Behind the scenes: 4 insights to gather from competitors’ marketing

If you’re looking for direction in your next marketing campaign, you might start by evaluating what your competitors are doing — especially if they’ve been in business longer than you have.

Often, dissecting competitors’ approaches to promotions can offer valuable insights into what’s likely to be most effective in your industry and marketplace, as well as techniques that probably won’t work. If you notice another company discontinuing a program, you can bet it didn’t produce the expected ROI, whereas promotions that go on for the long term are probably worth a second look.

Formal competitor analysis and market research can be invaluable, but even anecdotal info that comes from simple observation can help.

“Your successful competitors have already done all the hard work,” notes Nick Tubis in Forbes. “You can very quickly learn what works for them. As Tony Robbins said, ‘The surest way to achieve success is to model someone who is already successful.’”

Consider these suggestions for using competitors’ marketing schemes to your best advantage.

• Peruse your competitors’ websites from a consumer standpoint. Are they more appealing, more user friendly or easier to navigate than yours? Are their visuals better? Interact with the customer service function and note how the site incentivizes future purchases. What aspects could you adopt?
• Tubis recommends evaluating the success of your competitors’ online display ads through tools such as WhatRunsWhere, SimilarWeb and SEMrush. The tools can reveal insights about their keyword rankings, which ad copy is working, how their landing pages present, where their backlinks originate and how much of their traffic is coming from Facebook ads, paid search, SEO and other websites.
• Check out other brands’ social media presences. Use a private Twitter shield to gauge which of your competitors’ posts garner the most retweets and likes, and/or use Facebook Insights’ “Pages to Watch” tool. Hootsuite and Oktopost offer similar social media monitoring.
• Subscribe to competitors’ blogs, read user comments and optimize SEMrush to determine what type of content marketing is converting for them.

As you learn more about your competitors’ strategies, it’s important to avoid knee-jerk reactions and instead shoot for longer-term plans aimed at superseding their efforts in the long haul. Go for style over substance, don’t try to please everyone and never override your competitive differentiators just to gain a temporary advantage.

Talk to Custom Toll Free for more tips on marketing plans that can beat out your competition.