“I take inspiration from everyone and everything. I’m inspired by current champions, former champions, true competitors, people dedicated to their dream, hard workers, dreamers, believers, achievers.”
Wise thoughts from UFC super-fighter and self-marketing machine, Conor McGregor. But it’s not just sportspeople who should be adopting this approach. In business, taking note of competitors should be an integral part of your research strategy.
What is competitive research?
Competitive research, according to Entrepreneur, is defined as “identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.”
Those not doing this are missing a trick.
For example, a quick evaluation of the best performing web content relating directly to your client’s industry will show the range of tactics being employed by rival companies and even journalists to encourage interaction, shares and links.
This way, you know what the public (potential future customers) are wanting, and you can target journalists with relevant content and ideas that are likely to perform and connect with their readers, increasing your chance of achieving press coverage and links.
Competitor analysis tools
As digital marketers, we can assess competitors based on fact. Website functionality and back end analysis enable us to critically analyse a competitor’s real-time performance.
Ahrefs
A powerful tool we use is, ahrefs, which allows you to forensically analyse your competitors. You can look at the keywords they are targeting, how they are performing, how much organic traffic are they getting to their site, and to which pages.
Ahrefs ‘top pages’ section is brilliant for content analysis; you can see pages that are attracting inbound links and social shares, helping you to understand successful topic areas in your market.
You can view and click through the backlinks pointing to the competitor’s site, understand if they have a link building strategy in place, and how it is performing. This is particularly valuable to prospective clients as it shows real evidence of what lies behind their rival’s success.
Similar Web
SimilarWeb is another great tool that allows you to enter a site and obtain data on website organic traffic distribution, visits via location, time spent on page, bounce rates and traffic source, including direct, search, social, mail or display.
It also shows you the top referral sites. (Websites sending the most traffic.) This level of understanding is vital in creating a successful PR strategy. If your top competitor is getting great traffic and results from a certain site, you know you need to try and achieve coverage and links on that site too.
We can use the information gathered to analyse the effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses of that brand and its campaign to understand if it identifies any new opportunities for our client.
As McGregor puts it; “take inspiration from everyone and everything”.
Results of a competitor analysis
The analysis allows us to fully understand the market in which the client plies its trade. What is effective? What is working? What isn’t working? How well are brands performing? These are all questions we can answer.
Once you have conducted research, you can present it to peer and clients, followed by creating your full strategy; including industry best practices and inspiration from competitors to achieve goals and gain authority in the client’s business sector.
Competitors of all sizes are important. If they are classed as competitors, their organisation is a rival. Having an understanding, even if only top level, of their weaknesses, strengths and performance in the market will elevate your knowledge of the industry.
Different is good; if an organisation is doing things that others are not but is still succeeding then that is something to take note of. If your brand has several closely-matched competitors it can be hard to be heard over the noise.
The ‘wild card’ brands often generate the best ideas and stand out from the crowd, for this reason, we often suggest looking at market leaders as well as direct competitors.
Don’t just do it once, set up alerts for your competitors and regularly check to see what they are doing and assess their performance; chances are they are looking right back at you too.
Circling back to our friend McGregor, we like his approach. Stay inspired and keep an eye on your fellow “dreamers, believers and achievers”.