Marketing
Digital Marketing 101: The Guide You Were Waiting for!
Digital Marketing 101: The Guide You Were Waiting for! Here we bring you our expertise in guiding you to the Digital Marketing Path.
Learn how to beat your competitors with a better marketing strategy. These marketing tactics will help you steal more customers from your competitors.
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“Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business – you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.” Malcolm X Are you tired of your competitors outranking you? You’ve spent time optimizing your site but it still isn’t turning up as high as you thought it
“Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business – you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.” Malcolm X
Are you tired of your competitors outranking you?
You’ve spent time optimizing your site but it still isn’t turning up as high as you thought it would (or should).
What does the competition have that you don’t?
How are they making a killing over your site when it comes to search results?
The answer?
Typically, it comes down to ideas and marketing.
The good news is that you can use your competitor’s site as a model to eventually surpass them in the search results and win the traffic race.
Learn about Digital Marketing 101: The Guide you Were Waiting for!
Here’s how to find out what your competitors are doing, reverse engineer their tactics, and then blow them away with better execution.
Competitions are not always there to pull you down the ladder.
Rather it serves as a dynamic tool to help you evolve as a person and as a business.
It can prove to be a constructive teacher to improve your business strategies.
Just because you keep an eye on your competitors it doesn’t mean you are always stealing, but this kind of stealing which I will talk about is not a bad form of stealing.
You could get to know the do’s and don’ts of your business and improvise them according to your creativity and uniqueness.
Let’s say that your competitor is losing his customers because he did not have a good customer support system. Then you could offer that feature and procure that portion of the customer pool.
There might be features which your competitors offer that you might be missing out in your business, you could imbibe them into yours or even provide a better shot at it.
This will help you to retain existing customers and make room for new customers.
Jeff Bezos who is the CEO of the e-commerce market giant Amazon has himself quoted on how one can learn and grow from the competition.
“We watch our competitors, learn from them, and see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can” Jeff Bezos
Top digital marketing companies have always taken competitions constructively and implemented them effectively.
Let’s look at those 10 Tactics which you can learn from your competition.
#1 Content creation
Content is the basis of any marketing campaign. it is a perfect medium to convey your users that why they should use your product or service.
Content is needed in all forms of marketing from creating ad copies and landing pages for your paid campaigns to creating infographics, ebook, blogs and lead magnets.
It is mostly to get your content marketing working for you.
Now that you know the importance of content, you need to keep a hawk’s eye on what type of content is converting for your competitors.
The best way to find out about your competitor’s content is to subscribe to their blog.
Read their blogs and comments and find out the articles that are converting from them.
For this, you can SEMrush. Go to semrush and add your competitor’s URL
SEMrush – Domain Overview
From here you can view their organic keywords, their ad copies, landing pages, and backlinks.
This will save a lot of your manual time spent in finding all this information.
Easy? Great.
Now let’s get back to work.
Put all their converting keywords into an excel sheet and start optimizing your site for those.
You can create blog topics around them, create ebooks, do SEO for them and also use them in your paid ads.
Apart from this, you can also focus on the type of content are the competitors posting on their website?
Does it have customer testimonials or blogs?
Does it have product recommendations?
Which content has got the maximum customer engagement and which are the ones that have made customer abandon the page?
High-quality content in websites has always done the needful to businesses.
Check if their content is preferred more by the users than yours and how often they are posting and updating their content.
Once you analyze these look for where your website is lagging and improvise it.
#2 Creatives
Presentation of any product matters when it comes to creating a good first impression.
When it comes to a website, its design is the very first thing that catches the user’s eye.
However good the content of your website might be, the web design and layout gives the first impression in digital marketing.
Look at your competitor’s website starting from the title, font, the layout used and the design. Check how they have implemented the site’s style, quality, and design.
Does it absorb the users into it? Focus on everything in the website that appeals to you and works on your website with the ideas obtained by weighing it.
Some of the creatives that you need to follow can be graphic ads, home page banner, lead magnets, ebook designs, email designs and most important infographics.
#3 Social Media Pages
Social media is a tool far more powerful beyond our imagination when it comes to amassing customers.
Customer reviews on products in social media can make or break a business.
Marketing campaigns that run on social media have proved beneficial for most businesses. If you aren’t on social media, the time has come to make your presence there.
Look for the queries and contents the competitors have posted on their social media pages and gauge their pros and cons.
Also follow their Facebook ads, tweets and LinkedIn Ads.
The latest survey indicates that LinkedIn ads show the most conversions.
Food for thought? Go ahead and create your linked in ad strategy. Put on great content and you’ll be sure able to beat your competition
#4 Customer Service
The customer is king! We all know that but how many of us really create strong processes around it.
Upselling, cross-selling, after sales selling, keeping in touch and maintenance services. These are some activities around we should be following our competition and creating our own processes.
These are some activities around we should be following our competition and creating our own processes.
To begin with, learn about your competitor’s feedback strategy.
Use feedbacks gives the clear picture. Apply it to yours and see what your users have to say.
You can create surveys from your CRM and set auto emailers for your clients at various stages.
Whatever domain your business might be, customer service is the key to retain customers.
Customer satisfaction is the door to profitable business as it helps businesses win their customer trust.
Customer support should be easily accessible and care should be taken to be prompt to the customer queries.
Getting to know the issues of competitor’s customers will help you to avoid those in your business.
Learn how the competitors offer to support their customers and weigh yourself accordingly to discover the scope of improvement.
#5 SEO
Google yourself to get to know how high up your site appears in the search results compared to your competitors.
If your page appears on the top, then there is no need to worry. But if it is not the case, then find out find out what keywords your competitors are targeting.
Use semrush’ organic keywords list here.
Look for keywords in which they are beating you.
Do content marketing for those keywords, promote them on your blog, and run ads on them.
Invest time and money in your search engine strategy.
If you are not on the first page, then you are losing outbid time!
#6 Backlinks
Backlinks play an important part in SEO.
The more backlinks your page has, the more are the chances of ranking in the top of search results.
The reason why they are tough is that you cannot buy or borrow them, you have to earn them!
I can think of no other strategy but a blogger I admire Robbie Richards. His Backlinks building guide is one resource you should definitely check out before getting started with your own strategy.
Use of simple yet efficient SEO tools like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer by Moz and SEMrush will help you find out which websites are redirecting traffic to your competitors’ websites.
With a little research, you can sketch a roadmap of websites to target for backlinks.
You can then approach these websites for backlinks.
If they have agreed to backlink your competitor’s website then they will backlink your company’s website too. After all, it is a business to them too.
Backlink research benefits to improve your content strategy since the research helps you to get to know which content is earning more interest and the links can help decide what to create.
#7 Traffic Analysis
To acquire more traffic on your website it is necessary to get to know what your competition is up to.
Getting to know what marketing campaigns they are using to increase their website traffic.
It might be a TV ad or a simple feature they added in their product. Once you get to know
Once you get to know where they are receiving the traffic and how they are achieving it, it will be easy for you to generate more traffic to your website.
Take some time out and read this blog here by Neil Patel. It’s very resourceful and will prove valuable to your efforts
#8 Knowing your audience
You can comb through the comments section in the competitor’s websites and social media pages to get to know their audience.
Web apps like SimilarWeb —which is powerful yet easy to use can get you the data on what type of people are visiting your competitors’ websites and how they are getting to the sites.
In my previous blog post, I shared about how you can create your customer persona. Here’s a link to my blog “5 Website design trends to follow in 2017”.
#9 Branding
Branding is a key point to gain customer loyalty to your product.
You can get inspiration from your competitor’s success as it gives you a great idea of what works when it comes to branding for the category of product that you are selling and target audience.
Get ideas from your competitors on how they have established their brand name in the market and the strategies they took up for it.
Look at your competitors and see if they are pushing their products as the cheap alternative or if they are going for a premium look.
Check what works and what does not work for your competitors and give your brand a unique personality.
#10 Product analysis
Analyze, good and bad in the products they are offering and find the areas of developing your product.
Look at their costs, then provide the same product for a better price.
Providing offers and discounts for the same product will increase your customer base considerably.
But, don’t forget to promote these offers. No point if no one knows about it!
Conclusion
Digital marketing trends are always subjected to change.
The trends are decided by what users want and it is an ever-evolving process.
Changes are always welcomed by the users and a simple change can make a lot of difference in your business.
Analyzing of your competitor’s strength and weakness will help you get a lot of ideas on where you are lagging or scoring.
Instead of being intimidated by their success, you can do an introspection of your business will help you to get to the top.
Don’t let a tough competition bog you down. Step on it and rise above the storm.
Now that you have gained some valuable information about the Marketing strategies of your competition, go and get started!
You are now in a better position to enhance your online presence and to outshine them all.
If you need a detailed competition analysis, feel free to request for a free assessment and one of our experts will schedule a call with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a competitor’s marketing strategy?
Competitors’ marketing strategy is simply a fancy tactic to understand your business reach in the market. In this methodology, you need to check what your competitors are doing to make their brand popular all across and utilize the same to make your brand prominent like others.
2. How do you identify competitors’ strategies?
You need to follow a few effective marketing techniques to carry out in-lined competitors’ analysis. The steps involved in identifying the competitor’s market value are:
- Content Creation
- Creatives
- Social Media Pages
- Customer Service
- SEO
- Backlinks Creation
- Traffic Analysis
- Knowing Target Audience
- Branding
- Product Analysis
3. How do you beat business competitors?
There is a saying that before beating your competition beat yourself first. During your journey, you must have noticed a few strategic flaws. Remove them and then move ahead to adapt competitors’ winning marketing tactics.
You can implement the same by -
- Identifying and solving the pain points of competitors
- Build your business niche to attract more traffic
- Always stick to the competitive pricing structure
- Adopt iterated innovation process to bring something new to your business
- Strive hard to regularly improve your customer service
4. How do you protect your customers from competitors?
It’s not easy to win the trust of customers in this ever-changing business world. But still, you can achieve the same by building intelligence around your products, adding value to the conversations, becoming a reliable resource, preparing yourself for the competitive market pricing war.
5. What are the 5 competitive strategies?
Today, you may find a long list of competitive strategies, but do you know, all these strategies are derived from Porter’s theory of competitive analysis?
Michael Porter was an American academic popularly known as his theories based on economics. To identify analysis, he introduced proven strategies including Cost Leadership, Differentiation, Cost Focus, Differentiation Focus.
6. What is the difference between a substitute and a competitor?
A competitor is the direct rival for any business or product and provides the same services as one another. A Substitute in other ways is the competitor that partly fulfills the customers’ demands in different ways as expected from the direct competitors.
7. What are the 4 types of marketing strategies?
The marketing strategies are not limited to just 4 in number, there are multiple strategies counting from Paid Advertising, Relationship Marketing, Cause Marketing, Undercover Marketing, Word of Mouth, Transactional Marketing, Internet Marketing to Diversity Marketing.
8. How do you increase sales?
Competitive marketing analysis is done to attract more traffic to the brand to ultimately maximize sales and profit. The best tactics that help you increase your sales consist -
- Paying attention to existing customer and their behavior
- Ask customers for product or service feedback
- Conduct a content audit
- Execute consistent brand promotions
- Grab customers’ attention by throwing exciting packages, deals and discount bundles
- Brush up your sales skills as per market trends
- Utilize social media advertising strategies
9. What are some growth strategies?
Major growth strategies to be implemented for business are market expansion, market penetration, product expansion, growth through diversification and acquisition.
10. What are the techniques of marketing?
Direct Selling, Cause Marketing, Co-branding, Affinity Marketing, Internet Marketing, Earned Media/PR Marketing, Point-of-Purchase (POP) Marketing and Word of Mouth can be included in the list of best marketing techniques.
11. Which company has the best marketing strategy?
There’s not a single example to define the best marketing strategy rather the list comprise of more than one brand, achieving optimum profit through their implemented marketing strategy. Starbucks, Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola and Colgate are a few from the long list.
12. How do you win a competitor?
Beating your competitors will only be possible if you know their strengths and weak nerves. This also can be done if you effectively build the perfect niche for your business, innovate for trending strategies, keeping the pricing correct and lastly improving the customer service for better brand engagement.
13. How do you do a competitor analysis in marketing?
To carry out competitor analysis, executing a few major steps are mandatory. The focal points are - categorizing the market competitors, identify your competitors market position, thoroughly examine the competitors’ website to their level of customer experience, take a glance at their pricing policies, ask for reviews to know more about customer perspectives and in the last check their social media activities for brand and product promotion.