Your website is designed to bring you more business and sales. When it comes to your competitors, their websites exist for the same reasons. With this, it becomes important to monitor and analyse their online marketing.
Find Opportunistic Keywords + Rankings
Online advertising is one of the most, if not the most, prevalent forms of online marketing in existence today. It is largely driven by keywords in that if someone searches for a term that you have an advertisement built around (i.e. your chosen keyword(s), your website will appear in the form of an advertisement on their search results page.
If you are a confectionery business and notice that your competitors may appear in search results for terms such as lollipops, marshmallows and jellybeans but they do not appear attached to the term chocolate, you can exploit this shortcoming by buttressing your online advertising and presence in relation to this term. It is also advisable to make a note of where your competitors appear organically within search rankings. Are they beating your website at all? If so, examine the relevant pages and see where you can improve your search engine optimisation and content to bridge this gap.
Infiltrate their Social Sphere
Discover what is popular with them – what do they talk about and what gets their customers talking? Examine their social media feeds to ascertain their most shared and talked about content. Obviously, this has struck a chord with their customer cohort. Why? Did a particular offer appeal to many due to the duration of the offer or perhaps the discount on the price? Did their social media followers respond well towards the news that a new type of product or service is being offered?
In this age of information overload, it is vital to pounce on any aspects that manage to grab users’ attention enough so that they stop to like, comment or share it etc. You can also sign up for Google alerts specific to a competitor and competitive keywords to keep tabs on any key players.
Put your ‘Customer Goggles’ On
Take a break from analysing their activities as a business competitor and instead take a look at what they are offering if you were a customer of the business. Sign up for their newsletters (using an e-mail address that is not connected to your company) and habitually read their blog content. From this, you can glean news and information about what your competitors are up to and where they are headed. Maybe they will launch a crowdfunding drive to help fund the opening of new premises.
Use this to your advantage by highlighting in your own content, blogs and newsletters the range and location of premises that your own company has. If you only have one (or none if you a purely online entity), reinforce how your online shop has worldwide and efficient delivery.
