as you, but doesn’t sell the same product.
Run a dog kennel? See how pet shops behave online.
Got a B2B design agency? Think about what B2B developers are doing.
Own a gym? Research how sports brands are reaching out.
What should you look for?
Traffic
All else being equal, if one of your competitors is getting lots of traffic, it suggests they’re doing something right. Services like Compete, comScore, and Hitwise can help you find out just how often people are visiting your competitors’ websites.
Content types
Is there a certain type of content that’s getting lots of social shares? Whether it’s a weekly survey, a Q&A or well-written blog posts — if it’s working for them, there’s a good chance it will work for you.
Social media
What type of content is getting the most and least engagement on your competitors’ social media channels? How long does it take for them to reply to interactions? What kind of content do they share? Remember, don’t just look for the stuff that is getting the most traction. Sometimes the best way to learn is through (other people’s) mistakes.
Backlinks
Open Site Explorer by Moz and SEMrush are two powerful SEO tools that you can use to see which websites are referring the most traffic to your competitors’ websites. With a little digging you can draw up a roadmap of websites to target for backlinks. After all, if they are linking to your competitors, they could well do the same for you. You can also find out what keywords your competitors are targeting.
Audience profiling
You need to know about SimilarWeb — a great-looking, easy to use web app that shows you what type of people are visiting your competitors’ websites and how they are getting there.
The power of partnerships
Building partnerships with your indirect competitors is a proven way to ante up your business growth. Essentially you form bonds with other businesses that have the same audience as the one you are trying to market to. It works well between two companies that offer complementary services. Car dealerships and car insurers. Wedding dress shops and wedding caterers. Online accounting software and web design agencies. With partnerships, the heavy-lifting of introducing your services to prospective leads is done for you.
Over to you…
There are oodles of tools out there on the www that can help you drill down into your competitors’ digital marketing. And while it’s important to repeat that you can’t trump originality, a basic understanding of what is and isn’t working for your competitors can only help your own marketing efforts.
Choose the tool that you think is right for your business and give it a try today!