How To Conduct A Proper Competitor Analysis

Reading Time: ~4 Mins | Written By: Mackenzie Bergman, Julian Bermudez, Sean Imoo, & Sydney Vardja

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Staying ahead in digital marketing requires a thorough understanding of your rivals' strategies. 

To conduct an effective competitor analysis, it's crucial to closely observe your rivals' marketing strategies, encompassing a variety of tactics such as email campaigns, social media initiatives, and digital advertising.

By dissecting their tactics used—and their strengths and weaknesses—you can gain crucial insights into your own market positioning and opportunities for growth. In this article, we dive into how to perfect your competitor analysis, looking specifically at how to audit email marketing, social media and digital ads efforts.

1. Auditing Your Competitor's Email Marketing

Start your competitor analysis by subscribing to 3-4 of your industry competitors' eNewsletters and gathering what you receive in your inbox for a month-long period. At the end of the month sit down and go over each competitor's emails and note down their strengths, weaknesses, and inspirational takeaways you can implement for your own emails.

Here are a few steps you should follow to ensure you’re getting the most out of this analysis:

1. Identify your competition (3-4 industry competitors) and subscribe to their eNewsletters

2. Gather information on how they have set up their email signup form on their website if they are sending automated emails, email frequency and content, products, services, pricing, service area, reputation, and marketing tactics.

3. Compare the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor.

Build on your competition’s strengths and weaknesses to create a competitive advantage.

2. Auditing Your Competitor’s Social Media Accounts

Having a strong understanding of what your competitors are doing on social media can serve as an excellent place to start when it comes to planning out your brand’s social strategy. Whether you glean many “not to do’s” from inspecting competitors’ pages, or walk away with some great inspiration, it’s very beneficial to have an idea of what similar brands are putting out to their audience.

Once you have researched and decided on the top 3-4 competitors you’d like to look into, identify all of the channels they are active on and begin to comb through each page. Make detailed notes of each brand and social platform they are on in order to inform your strategy as much as possible. Here’s a breakdown of how best to conduct your social media competitor analysis:

1. Identify your top 3-4 competitors as well as the social media channels they are active on.

2. Conduct a SWOT analysis of each page, noting what seems to be working well for them, what inspiration you can draw, as well as what you want to avoid when planning out your own strategy.

3. Some points that can inform your SWOT analysis are:

• How often do they post?

• Are they using all the features of the platform (Stories, Highlights, etc.)

• What posts appear to be performing really well and which don’t?

• What is their hashtag strategy like?

• What are some things to note about their brand voice?

• How do they interact with their community via social channels, public comments, reshares of content etc? 

Take this information into account when you are creating or updating your brand’s social media strategy.

3. Auditing Your Competitor’s Digital Ad Campaigns

In the dynamic world of digital marketing, mastering pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is critical. However, doing so without insight into competitors'  strategies can be limiting. Conducting a thorough PPC competitive analysis is the key to unlocking valuable insights that will help you better optimize your own ads and get a leg up on the competition. Here are some simple steps that can help you perform your next PPC competitor analysis:

1. Identify your competitors. Beyond the obvious contenders, proactive research into keywords relevant to your business or industry can reveal new and emerging rivals. 

2. Delve into your competitors' ad copy and messaging. Ad intelligence tools like Semrush and the Meta Ad Library can help offer a comprehensive view of their strategies. Analyze their language, tone, creatives, and key messages before thinking about how you can optimize your own ads.

3. Analyze competitors' landing pages. The next step is to evaluate the design, call-to-action (CTA) placement, and conversion elements on your competitors’ landing pages. Take note of any engaging elements that you could implement on your own website.

4. Optimize your ads using insights gained. Once your analysis is done, you can now start to refine your ad copy, creatives, and landing pages based on your newfound knowledge.

Mastering these steps will elevate your PPC campaigns and drive more conversions in the long run. Read and learn more about conducting a PPC Competitor Analysis. 

Executing a thorough competitor analysis can be a gamechanger for any brand. Beyond identifying your competitors' shortcomings, you also gain the opportunity to draw inspiration from the remarkable ideas they have already put into action. Talk about a win-win!

Maintaining pace is imperative. Those who can’t keep up fall behind yesterday.