How To Do Competitor Analysis In Digital Marketing: Pro Tips

Understanding competitors and your business is an essential aspect of digital marketing. It helps you analyze the strategies your competitors are using, which you can use to attract more customers. 

As you check what your competitors do online, you understand their strengths and weaknesses. You do not need expensive tools to do this; with the right strategy, much of this can be done manually.

So, how to do competitor analysis in digital marketing? Let’s learn from experts!

What Is Digital Marketing Competitive Analysis?

The digital marketing competitor analysis process involves deep research to comprehend a competitor’s business’s strengths and weaknesses. It entails analyzing the marketing mix, pricing, product innovation, and even their websites to determine what they excel in and what aspects they lack.

This helps to understand how to devise a strategy that outsmarts the rival business. 

Any company that wishes to improve its marketing strategy must understand its competitors’ approaches. It is crucial to stay informed of industry standards and adapt accordingly through competitor mapping and analysis.

Why Should You Do A Competitive Analysis Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing competitor analysis is fundamentally essential to marketing because it tells you what your competitors are succeeding in and where they are not performing. Here are a few benefits that you will get: 

Identifying Barriers and Opportunities  

One of the biggest advantages of competitive analysis is the identification of barriers that competitors face. These barriers subsequently help devise a marketing approach based on them. 

If your competitors cannot meet customer demand or have poor user experience, these can be business opportunities for you. 

In addition, there are other opportunities they might not have considered, be it new trends or unfulfilled customer needs. By concentrating on these, you can make a mark.

Understand Your Value Proposition

A competitive analysis is a tool to refine your USP or Unique Selling Proposition further. 

What sets your product or service apart from others? Assessing competition will allow you to learn where you can tip the scales in your favor, making it easier for you to explain your value to customers. 

Understanding your value proposition helps you know how to pitch your innovation best.

If you provide a better product at a more competitive price point, you will be able to attract more customers to your business.

Spot Weaknesses in Competitors’ Strategies

There is much to learn from competitors by researching the most used platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter as a social media tool. It could be that they don’t interact enough, or their target audience is not on social media. 

Their overreliance makes these platforms idle, which can be capitalized on. Social negligence also occurs when follow-up calls are skipped regarding customers’ complaints or low-quality systems. 

Going after these weaknesses can give you an advantage over the competition.

Focus on Effective Digital Strategies

Competition analysis can help you target the right digital strategies. It allows you to gain insight into what content, social media posts, and marketing efforts are working well with others’ campaigns. 

This allows future marketers to know best practices and things to avoid, saving money and time. These effective strategies can be used to sharpen your marketing techniques, which in turn helps garner more clients for the business.

Explore New Clients and Markets

Using a competitive form of analysis helps in understanding more than just existing clientele; it can also assist in finding new customers. 

Using your competitor’s customer base and looking closer, there may be under-served or overlooked segments that can be targeted.

With this kind of analysis, you can also find places with minimal competitor activities, which enables targeting new groups of people. 

Expanding into new territories or demographics helps grow the business and gives new marketing opportunities.

Spot Emerging Market Patterns

Markets today are much more volatile than before, and it is safe to say that all your competitors understand this, too. Just as technologies, social media, and consumer behavior constantly change, so do your competitors’ strategies. 

These new shifts in strategies showcase how markets are shaped. Understanding them will not only give you new possibilities but will also allow you to prepare to change your plan before the competition does. This ensures you remain competitively relevant in the market. 

Direct Competitors, Indirect Competitors, & Brand Competitors

For competitor analysis to be effective, it’s critical to scope out the various competitors that exist. Recognizing these segments allows you to analyze your competition with greater ease and provides you with a way to differentiate yourself.

Who Are Direct Competitors?

Direct competitors can be other businesses or brands that target the same audience with their products and services.

For instance, other bakeries in your location can serve as your direct competitors. You compete for customers, market share, and attention. This sets the pace for competition for marketing, collaterals, and promotions. 

These competitors often have similar pricing, products, and marketing tactics. 

Since these are the customers you are vying for, it is necessary to understand what their strategies are and analyze in detail what your competitors are doing right and where you should focus your efforts. 

Observing how they serve their customers, promote themselves, and design their websites can assist you in perfecting your own.

Who Are Indirect Competitors?

These businesses are considered competitors because they sell different products or services yet still serve the same target audience as you. They may meet similar requirements or provide different options.

To illustrate, if you operated a coffee kiosk, your indirect competitors might include nearby juice bars or even convenience stores that sell pre-packaged coffee. Although they do not sell identical products, they reach the type of clientele who need a quick health-boosting drink. 

Studying indirect competitors allows you to know what other types of products or services customers are looking for and how you can position your business differently.

This may also prompt further thinking on how to accommodate the needs of these clientele and create new strategies to make more people interested in your business.

Who Are Brand Competitors?

Brand competitors are like direct competitors but with a twist: they’ve built a strong brand and a loyal customer base for themselves. While these companies sell products, they are also marketed in a unique way that differentiates them from the rest. 

A good example is Apple as a brand competitor against other tech companies. Apple not only boasts its competitive technology in the market but also has a reputation for attracting loyal customers through elaborate designs and high-quality products. 

Understanding brand competitors gives insight into the value one can earn by having a strong market reputation over other companies.

How To Do Competitor Analysis In Digital Marketing?

A competitive market analysis of digital marketing involves looking into the competitors’ content, websites, social media accounts, and overall tactics on how they operate online. Now, let’s look into the aspects that you need to focus on for a strategic analysis: 

Know Your Competition

Identifying your competitors is the foundation of any competitive analysis. You want to look at three types of competitors: primary, secondary, and tertiary. 

• Primary competitors, such as Asos and Boohoo, provide the same products or services to the same audience. 
• Secondary competitors such as Gucci and Target provide similar products but to different audiences. 
• Tertiary competitors do not consider each other direct competitors but serve the same type of customers with different products; for example, Patagonia and Red Bull. 

Type the names into a search engine together with social media handles and find these competitors and create a complete list.

Identify Targeted Clients For Your Competitors’ Profiles

With competitors, you can use what they focus on and strategize around it. So begin with looking up their website, social media platforms, blogs, and reviews to identify their target audience. 

You can get their mission and values on their about page, so do not forget to check that. Also consider how they respond to their audience on social media as this reveals the nature of the audience. 

This will allow you to understand their client base as well as competitors’ positioning. This will allow you to devise effective strategies to capture and retain clients.

Implement the 4 Ps Strategy 

The 4 Ps of marketing—Product, Price, Promotion, and Place—are critical when evaluating competitors. Start with what products they offer. 

What aspects of it attract buyers? What are the selling points? 

Next, study their pricing. Do they charge a one-off fee or run a subscription service? Does their pricing differ from yours? 

Next, consider how they advertise. Which digital platforms do they utilize? Do they focus on social media ads, or do they prefer content marketing? 

Lastly, look into the channels through which those competitors sell the products. Do they sell only online, or do they have brick-and-mortar establishments? 

This will give a comprehensive picture of their marketing strategy.

Audit Their Content

In digital marketing, content is everything. Take your time to study what your competitors create, such as blogs, videos, case studies, podcasts, etc. 

How often are they posting? What topics are getting their attention? Is the content interesting? Find any gaps within their content.

For instance, do they only publish articles and completely ignore videos or webinars? These gaps are opportunities for you to create content that fills the void. 

Conducting an audit provides an understanding of what is effective content in your industry and what is not. This means that you can plan your content strategy based on what you learn.

Check Their Website and SEO

A competitor’s website is often their best marketing tool. Explore the site’s structure to evaluate how well it works. 

Analyze the navigation, product pages, and blog posts. Look at how easy the website is to use. Also, check how fast it loads. 

Additionally, analyze their SEO. What keywords do they use? How do they rank on Google? Pay attention to their usage of H1 tags, internal links, and meta descriptions. 

This will allow you to find gaps on the site to improve its performance and user experience.

Start With Social Media

Understanding how your competitors use social media will greatly improve your digital marketing strategy. 

Simply visit their social media accounts. What types of content are they sharing? Are they sharing images, videos, or caption posts? What social media accounts does your competitor have? Which platform do they engage their audience the most? 

It is also important to pay attention to their tone and messaging and who they are following, as well as how they interact with them. 

Social media represents a company’s image, so knowing what your competitors are doing can give you ideas of how to better your business as well.

Assess Their Paid Advertising Techniques

Analyzing paid advertising can teach you particularly interesting information about competitor firms. Try to figure out where and how they are placing advertisements: Is it through Google, Facebook, Instagram, or other platforms? 

Study the ad copy. What do they attempt to sell? Do they sell deals, excitement prizes, or free trials? Note the keywords they blanket and the aesthetics of the ads too. 

This allows you to learn which campaigns are successful within the rivalry and what ads appeal to their audience. Hence, information like this can be used to better your own paid advertising strategies.

Analyse Customer Reviews & Feedback

Customer reviews tell a lot about what a person is intrigued to know about competitors. Check review websites, social media comments, and product reviews on e-commerce websites. 

What do consumers think of their products and services? Are there any frequent issues? What are their statements of utmost significance? These reviews depict the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, thus allowing you to capitalize on them and improve your offers. 

In addition, these reviews give a great deal of insight about what customers want, which can help guide product development and customer service.

Consider Your Next Steps  

With competitive market analysis completed, it is time to choose the productive next steps to undertake. 

What are other marketers doing that is good, and what are they doing that is bad? What business opportunities do you think they didn’t use completely? 

Use this information to make better your digital marketing strategy – whether it’s rewriting content, changing your site, or refreshing your social media strategy. 

The ultimate goal is not simply to catch up to other competitors but to put them behind. Spend time on online areas that will yield the best outcomes and maximize your budget accordingly.

What Are The Types Of Competitive Analysis?

When examining marketing landscapes, a competitor’s digital marketing can be approached in a variety of different ways depending on what area one wishes to examine. Let’s now know about a few of them:

Social Media Competitor Analysis

It is one of the best platforms to interact with and convert customers to improve brand engagement and recognition.

Performing social media analysis for your competitors allows you to find out which platforms your competitors are actively engaging in and what content they tend to post.

The focus should include: the amount of followers, engagement received, and focus topics. Additionally, make sure to note when the users post as well as how many customers they interact with. 

PPC Competitor Analysis 

PPC Competitor Analysis is part of advertising that looks over the paid marketing campaign’s strategies of their competitors. This entails searching for the landing pages and analyzing the items on which ads are displayed. 

Are they using up expensive and high volume searched phrases, or are they going for cheaper niche keywords that bring in better prospects? 

Check how well the landing pages correlate with the advertisement copy that is used. Doing this analysis helps you measure the PPC strategy of your competitor and build counter measures that ensure your campaign ads are visible and ahead of your competitor’s ads. 

If anything, it will give you a heads-up for the competitor’s marketing budget and goals as well. 

SEO Competitor Analysis

SEO competitor analysis will help you determine which phrases your competitors rank for and how they are drawing visitors to their websites. 

This analysis also needs to focus on the comparison of the websites, like page speed and UX, as well as some missing items in the keyword strategy. 

Are they authoritative with their other website pages, and do they rank on phrases you have the potential to aim for? Check their posts and see how they perform.  

Competitor Analysis Tools

There are many competitor analysis tools out there to help you. This will make your data collection simpler, more accurate, and more efficient. A few examples of the best tools specific to key areas are:

SEO Analysis

In the quest for effective competitor analysis, the right tools can truly make a world of difference.

Ahrefs is arguably one of the best tools for SEO analysis. It gives you access to a wealth of information showing which keywords attract the most traffic to websites of your competitors. 

Ahrefs can help track benchmark keywords, analyze estimated search traffic, and monitor marketing campaigns for competitive intelligence. SE Ranking is also indispensable in the market because it provides metrics around organic and paid searches.  

PPC Analysis  

Popular PPC analysis tools like Semrush help you conduct an in-depth site audit and find competitor keywords, and backlinks data. 

Spyfu is another tool that narrows down on the most profitable keywords your competitors use in their PPC campaigns. These keywords can then be analyzed and used to boost the performance of ads. 

Google Ads Auctions Insight compares results with others bidding for the same auctions, giving a holistic feel for paid search. 

Keyword Analysis  

Similarweb performs extraordinarily in web traffic and channel performance analysis, helping users find promising keywords. This too reveals engagement metrics your competitors are using to gain more votes. 

With these metrics, comparing performance becomes easy, and spotting keyword gaps to capitalize on trends, too, becomes effortless.  

Social Media Analysis  

Sprout Social tracks your competition’s social network accounts. It offers data on follower increase, engagement rates, and conversions, which aids in content effectiveness analysis.

Also, for inspiration, you can check ads running on Facebook and Instagram through Facebook’s Ad Library. Understanding the social activity of competitors helps in better audience targeting and engagement.  

Other Useful Resources

Google Trends is another useful tool for identifying emerging market shifts. It allows you to identify specific terms that are seeing increased searches over given periods. 

TikTok Creative Center shows statistics on the type of content that goes viral, so you know what strategies the competition utilizes. The Meta Ads Library is an additional source focused on researching ads placed on Facebook and Instagram. 

All of these tools assist in monitoring competitor activity and modifying your marketing strategy as needed.

Bottom Line

The main objective of competitive analysis is to never let your competition get too far ahead. Now that you understand how to do competitor analysis in digital marketing, you can remain relevant in the market and not fall behind your competitors. 

Competitive analysis is not a one-off task but rather an effort-based ongoing process. Refreshing your research from time to time helps you remain relevant all the time.