How To Perform An Effective Competitive Analysis

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Researching your competition should not be a daunting endeavor. In this issue of Unleash Your Marketing, I will show you some easy ways to “spy” on your competitors.

Start With An Overall Analysis Of Their Company

1. ?LinkedIn ?profile?is often helpful for employee counts.
2. CrunchBase is an excellent resource for information on key people, offices, and the founding date.
3. Glassdoor ?and?Indeed for any?job openings. Knowing whom they are hiring and which teams they are expanding will give you an idea of what steps they’re about to take, both product-wise and marketing-wise.
4. Owler ?for your competitors’ revenue and the number of customers. The data is a rough estimate.

Set Up Alerts For Competitors’ Interviews & Conference Presentations - you’ll be surprised at how much your competitors give away at event presentations and interviews without being aware of your listening.?

Use?Awario ?(there’s a free 14-day trial available) to create an alert for the names of your competitors’ CEOs or other key figures (don’t forget to put the names in double quotes to search for an exact match), and select YouTube as the source for the search.

Set up Google Alerts (they are free). It’s not as comprehensive as Awario, but it is an excellent source of competitor news. You should also set up Google Alerts for your company as well.

Uncover What Technology Your Competitors Are Using

1. BuiltWith ?is a great (and free) tool to figure out the tech stack that your competitor uses. Type in the URL, and you’ll be able to see what technology their website runs on, along with any third-party scripts and plugins it uses, everything from analytics systems and email marketing services to A/B testing tools and CRMs.
2. What Runs is a lean alternative to BuiltWith, a browser extension that analyzes any webpage you’re on.

What Are Their Customers Saying?

To learn what customers have to say about them, their brand’s Share of Voice, their customer’s sentiment behind their mentions, and the key topics customers bring up when they talk about your competitors, you’ll need a social listening tool like?Awario . ?

To measure share of voice, create an alert for each competitor’s brand in Awario, give the tool some time to collect the mentions, and jump to the?Alert Comparison?report to see how much each competitor is talked about on social and the web.

It’s a good idea to keep these alerts running for the long term (as opposed to just looking at Share of Voice once). This way, you’ll be able to see spikes in their volume of mentions, track what their customers are saying, and see how their (and your own) Share of Voice evolves over time.

You may also use the free Google Trends tool to see when specific topics are trending. You can even compare different topics. The results may be viewed geographically, so you can see which parts of the country or the world are searching for those terms and when.

Why Sentiment Matters

The caveat of measuring the level of awareness a competitor has is that awareness isn’t always a good thing.

???????What if there’s been a data scandal one of the competitors is involved in?

???????What if their customer service is horrible, causing an influx of negative mentions?

Measuring the sentiment behind helps you understand what these companies’ customers love and don’t like about their products. It also serves as a benchmark when you analyze the sentiment behind your brand and product mentions. 40% of your mentions are positive, 20% are harmful, and the rest are neutral. How do you know if that’s good or bad without a benchmark?

?What Is Your Competitor’s Ad Strategy

SimilarWeb ?is a great (free to try) starting point to get an idea of your competitors' ad strategy. Enter the URL of a competitor’s website and navigate to the?Search?section – it will show you if your competitors have any search ads running and, if they do, what their target keywords are.

For Facebook Ads - Use Facebook’s?Ad Library ?to search for your competitors’ ads. It won’t reveal targeting rules competitors use, but you’ll have a good idea of how many ads they’re running and perhaps find inspiration.

Analyze Your Competition’s Content Marketing

BuzzSumo ?is a great (with free features) tool to help you out. It displays the most shared posts on any blog within the past year, so you can get inspiration for your posts and a better idea of what kind of content resonates with your target audience the best.

Conclusion

Remember: the idea of a competitive analysis isn’t to copy what your competition is doing. It is to understand where your brand falls in the market and find new opportunities to make your brand stand out.

Thank you for reading & as always I hope you found this article useful and actionable. If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions please reach out.