Attracting customers and generating leads has always been a hard job. After months and months of trying, we think that our tool isn’t good enough, and then we’re rebuilding it and saying to ourselves: “I will acquire them as soon as I finish this feature.”
And this situation repeats over and over.
When you are stuck with attracting customers, it’s usually two things:
You don’t know how to do it efficiently
You didn’t do your customer development at the beginning, so now you’re paying the consequences
In your case, if it’s number two, then, I don’t know. You will need to go back to do your first step – customer development, and right after you finish that start building your product.
If you don’t know how to attract your customers efficiently, then, my dear friend, you are in the right spot!
So, let’s see what the five best strategies to acquire new customers for your startup are.
1. Kickass SEO and Backlink Building
SEO will mean nothing to you only if you are a billionaire (so you can spend thousands and thousands on PPC and other Ads) – but I assume you aren’t because you are reading this article. 🙂
Every business should tend to improve its’ SEO and Keyword rankings. One of the best ways for that is undoubtedly the Backlink Building.
If you don’t know what Backlink Building is, let me explain you in a few sentences:
The term “backlink building” is building links, or finding new and high reputational websites that would link back to you.
The reason why you should do this is that Google will rank your website better if some big website linking back to you.
Imagine the following situation:
Shakira is celebrating her birthday in a club near you. You would desperately love to enter there and see all those celebrities! But unfortunately, you can’t come there because the security guard won’t let you go.
You are embarrassed, and everything you want right now is to go back home and blame yourself because you are not “famous.”
But suddenly, someone opens the clubs’ doors, and starts yelling at you:
“Hi, John, come over here! It’s such a great party!”
You turned back, and you saw your friend Rihanna calling you.
Suddenly, the Security guard lets you go inside.
The same principle is for Google too. When some “famous” website links back to you, you will automatically be higher on searches for some particular keywords.
2. Attracting customers with high-quality content
High-quality content is crucial if you want to attract more customers to your startup. Providing value has always been famous for every business.
Take, for example, a HubSpot.
HubSpot is probably the best company out there. Their content-creating team members are killing it. Just take a look at their Blog. Isn’t it amazing?
Creating Content will not just help you to provide more value – it will also improve your SEO and rank you better for some particular keywords.
Every Blog post should follow at least some basic stuff like:
Being SEO friendly
Having a clear, nice, and engaging introduction
Every Blog Post should have a clear Call-to-Action
Providing value is a must
Try to keep every blog post with more than 1000 words
Include as many images as you can
My favorite part about creating Content and Marketing is not just Content Creation; it’s also Content Distribution!
You see, one Blog post with a vast distribution is more valuable than five blog posts with poor delivery, and even more, proper distribution will help you in attracting customers.
So instead of focusing your effort on creating as many blog posts as you can, try to write less but distribute it better.
Here are some tips about content distribution you should keep in your mind:
One blog post can be re-forged in several other pieces, like How to’s, Quizzes, etc.
Publish your blog post on your “owned” distribution channels (Social Media, Websites, Groups, Communities)
Distribute your Blog post among different platforms like Quora, Reddit, Medium
Build relationships with influencers and let them promote your blog posts.
The best thing about Content Marketing and distribution is that you can play with it as long as you want, and results will come!
3. Outreach like a Pro
The essential part of every business is sales. You realize that every position is a sales position. Everything we’re doing is focused on growing sales and profit.
Just like in the “old good days,” salesmen were reaching out to us with cold calling, now we’re reaching out to our potential customers with cold emailing.
Before you even start making your sales, you must know who your Ideal Buyer Persona is?
Write it down who are they, what’s their position, what are their biggest pains, how are you solving them, how old are, what’s their usual outfit combination – everything!
Now when you have that prepared, you can’t start doing your cold emailing before you finish one last step – and that’s lead generation!
Use the Internet to your advantage. Find as many potential customers as you can.
You can search in some particular Facebook group and Communities; you can scrape Quora, Product Hunt, or even LinkedIn. Find their emails, and you will be ready for cold emailing!
Cold Emailing is all about making great connections with the first contact. Yeah, it sounds tough to do, but if you want to succeed in this, this must be your primary goal.
Cold Email campaigns are based on:
One initial email
Follow-ups
Remember to always follow up with your recipients, but don’t be too spammy. Two follow-ups are enough. If they don’t respond to you after three messages, then it’s likely that they are not interested, or that you didn’t do your outreach campaign very well.
In the initial email, the focus should be on their biggest pains and your solution. But don’t be too promotional. Keep it short, and at the end of the email, give them a clear Call-to-action.
In Follow-ups, everything is about providing value. Remind them about their problems, and provide them with some valuable articles.
4. Create better Marketing Strategies than your competitors
Whether you are a small or medium business or large enterprise, you must have at least one competitor out there. It’s almost impossible that you don’t have one.
A lot of people think that conducting competitive research is everything they need to do when we’re speaking about competition.
You see, if you don’t monitor your competition, you will not know what their next steps are, and you will not be able to outmaneuver and beat them. Right?
It is also important to keep track of startup metrics, so you can measure your progress.
So, the conclusion is – if you want to create better marketing strategies than your competitors, first, you must monitor them and see what are they doing.
When we’re talking about competition monitoring, here is what should you keep your eye on:
So, now that we have seen what are the best marketing strategies for attracting customers, what would be the first one you will implement in your startup?
‘Time Waits For No One’, it’s the name of a song sang by Freddie Mercury in 1986. It may sound like a cliché, but the phrase finds its meaning nowadays, in the century of speed and technology, where science has a rapid evolution. The truth is that we’re taking for granted this important resource, and we forget that all our life and career is governed by it.
But, let’s not go more in-depth into eternalism, in the end, each one subjectively perceives time, and each one is free to lose it or take advantage of it as desired.
Let’s better have a look at “time” as an essential resource for businesses and understand how it can bring success to it, no matter the size or industry.
Time is an essential element to take into account when launching a business, a new product, or an important campaign. Surely you’ve had your doubts about when it’s the perfect time to launch your product on Product Hunt; when it’s the best time to send a coupon code to your users or when you should implement that feature that will take your product to the next level etc.
In business, whether you’re a start-up or a huge company, there are lots of situations in which time can be seen as a friend, but also as an enemy. To investigate your relationship with time, start questioning yourself: Do I often work beyond working hours? How often am I missing deadlines?
Besides the conscious moments when we figure out that time is not on our side, we might spend a lot of time doing research, focusing on tasks that consume a lot of working hours without any result, or we might lose track of time in manually conducting competitive analysis.
The truth is that it’s difficult to control every minute of the schedule, especially if you’re part of a team that shares tasks and common projects. The key to transforming “time” in a friend is to learn how to manage it properly, especially when doing business – this actually can be the success key in today’s market, whether you’re a CEO, a Customer Success Manager, or a baker.
To understand the importance of time management in the workplace, let’s have an overview of this concept.
What is time management?
Time management refers to planning and controlling the time spent on specific activities. It’s an essential skill to have, and by mastering it, you’ll be able to work smarter than harder. Proper time management should be a priority, especially for small businesses that cannot afford to waste time. Implementing, as soon as possible, good time management within the team can boost the business’s performance and help the company to achieve the wanted results with less effort and more effective strategies.
Good time management also refers to the ability to think fast and react quickly in a particular situation that might occur. For example, you notice that one of your competitors has released a before Black-Friday campaign that becomes a huge success. The offer is pretty good: Buy One and Get One FREE.
Let’s imagine that you didn’t plan to offer a discount before Black Friday, and for the event, you’ve thought of offering 30% off only on specific products. In this situation, good time management allows businesses to take action in unforeseen circumstances. You have to come up with a strategy to overcome your competitors’ success, but also to plan a hard-to-refuse discount for your audience.
How to improve your time management skills?
Time management is a learning skill, so with a bit of patience and determination, you’ll start to make better use of your working hours.
Plan
If you’re not familiar with time management, start by planning your working hours and set up when it’s the right time to do a task or an activity. Making plans for today’s working schedule, tomorrow’s schedule, and so on and sticking to them, it’s the first step to become a time management pro. All you need is discipline, and don’t forget that the main goal is to work smarter than harder and save time, if possible. So be realistic when you do your daily plan and concentrate on what you can truly achieve on that day and what’s your goal.
Prioritize
Planning your daily work schedule is important, but prioritizing your tasks is crucial! This process will help you to figure out which are your most important tasks, which are the less important ones, what you should focus on and when. After completing this step, you’ll know exactly what needs to be done and how quickly.
Use time tracking software
Stop filling in agendas or Google Sheets with your “to-do” lists or daily tasks. Time management systems, like time tracking software, help you to manage your schedule, your team’s schedule right on your desktop, or on your phone.
Tracking time on a shared platform allows business owners to create transparency within the team. The possibility to quickly manage schedules, assign tasks, communicate or share ideas with your colleagues about particular tasks demonstrates teamwork. It ensures that each employee has an important contribution to the business’ success.
Shortly, time tracking allows you to discover how you work, where you struggle, how your team uses time. Here are some suggestions for the most effective time tracking apps that stand out from the crowd and help organizations increase the quality of their time management and work ethic: • PAYMO
A modern and intuitive project management application for project-based businesses and freelancers that bundles advanced task management, planning, scheduling, time tracking, collaboration, and invoicing. With Paymo, you can keep track of the entire lifetime of a project – from creation until getting paid – without having to use and pay for several apps. Worth a try!
Surely you’ve heard about it! It’s a collaboration tool that organizes projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. All your projects, all your tasks, all of your team–organized, accounted for, and easily visible at a glance.
Organizes everything from company objectives to routine tasks in one place, so teams are clear about priorities and responsibilities, and you can monitor progress in real-time to keep projects on track.
Focus on what matters the most
By analyzing your time tracking, you’ll learn out how to manage your time wisely. To become a time management expert, it’s necessary to understand the importance of prioritizing tasks. Remember that not everything important is urgent and vice versa. The key is to focus on learning how to categorize your tasks and projects properly.
Many advantages come along with proper management of time, and each business should cultivate a workplace that gives importance to it.
Benefits of time management and time tracking in a workplace
Learning how to spend time wisely is an important skill to have in everyday life, but especially when it comes to professional life. It’s simple: time management can make or break your business or your career.
In conclusion, keep in mind that bad time management can hold you back against your competitors who implement time management skills and who take advantage of its benefits. In short, proper time management can be seen as a competitive advantage, so learn how to master and control it.
Many advantages come along with excellent time management, and each business should cultivate a workplace that gives importance to it.
Here are some key advantages of time management in professional life:
Time management helps you to understand your work priorities so that you can gain valuable insights from time tracking. You’ll be able to analyze the “reality” of your working hours, which are the time-consuming tasks, which are your struggles and what can you do to develop your time management skills.
Time management boosts productivity, and efficiency. With a time tracker, you can notice which tasks are worthing your time, which actions are giving the wanted results, and which are the tasks that consume a lot of your working hours. You can go into every project and see what you can improve, how can you better divide your working time to become more productive and efficient.
Time management creates happy teams. Having proper time management within the company helps the business’s team to stay focused on their priorities. Also, using a time tracking system allows seeing what tasks are people working on, who is struggling, who needs help, but also who is working overtime or not at all. The main idea is to keep things transparent and in the same direction.
In conclusion, if you want to succeed in business, you have to take into account the importance of time management and to develop this essential skill.
It seems like every little thing has something to do with the numbers, don’t you think?
The answer is probably somewhere in between.
When it comes to the quality products or services, the new people who visit your Instagram profile certainly bring a more significant number of followers. However, it is also important who forms this certain group of followers.
Today you can buy a profile with a large number of followers and post your content, but would that be of benefit for you? There is an excellent chance that that would never happen.
The audience that follows you must be interested in precisely what you have to offer. If you buy a profile that previously dealt with the sale of sports shoes just because it had a lot of followers and your aim is to be engaged as a life coach, revenue will undoubtedly fail to exist because that is not your target audience.
Fake followers and bots are also not a good idea because they will neither be interested in what you have to offer, nor will they increase engagement on your posts.
Therefore, in the continuation of this article, we present you with 8 Instagram growth hacks that will help you get to your right audience and a lot more sales.
1. Tell a brand story
You could start with a brand story. If you think that the stories aren’t of the utmost importance when it comes to business, you should think twice.
There is a vast number of brands in the world, and, to be successful, you have to stand out. But how?
Your story is something that makes you unique. Maybe you already have a brand story, and you aren’t aware of it.
Why did you start with that business in the first place? Is it about creativity, about helping others, or about something that you always wanted to have, but it didn’t exist, so you decided to make it yourself?
If you do everything just because of money, people will see through that, and that is not an excellent way to become famous.
To make it clearer, here are some examples of what we were trying to explain:
sweetgreen – connecting people to real food since 2007.
Sweetgreen is a concept whose mission is to “bring people back” to the healthy food, but at the same time to educate them about food and its preparation, and how they should protect the land because the land is the source of it.
They also organize campaigns that they inform their followers about on social networks. One of the bigger ideas is to provide children in schools with a healthier meal and to make progress in doing so.
Also, they are continually coming up with exciting and useful things like “plane salad” that people can order to avoid unhealthy food often served on planes during the trips.
Behind the beautiful and colorful images on the feed, there is a story we can see in the bio section and through the story option and IGTV.
The Puravida brand was created by the founders Griffin and Paul, during a visit to Costa Rica, where they met two artisans who had bright color bracelets on their hands, the same bracelets as the ones we can see in the pictures. Artisans said, during their story, that they were living in poverty, and then the future founders of the brand came up with the one idea.
They asked them to make 400 bracelets, which they afterward took to the shop where they sold them all at high speed. Griffin and Paul had invested in this idea, and now over 650 artisans around the world earn a living from creating these bracelets.
These are the two very successful examples of how a brand story influences people to connect with their brands and with them.
Tell people your story, but do not forget that storytelling should be present always.
Storytelling is something that converts. The storytelling base that you will use in the captions below the images, in stories, and so on, should consist of the answers on the following questions:
– What can you offer to your followers?
– Why exactly should your product be their choice?
– What is your mission?
It’s important to put your customers first, and not your product. Keep this in mind.
Another essential item is the look of your feed because it is your catalog, a presentation of your brand.
And because of that, you need to pay attention to the following:
the pictures should be clear
choose the color of your feed’s theme: that includes the complementary colors or filter through which you will drag each photo
decide which type of content will you post on your profile, depending on your brand
make a posting plan
If you follow these rules, your feed will be organized and pleasant to look at.
2. Find people who are following similar pages and follow them
Following people that already follow some brands that are similar to yours is one of the simplest Instagram growth hacks.
Yes, it takes time, but it can be beneficial for making your account more and more popular.
What is it that you can do?
First, do some research.
For example, if you want to start selling books, you should type keywords that are crucial for your business, such as books, books, bookstore, book lovers, and similar into a search bar on Instagram application.
Also, you can research other bookstores that you already heard of.
When you find those similar pages, you should start following people that are already following these profiles.
Do not stop at tracking, but also like their pictures and leave comments. Make sure your comments are interesting, not just containing emoji or sentences that sound like spam-like “Nice pic” or “Cool feed, go check our.” Put some effort.
If you are wondering whether it makes sense to spend so much time on following, liking, and commenting, believe it when I say it, it pays off.
A small experiment was conducted where a total of 300 people were recruited. The first 100 were given only one follow, the other 100 a follow and alike on one of their pictures, and the remaining 100 were followed, one of their photographs liked, and the comment was left.
The statistics were as follows:
Only follow: 14% got followed back
Follow + Like: 22% got followed back
Follow + Like + Comment: 34% got followed back
These statistics do not always have to be identical, of course, but it’s obvious that this principle works.
Of course, before you start with this tactic, your profile should be arranged, and it needs to contain:
a profile image (the best option is the logo of the brand)
all the most important information has to be typed in the bio section
there need to be at least one of the contact buttons (call, email or directions)
a minimum of 9 photos so that when people visit your site, the profile looks full
No one will bother to follow a profile that is half-empty and looks dysfunctional.
Another option is to use your apps to find your followers through them.
They work like this: apps automatically follow people who share similar interests as your target audience.
One such app isInstazood. It’s an Instagram bot that automatically likes, follows, leaves comments, watches the Instagram stories, unfollows, and manages posts … And it does all of that instead of you.
It’s important to emphasize that you should never use tools that attract fake followers and bot profiles because they will not become your users.
This app follows the right people who want to connect with you because they are interested in what you have to offer.
Also,Instazood ensures that you do not cross the limits set by Instagram, and it offers different speed settings for advanced users.
Riotly platform works similarly. It identifies what kind of target group your target group is and then analyzes it and interacts with it, which increases the number of followers on your profile.
3. Find relevant hashtags and post things at the right time
Hashtags are often ignored or, more often, not used in the right way. However, it’s completely wrong to ignore such an important Instagram growth hack.
Hashtags are tags that Instagram has introduced to make it easier to find things that interest us in one place. For example, if you type #coffeshoop, you will see the pictures that are related to this topic.
You can find the relevant hashtags for your business by exploring competitive profiles, looking at their pictures, and seeing which hashtags that are used in descriptions or comments are best quoted, that is, which ones are the most popular.
When you’re done with the hashtags’ search, put them in the search bar on Instagram and see how many more tags are associated with them to create a small hashtag database that you can use later for your posts.
You can have a maximum of 30 hashtags in one post, but this might be too much. Find out what is the number of hashtags your popular competitors use and check if the same number suits your needs best.
Neil Patel advises that from 5 to 10 hashtags per post is a good option.
As for the right time to post on Instagram, Later conducted a survey including 12 million posts, and the result showed that the best time to post is between 9:00 am and 11:00 AM EST.
In the following table, you can see the top 3 periods for posting the content within each day (represented in EST):
Although it is undoubtedly advisable to try out how this release date will turn out for you, it does not necessarily mean that the same rule will apply to every business.
The most important thing is to post when most of your followers are online.
To find out that you can try and upload posts at different times, but you need to analyze the results simultaneously by looking at your engagement (the number of likes + comments + shares) at the time when you post.
Another way is to take advantage of what Instagram itself offers within your business profile – Instagram Insights.
When you enter Insights, click on the Audience segment.
There you can see the different statistics:
the total number of followers
top locations
age range
gender
followers
In the followers’ section, you can see when your followers are most active during each day of a week or each hour of a day:
Explore these statistics and find out what is the best time for your posts. When you see at what time you get the most feedback (when is the most significant engagement), continue to post in that publication period.
This will also contribute to the fact that your followers know when are you posting, and if they fail to see the post, there is a possibility that they will go to your profile to keep pace, which also increases your reach.
4. Create and promote branded hashtags
Brainstorm the ideas with your team and see which are the best options for your branded hashtag. It would be best if this hashtag is connected to your brand or slogan that you are using.
If you intend to intrigue your audience for the sake of the marketing move, you can also use a hashtag that will not be associated with your brand at first. Still, in the end, you will make a reveal and discover who hides behind it.
Explore all the variants of the option you decide for and check in the search bar if someone hasn’t already used what you want to connect to your brand.
You can use Branded hashtags for promotions, prize games, events, and so on.
For example, The Coca Cola Company made a #ShareACokecampaign to encourage consumers to buy personalized Coca Cola bottles as gifts to each other.
Then, L’Oreal made a campaign under the hashtag #WorthSaying, which is aimed to encourage women to find out what’s important to them and what is “worth saying.” The campaign included celebrities like Jennifer Lopez so it was a great success and the hashtag became viral.
Also, L’Oreal has promised that for every mention of this hashtag on the social networks, they will donate $ 0.25 to charity.
Using branded hashtags when it comes to prize-winning games is one of the great Instagram growth hacks!
The Container Store organized a prize game where winners could win $ 500 vouchers. The participants had the task to publish pictures of them using their storage and organization products on social networks in a creative manner with the hashtag #containyourselfcontest.
They got 200 pictures in a short time, and they got over 10000 additional impressions on their content gallery.
5. Optimize your Instagram content and profile for Google Search
Social media has a great impact on SEO. Although it may seem that there isn’t any strong connection between Instagram and Search Engine Optimization, it nevertheless exists.
You will be convinced in a few seconds.
Neil Patel presents you with several ways how to optimize your Instagram account for Google Search:
use geotagging option
When you take a photo, the coordinates of the location you are in at that moment are automatically linked to the photo. Instagram will publish the location of the photo only if you choose it, and it will appear above the picture.
This is of paramount importance if your business has its physical location because people can find out where you are, and they can also check themselves in, and you will get UGC (User Generated Content).
complete your profile
Your profile should have a profile photo, profile name, username, bio with the most important information, and links to your other web assets.
use keywords
Don’t forget to use adequate keywords in your bio and the content that you are posting.
promote link building
Link building includes using links of other sites on your site.
When it comes to Instagram, it means that you use them on your profile and in your posts.
The links you use should be connected to your content for your profile to be well optimized. Do not use random links simply because they are linked to popular sites.
encourage social sharing
If you want to make your content more visible, you must encourage content sharing to the other channels such as sites or other social networks so you could reach more people and make more traffic.
If people share your content, Google will recognize this as something important, and it will give it an edge.
6. Use shoppable Instagram posts
Shoppable Instagram posts are the convenience Instagram has provided for the business profiles.
When you upload images to your Facebook catalog, they will be linked to your Instagram account, and you will be able to create shoppable posts.
People eagerly follow the brands they like because they feel closer to them, they can contact them directly via the DM, and they can keep pace with all the news and campaigns. Given that more and more people opt for online shopping each day, the introduction of this option is an excellent move towards developing brands.
The followers now can click on the picture and find out the price of the product instead of sending a message and waiting for an answer. Therefore, their interest is not lost while waiting to get the necessary information.
This shoppable feature also has metrics attached so you can track the data collected by your followers. With this option, which is also located in Instagram Insights under the Post impressions, you can see likes, reach, outbound clicks, etc.
7. Cooperate with micro-influencers
It is already known that the influencers can be categorized into micro-influencers and macro-influencers.
We are now going to pay special attention to micro-influencers – people who have fewer followers, but again have a specific impact on their audience who trusts in their recommendations.
Scrunch defines micro-influencers as people who have between 2000 and 50000 followers.
Cooperation with micro-influencers is one of the best Instagram growth hacks!
As they have fewer followers, their connection with the audience is stronger because they can respond to comments and messages more efficiently than a macro-influencer whose inbox is stuffed with hundreds of messages, not to mention the notifications for comments which are never to be seen probably.
Also, it is highly probable that a large number of brands has not yet engaged the micro-influencers. Therefore it will not seem as if they would accept various offers for cooperation solely to get money.
Many influencers get critics from their followers because their audience feels like their recommendation is no longer so vital if they accept a lot of co-operation, and the money is the only thing driving them.
Of course, if you want to reach an even larger audience, you can hire more micro-influencers to spread the news about your business.
Keep it in mind that you always choose influencers that have some similarities with your brand. It wouldn’t be so logical to call a fitness trainer to advertise carbonated drinks and sweets, right?
How exactly is the number of your followers growing if you hire influencers?
When you make a contract with a micro-influencer, he becomes the ambassador of your brand. Therefore, it is essential to select who will you engage carefully. If you are not sure how to make this choice, it’s better to consult a social media manager, hire a digital agency, or expand your knowledge of social media trends..
After the agreed cooperation, the micro-influencer represents your brand to his followers who are there because they trust in his opinion and are interested in what he has to say. That already gives added value to your brand.
If they become interested, his followers go to your profile and start researching.
Giving the fact that they have heard about you from someone that they gave their trust and attention to, it is much easier to convert them into your customers. It is up to you then to maintain quality content, answer their questions and messages, and not allow them to wait.
Have you ever thought about how, no matter how hard you tried to make a better product or service, people are still not able to find out about you?
The market is overwhelming, and competition is enormous.
You spend your budget on commercials, but conversions are still not happening.
And, while you’re trying your best, everyone is talking about your competitors.
Fortunately, there are ways to make your business a “well-oiled machine” for recapturing competitor’s customers.
If you think that such a thing is not a ”fair fight”, do not worry. With these five solutions we have chosen for you, the competition with competitors remains within fair-play.
Continue reading this article, and it will become much clearer to you how to do that.
1. Create a high-converting landing page with competitor comparisons
Creating a landing page on which you can compare your brand with a competitive one might bring you much higher conversions.
But, you should be completely objective and insist on fair-play.
Before you begin making a landing page, keep in mind the following:
Never try to add negative attributes to competitors that do not exist, just because you want to stand out in comparison to them.
Don’t promise what you can’t do, because, after that, disappointment by the visitors of your landing page arises. If their expectations are not fulfilled, they are doubtful to return to your website.
After understanding these items, start creating the page.
Find the competitor that is more popular than you, but the one from whom, in reality, you can offer a better solution for your target group.
It’s up to you to take advantage of their popularity to get more customers and, what’s more important, your competitors’ customers.
Why is it essential that the competitor you compare yourself with has to be more popular than you or at least someone who’s your equal?
Because when people search, e.g., Trello, there will also be both those who have mentioned him on their websites and his alternatives.
In this way, someone who is not completely satisfied with the service that Trello provides will be able to choose one of its competitors who offer him with better user experience. Someone who suits his needs more.
To make it clearer, look at the following example that monday.com did with Trello.
First of all, as soon as you enter their landing page, you will see what the primary purpose of the monday.com tool is.
They then point out why they are a better option than Trello:
Then their features come to the visitor’s attention, and only at the end, when the visitor goes through all this information, the key proof is waiting for him.
It’s a comparison report that shows them black-and-white results, that is, why they should choose them and not their biggest competitor.
The catchy and objective article will attract the attention of your competitors.
If they are not satisfied with a particular segment of your service or want to try something else, this is an excellent opportunity for you to introduce yourself to them.
Choose a few competitors and compare their offers and features with yours.
Don’t forget to write a realistic comparison. Do not present your competitors in a negative way only.
Look how lemtalk wrote an article about Intercom alternatives.
lemtalk
HelpCrunch
Drift
Zendesk
Lemtalk gave feedbacks about each of the four mentioned alternatives, including themselves.
Every feedback is objective and explains why they wrote this comparison in the first place.
Intercom was not the best solution for them, and the market has a lot of simpler and more affordable tools that are great for small team communication.
They compare each alternative with Intercom individually, tell you what the differences are, and what their experience with each of them is like.
Each tool is rated according to the following criteria:
Easy to setup
Easy to use
Customization options
Value for money
Customer Support effectiveness
Features Score
These metrics help the target group to summarize what lemtalk team thinks about other platforms.
Keep in mind that you should be careful when writing articles about competitive analysis.
If your target audience has already used one of the tools, it will know whether you are objective or you want to make money on your competition’s account. So make sure you describe the real picture and your real experience.
Also, do not try to make your offer seem much better than it is, because people will notice everything.
Once they become disappointed in you, you will lose their trust and help your competition out.
First of all, you will have to find the competitor’s customers.
Do your research (if you have not already) and find out on which sales channels are your competitors promoting themselves.
For example, in the case of social networks, check who their followers are. You can also look for them in the comment or review section.
Many companies now also build online communities through Facebook groups that are often closed and serve to maintain communication between the brand and its users. Join them, and you will acquire one more option to see who their followers are.
But you should know that these are often the most trusted buyers, so do not get too promotional once you get in touch with them.
Do this with all the promotional channels of your competition.
After you find their customers, make the first step.
Be polite and professional. Do not be too intrusive.
You can contact them directly through the platform on which you have found them, or you can send them an email if you’re able to reach them.
Emails are the best option because building quality mailing lists today can be of crucial importance to your business.
When you contact them, try to offer some deal (for example, a free demo or a free trial of your product) or explain why your product is better than the competitors.
Provide them with all the necessary information if you want to get them interested and convert them into your buyers.
4. Point out competitor’s weak spots
We can learn a lot in business only from doing research.
And the better and more thorough the research, the more information you will get that can be of great importance to you to improve your business and increase the number of customers.
Feedbacks, reviews, and comments can tell you a lot (but really, A LOT) about your competitors.
People like to express their opinions, whether they be positive or negative.
And especially, they like to share their experiences.
This is a gold mine of information when it comes to recapturing competitor’s customers.
Reviews on websites such as Capterra are a great source of opinion, interest, needs, and desires of your target group.
When you read what your target group wrote about your competition, you will find out what are they doing well and what not so.
It’s more than an excellent guideline to find out how to make a better product than theirs.
You will be able to offer potential customers exactly what they want and what they need.
For example, when you see a review where someone has complained about a particular matter concerning your competition or has given a proposal for improvement, it’s the right time to adopt that and provide them with your offer.
Then contact them, and let them know that maybe you can be the one to give them what they need and what they expect to resolve their pain points.
You can even have the interviews with competitors’ customers about their needs and problems, or offer them to fill out a survey.
Shortcomings of your competition can quickly become your strengths.
5. Monitor competitor’s online campaigns
Creating an online campaign requires a lot of time. Usually, it takes several months. But also, while you’re creating it, you can see errors and decide to correct them right away, which means this process can take even longer.
To create effective campaigns, monitoring your competitor’s online campaigns should be on your priority list.
By observing their campaigns and the changes that they are implementing, you will see what they have been doing wrong but also what your frequent target audience best responds to.
If you analyze their strategies and moves, you will find out what are the best practices in your niche.
When you implement them, the results will include recaptured competitors’ customers and an extended customer base!
Remember that when it comes to the world of business, everything should be automated.
To automate the process of monitoring, your competition can use tools such as Competitors.app.
You can choose features and who you want to monitor.
It’s effortless to use, and it will collect all of your important data in weekly reports.
The bottom line
As you can see, most of these methods for recapturing competitor’s customers are quite simple.
But, if you want to be successful, you need to make some effort and invest time in it.
Monitoring competitors’ online campaigns indeed take most of the time, as there are many items to be followed.
And the damage caused by wasted time is irreparable.
The amount of time required increases significantly when we understand how much the competitors need to be explored.
However, if you want to save a considerable amount of your time and focus on other important tasks, you can leave this part of the job in the care of the Competitors.app.
You will get your reports ready for analysis, and after that, you only have to apply what the app shows as the best results.
It has different packages so you can choose which one is most suitable for you.
Now, with all this information, we think that you are ready to obtain a bigger base of potential customers.
Competition is everywhere, and if you’re not aware of it, you should. Competitors are our best friends and enemies at the same time. Knowing how to beat the business competition is of crucial importance.
You probably heard a lot of confident people saying: “We don’t have important competitors!”. That isn’t true.
Although confidence is an essential factor when it comes to business, the competition, whether we wanted to admit it or not, really exists. We must keep up with what is happening in their business plan.
Whatever you do, there is an excellent chance that someone else does it also.
The focus should always be on your business, that’s the fact.
Nevertheless, it’s also important to be aware that the existence of business competition is inevitable.
If you ignore the performance of your competitors, you are likely working against yourself. Not paying attention to them, you can create a huge disadvantage for your business.
If your goal is to prevent a regression in your business, the solution is to make a comprehensive competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis or competitive research is a field centered on strategic research that specializes in the collection and review of information about rival firms. It’s an essential tactic for finding out what your competitors are doing and what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being. Competitive analysis will help you to:
evaluate
analyze
beat your business competition!
Why is it important to monitor business competition?
Observing the steps that your competitors are taking can bring you great benefits.
Even before, when online businesses were not so developed, one of the most important segments when it comes to business plans was market research, which necessarily includes business competition.
You must know where your position is in comparison to the competitors. Not only when it comes to the results in Internet browsers, but also what are they exactly doing, what are they excellent at, and what are they doing wrong.
You can always use their mistakes or omissions as a benefit for you and take the win regarding the business competition.
Let’s give you one example to make it clearer.
Finding out which keywords are used by your competitors, it can help you realize which are the low competition keywords that people search, which keywords is competition not using, and which keywords are relevant to your field.
Jackpot!
Now you know which keywords you need to focus on and to, in that way, get more visits to your blog, website, or online store.
Given that the business competition is a complex topic, we will take you to step by step through this article and explain how the research of your competitors should look like.
1. Who are your competitors?
Of course, first, you need to find out who represents your business competition.
Make a list of your competitors.
Probably, the main competitors in your niche will pop into your mind first. If that’s not the case, do your research using Google, which will surely be an excellent source for you.
You do not have to take absolutely every brand or company into consideration, but, for example, start with the ten major and the most successful competitors.
You will easily be able to expand this list later on.
For now, it’s important to make the base – the starting point from where your business competition analysis will start.
2. Different sales channels, content and the tone of communication
In addition to websites that are the basis of online presence, social networks play a huge role in brand awareness.
It’s time for you to find out which sales channels your business competition is available on.
Today, there are many social networks that you can use for your promotion. Some of the most popular ones are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Get started and check which channels are your competitors promoting themselves on.
Tip: Do not follow each step of your business competition, blindly. If you are dealing with a job that is not suitable to be advertised on, for example, Instagram, and one of your competitors is doing just that, do not follow in their footsteps. If you are not sure which channels you need to focus on, look at what the majority is doing and try their method or consult with an expert who will be able to lead you to the right path.
Once you’ve learned where others from your niche are promoting their business, it’s time to pay attention to the type of content that they post on different channels. Some of the content types are:
visual content: photos and videos
blog posts
eBooks
webinars
newsletters
podcasts
FAQs
demos
Identifying the type of content that your business competition publishes can help you to plan your strategy on different channels.
The important items to pay attention to when it comes to the content are quality and regularity.
When you consider the tone of communication, look at the way your competitors communicate with their users.
Be sure to pay attention if they have a section with the left reviews.
In addition to seeing how they respond to their visitors, you also have insights into feedbacks. See what their users are praising and what they would rather change.
Take advantage of the competitors’ feedbacks to change in your business, everything that they weren’t doing right, and implement what is highlighted as their benefit. You are a few steps closer to beat the business competition!
3. Customer support
Your users want to know that they are important to you.
So take good care of them!
If you want to find out where your customer support stands in comparison to a competitive one, get down to the research.
Do not just watch what your business competition is doing; get in touch with them.
Most websites offer the option of live chat where you can start communicating with chatbots or with real people and ask them whatever you want.
Of course, if we talk about social networks, do not use the company profile because there is an excellent chance that you will be left without answers.
This can also be a good opportunity to find out some things you couldn’t possibly understand by merely browsing the site.
For example, you’ve noticed that one of your competitors has a particular feature, but you do not know which principle that feature works by. Send a simple message (via live chat, email, inbox) and kindly request more information about the function and the work method of this feature.
Thanks to this, you will find out:
information about the feature (or any segment that interests you)
how much time do they need to respond to your message
what is their style of addressing visitors
Do this with different competitors so you could conclude.
One more time: do not blindly follow everything that your business competition does. If they need a lot of time to respond to your message, say 24h, that is certainly not a good way to keep your potential customers interested. Try to be as up-to-date as possible and to provide information in real-time.
4. Find out your USP!
The USP is an abbreviation for a unique selling proposition.
The most simple definition of the USP is The factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason one product or service is different from or better than that of the competition.
The USP is extremely important for you to stand out in comparison to the other competitors.
This should be your main characteristic that will be connected by others to your product or service, and which will make it easier for them to remember you by.
Find out what stands out as the main advantage of your business competition. Let this information serve you as an inspiration for your USP if you do not already have a clear idea of what is separating you from the others.
Let’s see some great examples of USPs:
M&Ms: The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
M&M’s USP is imaginative and easy to remember. Be honest, do you know anyone who has not heard of M&Ms?
Domino’s Pizza: You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.
There is a pizzeria on every corner, and therefore, the business competition is enormous. But Domino’s Pizza has come up with the simplest USP that works. Why is that? When you think of eating a pizza, you want it fresh, hot and to arrive as soon as possible. That’s precisely what Domino’s Pizza offers, and because of that, the very next association on your mind will be related to this pizzeria in particular.
Make sure to present your USP to the audience in an ethical and/or creative way, and let this become one of the main strengths in beating the business competition.
Tip: When developing your USP, you must keep in mind your ideal buyer persona. The USP should attract your target audience, so pay attention to the following:
what motivates them
what are their interests
what are their wishes
gender
age range
where do they live
5. Search engine optimization
We have reached the last but not the least important step when it comes to evaluating and analyzing the competition.
By knowing the search engine optimization strategies of your competitors, you can give them the final blow and finally beat the business competition!
Every brand wants to find itself in the highest position when observing the search results in Internet browsers – people focus mostly on the first page of the results.
How Impact says: 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
It is a big deal.
Every successful SEO strategy must include business competition research.
The investigation of competitive procedures is an absolute fair-play. Besides, be sure that your business competition is already observing the steps that your company makes, so why would you then allow them to be in the lead?
Today, many tools can help you monitor your competitors’ performance, and the conclusions you make based on the results will help you to improve your SEO rankings. Some of these tools are:
By using some of these tools, you will save yourself valuable time which you can use for some other tasks.
While monitoring your business competition, you can find out:
which keywords do they use
what types of backlinks do they post
what kind of content do they publish
how do they rank
Keywords are an essential part of a good SEO strategy. This should be your starting point when you start planning your SEO strategy, but also when you monitor the strategies of your competitors.
By analyzing the keywords used by your business competition, you can see which are the words that are best quoted in your niche.
You will see which words, some that you maybe haven’t used previously, have a high number of searches and therefore you will get new suggestions.
You will be able to see which are low competition keywords that your competition does not use, and you can target them.
A backlink is a great option to provide yourself with more significant traffic. You will find it easier to get a higher ranking by using backlinks on your website or blog. Your business competition is probably already using backlinks of the sites that might be important to you.
By tracing backlinks to the websites of your competitors, you will find out which are the popular sites that can bring you more visits.
You will find websites that are related to your niche that you can contact for outreach and link building more efficiently.
Content analysis will show you which type of content the people best respond to. Consequently, you will know which type of content you need to showcase on your sales channels.
All these items will help you find out the SEO metrics of your business competition.
Why is this important?
It’s important to know where you are in comparison to the competition. The results of these analyses will help you to evaluate the positions of the business competition.
You will find out what are you doing better and what are you doing worse than the others in your niche.
Learn their strengths and weaknesses.
When you get the results in front of you, you will know in which direction you need to go to improve your business and to beat the competition.
If you have felt stuck a couple of times, the number of visits has dropped, the sales have stopped, or you do not know what else you could improve, this is a great way to see the real situation.
Analyzing and evaluating competitive brands will surely broaden your perspective.
Keep up with the innovations.
Most companies that fail or go bust are those that do not keep in step with the times and changes. Do not let yourself get too comfortable even when you have the most conversions.
Don’t forget to do competitive analyses regularly.
It is not enough to do the research only once. We live in a time when things change at lightning speed, and one trend gets inherited by others.
For example, you can do it four times a year.
Maintain your audience’s interest.
Follow these tips, and the progress will be unavoidable.
After gathering all this information, it’s time for your strategy.
Competition Monitoring has plenty of use cases. Indeed, it can help you to improve user onboarding and attract more customers.
Do you know that competitors’ are the core of every business? And that carefully conducting your competitors’ research is going to save your business from doom?
Me neither, until I failed when I started my first startup. The reason why we failed is that we didn’t pay too much attention to our competitors. We just thought:
“Okay, we have this feature, this feature and this feature. All of them are amazing! The customers would love them!”
The truth is: nope. They didn’t love them. They didn’t even use our product. Why?
Our competitors were some 20-year old companies from the IT sector. Their websites were awful. But still, they managed to provide enough value to their users.
We have just overwhelmed existing and useful products. It turned out that our potential customers liked simplicity.
We didn’t realize that our competitors’ are big gamers in our industry. We have just thought: “Nah, they have a crappy website. They are useless.”
That thinking cost us our time and money.
My dear friends, that’s the reason why I have decided to show you what I have learned afterward, what were my mistakes, and how can you implement some of the tactics.
In this article, we will cover everything from doing great competitive research, over recapturing competitors’ users to successfully onboarding them, and creating in-app experiences suitable for them.
Let’s dive in!
Easiest, Fastest and Most Efficient way to Conduct your Competitors’ Research
We all hate conducting competitive research.
Yea, I will admit it – I hate it too!
But the point is – we need to do this in the best way we can if we want to build a profitable and enduring business.
So, here is how to do it in several steps (Yea, it will still cost you some time, but in the worst, you will invest no more than 5 hours for this – instead of 10+ like we all used before):
1. Write down several most relevant keywords for your business, product, service or feature (10 minutes)
2. Type all of them in Google and write down the first eight links on the page for every particular keyword. (20 minutes)
4. Create an insightful and detailed spreadsheet, where you can put as much information as you can. Here is some necessary information you should look for:
– Name of the company
– Headquarters, Address, State
– Founders
– Resources (Team size, investments, founders previous experience, etc.) Everything which can help you to determine their power and ability to create and make changes faster.
– Product features
– Unique Value Propositions
– Distribution and User Acquisition channels (Social Networks, Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.)
– Unique Buying Persona and Target Audience
– Technical information (Languages used to build the product, Website information – Traffic, Domain Authority, Trust Factor, Citation Flow, Spam Score, etc.)
(20 minutes)
5. Find this data (30 minutes to 1 hour per competitor).
From all the information you found above, you can see a lot of useful things about some of your competitors you can use in crafting and executing significant competitive advantages and to improve user onboarding:
Knowing your competitor’s available resources (time size, investment, etc.) will help you to determine what are their strengths and how fast they can implement changes, new trends, and pivoting.
Having clear insights into their Unique Value propositions and key features will help you to understand their offerings and what’s their trigger when acquiring new customers
Their founders must become your best friends – following their founders on all possible social media and rewatching or re-reading their old interviews will help you to see through what challenges they passed and how they solved some particular problems.
Have clear insights into their marketing channels – understanding this will help you to find out and determine their best acquisition and distribution channels. Understanding how are they onboarding their new customers is crucial if you want to beat them.
Now when we saw how can some particular data from Competitive Research help us, it’s time to see how can we create converting onboarding tactics.
Customers are bosses
There is no business that will live without its’ customers. It’s the same for your competitors and the same for you too. Whether you are in a big or small market, sometimes it’s not just enough to fight for, let’s say, 2% market share.
Sometimes we need to acquire a much more significant share if we want to build an enduring business and create a monopoly.
Having a clear mindset here is crucial, so ask yourself this:
“What would happen if I recapture some of my competitors’ customers?”
The best way to test your product, features and unique value proposition is actually to talk to your competitors’ customers! 🙂
Create some little surveys or even conduct some 15-minute call or video interviews. Because they are charming people (who else would give you 15 minute of their time in this busy world. right?), you can offer them some extended trial, discount, or your exclusive learning material.
The goal of your competitors’ customer development is to:
Understand their most significant pain about problems that you and your competitors are solving.
There is no better way to improve user onboarding than educating your competitors’ customers better.
Find the gaps in your competitors’ products and onboarding method, and improve them! Let’s take the following example:
There is a lot of Project Management tools right there. We have Asana, Trello, Atlassian, and many more of them, and almost all of them are complicated. The best software out there is the one that provides the best education and onboarding methodologies for its customers.
When some customer is changing one tool and going to another one, the biggest problem he has is the transformation itself.
Use the data from your researches and make sure that your product, onboarding strategies, and educational material are filling the gaps.
Create unique explaining videos. For example, you, as a CEO, can speak and explain your potential customers how can they use the tool or what are the benefits of using your tool instead of your competitors’ tools.
Pro Tip: put your face whenever you can – it will help you to establish better relationships with your customers and improve your personal and company brand.
Track Competitors’ Transactional Emails
Transactional (or drip) emails are triggered and behavioral-based emails.
According to Experian, transactional emails receive eight times bigger open rates than any other type of marketing emails.
Sending transactional emails will undoubtedly help you to improve user onboarding.
What are some transactional email examples?
– Welcome emails – emails that are sent whenever someone creates an account
– Triggered transactional emails – your user just activated your most important feature? Send him the tips and tricks about that particular feature through email!
– Activity-based transactional emails – Your user isn’t seen for a while? Remind them of the benefits of using your product
– The trial is ending – Whenever your user’s trial is about to end, remind them through transactional email.
There are countless examples of using transactional emails to improve user onboarding.
Here are some examples of how we at Competitors App use transactional emails to improve the activation rate.
Whenever we see that someone didn’t add it’s domain, we trigger them this email.
This particular email generated over 50% open rate, and more than 30% of those who opened this email added their domain.
Here, we’re offering our trial customers dedicating help and support by asking them to schedule 1 on one meeting with us.
This particular email generated more than 43% open rates and more than 25% of people who opened it scheduled the meeting.
Your competitors invested a lot of time and money to craft amazing transactional email campaigns or copies. They probably know better than you what’s working and what’s not.
So, why do you need to reinvent the wheel?
When you’re adding new competitors in your Competitors.app account, you will see the following notification at the bottom:
For example, if you want to monitor HubSpot, it may look like this:
Afterward, you can check your competitors’ transactional emails in your Competitors App dashboard.
Now you’re ready for skyrocketing your transactional email open rates!
Improve user onboarding with better in-app experiences
Is your goal to make better user onboarding? Right?
By now, you know your competitors very well; you know their strengths, weaknesses, unique features, and user activation events. You know what their customer’s pain points are, and how are they activating their trial users through transactional emails.
There are two last steps you need to conduct if you want to improve user onboarding flow, improve your retention, reduce churn, and activate more users:
Check their in-app user onboarding
Improve user onboarding
The best way to check your competitors’ in-app user onboarding is actually to try their product.
Signup to them, and see what are they doing.
How does their user onboarding flow look like? Do they use checklists, product tours, or progress bars? What are their tooltips?
Check whatever you can and write it down.
If you’re “lucky” and your competitors are well-established businesses, try to search for their user onboarding teardowns on the web.
Like this one, for example:
The next step is to improve user onboarding flows and make them better than your competitors have.
You can always use your dev resources or open libraries to create amazing in-app experiences, UX, and UI elements.
For example, User pilot is one of the Walkme and Appcues alternatives. It helps you to build triggered and behavioral-based user onboarding elements and in-app experiences.
The Bottom Line
As far as we have seen, you can achieve great results with constant competition monitoring. There are various use cases, and how to improve user onboarding based on your competitors’ research and competition monitoring is undoubtedly one of them.
Marketing automation has been a popular topic for a while now, yet not everyone seems to be taking full advantage of it. As advanced tools become more and more available, it’s only a matter of time before automation completely changes the way marketers work. It may be worth to start thinking about using proper marketing automation tools in your strategy – and here’s how to make that happen.
What is marketing automation?
Automation means improving and to some extent, even replacing manual or intellectual labor by machines. In the case of marketing, this becomes possible thanks to relevant marketing automation tools. Such software allows you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize your efforts, reduce human error, and as a result, make your job as a marketer much easier while optimizing your digital marketing strategy.
The main idea behind marketing automation goes way beyond that, though. It’s all about reacting to people’s behavior once you caught their attention, and make sure you keep them engaged – preferably through the whole marketing funnel. The more you (and thus, the marketing automation software) know about your web visitors or users, the better you can serve them. That’s precisely why proper marketing automation tools take advantage of machine learning and predictive analytics to be able to draw conclusions from the data available and suggest or even execute the best possible action. With such software, you can easily manage all your communication channels, personalize messages, and eventually turn your visitors into your clients.
What can you automate and optimize, exactly?
Email marketing
With email marketing, you can easily target and reach the right audience with relevant content. Apart from sending out mass emails, you can even define specific triggers to respond to your recipients’ actions right away correctly. Luckily, many tools can let you automate your email marketing campaigns. Take OutreachPlus as an example. You can easily send personalized e-mails on a scale, track the results of your campaigns, and even influence the acquisition of new potential customers. Once you’re at it, it can also be beneficial to monitor your competitors’ email marketing strategies.
Social media management
If you own a lot of profiles across social networks, having a social media marketing automation tool will help you manage them properly. Yet again, there are many tools created for that purpose, even though the majority has pretty much the same features. When searching for the best option to suit your needs, though, it’s worth to select the one that stands out and offers something more. Something that you could use not only for drafting, scheduling, and keeping track of all posts but also for automating the whole process even further, such as Kontentino.
Speaking of social media, though, there’s also another activity worth automating – social listening, especially if you want to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Luckily, Competitors App monitors both Facebook and Twitter to give you valuable insights. You can read more about monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.
Landing pages
With proper tools, you can easily create well-designed, interactive landing pages that will allow you to capture more leads (or serve any other purpose of your choosing). Unbounce, for example, is a compelling landing page builder that has some great features in store. It can even automatically replace some keywords on your landing page to match specific phrases that your prospects search for.
Lead generation
Speaking of capturing leads, you can also engage with your visitors via push notifications to encourage them to leave their contact details or perform a specific action. It’s also a great way to keep your web visitors informed about any exclusive deals, offers or updates, as well as deliver your content to those who could genuinely be interested in it. PushPushGois an excellent example of such a tool, as it allows you to track and analyze user behaviors on your site, and target the right audience at the right time.
Plus, if you need to retarget specific groups of customers, try doing so with RocketLink. You can not only set up push notifications with this app but also target people who have shown interest in your content by clicking on the link (which is shortened, by the way). What’s game-changing about that? Most likely, the fact that you can link to other websites while still using a relevant Call-to-Action that will drive traffic to your site, landing page, or a specific form.
Pretty much everything
Certain all-in-one marketing automation tools can serve most of your inbound marketing needs: building landing pages, capturing leads and creating databases, sending out email marketing campaigns, scheduling social media content, hosting and publishing your blog, analyzing data, and integrating it with your sales team. They come with a price, though. Advanced marketing automation software has tiered pricing, which means that its price grows along with your business. Still, Hubspotis definitely worth taking a closer look at if you’re interested in such a solution and able to afford it.
What to take into account when choosing a marketing automation tool?
If you’re considering to invest in marketing automation, it’s always a good practice to establish your needs first. Then, compare pricing, usability, and integrations with your existing software. Naturally, you may want to go for a powerful all-in-one marketing automation tool at first – but it may turn out to be too expensive. At the same time, you might not need to take advantage of that many features daily. That’s why it’s important to know what to look for when doing your research.
Choose your marketing automation tool wisely
Rapid technological development changes the way marketers work. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, though. By taking advantage of marketing automation, you can save a lot of time and often money as well. Especially since collecting and segmenting your databases, effective planning, and even analyzing your actions are now easier than ever. It’s all possible thanks to advanced marketing automation tools that become more and more available.
It’s important to remember that seasoned marketers should remain in charge, though, carefully observing the results of each campaign and drawing conclusions themselves. That’s precisely why digital solutions can’t entirely replace human labor. And rightfully so.
The 13 minutes you will spend reading this will probably be the best investment you have made today! Why? Because you will learn how to compete and beat your competition, be better than them and scale your business!
A few weeks before I started writing this article, I had reached out to Gerard Compte from „FindThatLead“to make a better business relationship with him. In the first message I had written in the P.S. section, I said:
“Good Luck in slaying your mortal enemies Gerard! ;)”
When he responded, I learned a precious lesson from reading the first sentence of the message:
“There are no enemies; just good people called competitors who are helping us to understand our market and customers better. Competition is the best thing you will have in business.”
Starting a new business from scratch is one of the most independent, exciting pursuits you can undertake. Due to the sea of information and helpful tools available now, it is much easier to set up and run one, and much more fun.
While you may have your idea up and ready, one question may still be bugging you from taking that leap. The competitive business environment may be forcing you to ask yourself:
“Should I do it?”
This is an excellent question to ask, as all entrepreneurs (especially if you’re doing it for the first time) do come across thoughts like, “All good ideas have been executed already.”
Contrary to intuition, having a certain amount of competition can be helpful – and a competitive business strategy is best for the growth of small businesses. Inside this existential question for your business, you should analyze these different areas:
The Competitive Market
It may be tempting to get to the exciting stuff of setting up a business – but it is always good to conduct your research first.
You may feel that your product is perfect for the market. Nothing like it exists.
Or you may be overthinking competition exists already.
In both these cases, market research is a tool that comes in very handy. It can help you:
(a) Identify your market segment
Your market segment is the ‘segment’ of people from the ‘market’ who will be the ideal customers for your product. Identifying and understanding this group of people will help you optimize your product.
As you understand the problems they face, and how they like to solve them, you can identify where in the process you can make it easier for them.
(b) Understand Market Trends and the Market Picture
By conducting the appropriate research, you can identify if there’s a market for your idea. It can help you determine your unique niche and how you can solve problems for that niche.
You can see if the industry you’re in is declining or thriving. It is best to go ahead into further stages of business development if the industry is stable and thriving/ new and on the road to a flourishing future.
These two steps will bring you to the essential part of the analysis:
(c) Identify and Study Your Competitors
Your competitors, even if they’re not entirely similar, are your ideas put into a business. Healthy competition can look scary – but it is what makes the market colorful.
If many companies are doing well in your niche, it also means that people ARE looking for what you’re offering.
You can analyze your competitors to identify the trends in your niche, see what works and what doesn’t, and get a clearer picture of how running your business would be.
You can analyze their best practice strategies and content to apply them to your own business. Further, you can also see where they failed/ tests they conduct to save time and save yourself from making those same mistakes.
You can also look into how they nurture their leads, how their sales funnel works, and how these could be improved to apply to your business model.
There are various tools available which you can use to analyze your competitors. These can help you track changes in your competitor’s websites, emails, social media campaigns, website tests – and their overall digital marketing strategy.
The deeper you look into your competitor, the more insight you can gain on how to improve your business.
This also has another helpful effect. As you understand what your competition is offering – you can even get what they’re missing – which can help you strengthen your proposition. This will again make your product unique and add value.
The Customers/Users
The user is the heart and driving force of any business. Great businesses are built on great ideas, no doubt, but those are ideas that add value to their users.
The users who are in your target segment can provide you a gold mine of information. Here are the ways in which they can help various aspects of your business plan.
(a) They’ll help you identify if your product is needed
Sure, you feel like your product could help out a lot of people – but you need to ask your prospective customers if they would be using something like it.
For example, if you build software that sorts company files with a subscription price of 300$ a month – would a business buy it? They could decide to outsource it pay a human to do it.
This exercise will help you in finding out if the users need your product. It can also help you in setting up a pricing range.
(b) They’ll help you see If your USP works
Your unique selling point (USP) is what sets you apart from other competitors. For determining the USP, it is best to learn about the problems the users face in real life, and the services they use to solve those.
While giving you an idea about your competitors, this will also tell you about the pain points of the user straight from the inside. Further, you can ask the problems they face with the current tools and services they use. It will help you identify where your competitors are missing the mark – and where you can make one.
If people are looking for alternatives to the current services, it is a tremendous opportunity to jump to. You can identify similar problems seen as a pattern among various users and build on that.
This will help you improve your USP further and evolve it into adding more value to the user.
For example – You’re developing customer support software, and many users tell you about not being able to sync their invoices to their email. This is a problem they face on a day to day basis and has not been solved yet.
You add this in your USP – and these users will be glad to shift over to your service.
The best ways of connecting with customers/prospects are usually by conducting interviews/ surveys.
These require significant efforts from you as well the consumer – another useful tool for analyzing the customer is through social media.
Social media is a significant communication channel for companies and their customers – and by tracking your competitor’s social media, you can get an insight here. This is another feature that competitor monitoring tools offer. This can also help you find and use channels where your competitors are not yet connected to their users on, and exploit it to catch up.
Many young companies face the problem of meeting the large “sharks” – the bigger companies which may be dominating their niche, and competitor analysis is how they can get ahead.
So, if you were questioning yourself about whether or not you should go ahead with your business idea – the best way to answer that is to do some research.
Once you find your value proposition, the only thing that stands between you and massive growth is how you promote yourself better than your competitors.
All the best – to more growth and great business ideas!
In today’s increasingly competitive world, using business intelligence to understand the inner workings of your business in detail is what will propel you above your competition. But choosing the business intelligence tool that will work best for your business can be a long-winded and complicated process. The business intelligence market has boomed in recent years, and there’s a great many tools out there that promise to cater to your business’ every need. To help with your decision, we’ve collated a list of business intelligence tools that we believe are best in class.
Business intelligence: a definition
First things first, business intelligence (BI) is a term used to describe a broad range of different technology, applications, and the collection of business information. Current and historical business information can be collected and stored, usually in a data warehouse or data lake, and then used to inform future business decisions and daily operations. Of course, this can help businesses work more efficiently and make more informed decisions.
Because of its value and use to an organization, a great many business intelligence tools have been developed and marketed. The trick for business owners is to understand which ones work best.
Business intelligence software: our top picks
Sisense: This nifty piece of BI software allows you to collate, analyze, and quickly view business data in a user-friendly interface. The Sisense dashboard is incredibly easy to use, with a drag-and-drop function that even the most tech-phobic person can get their head around. All critical business data can be seen almost instantly – very helpful for timely decision making!
Tableau: Sifting through the masses of data produced by businesses every day is an impossible task. Tableau allows people to create clear and stunning data visualizations with little to no prior programming knowledge. Tableau can plug into several different data sources, bringing everything together into one visual place that can then be shared and published.
Domo: Domo offers business leaders the ability to view real-time data on a single dashboard, with multiple graphics and the ability to create personalized models. There are also trend indicators and sparklines, which makes snap decision making much more informed. To help get a second opinion, there’s also the ability to share with others and make PowerPoint-style slides from it.
Qlik Sense: If you’re short on time, Qlik Sense will automatically create custom dashboards and reports. It works with businesses of all sizes, from global companies to sole traders. Qlik Sense is also one of the faster business intelligence tools, as it compresses any data inputted to up to 10% of its original size. For on-the-go decision making, Qlik Sense comes in a mobile version as well.
Woopra: Customers should make a key part of all business decision making, and Woopra makes this easy by analyzing customer behavior across different devices and platforms. It creates highly detailed visual customer profiles, which can be customized for several industries, including travel, finance, retail, and media.
Choosing a business intelligence tool
The above competitive intelligence software is only a small selection of the myriad tools available to businesses. When trying to find the right competitive intelligence app for your company, it can be useful to list all of your ‘must-have’ features, all ‘nice-to-have’ features, and features that you’ll never really use. You should also consider how many people in your organization will need to have access to the tool and their level of technical expertise. Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask to try a free demo of a business intelligence tool and see how well it works for your business in real life.
Business intelligence is a must for all modern businesses. But you do have to be smart when choosing the right business intelligence software. If you go wrong, it could be a time-consuming and costly affair that may also put your employees off using a business intelligence tool ever again. So choose wisely.
Read other competitive articles for your business
Competitive Intelligence Business – Competitive intelligence (CI) is a term you may have come across before. Like many industry buzzwords, it isn’t immediately apparent what CI is and how it can be useful to your business. But don’t worry, because we’re going to explain the ins, outs, pros, and cons of CI.
Find competitor keywords Finding your competitors’ keywords is essential for your business. It means that you focus your entire website on targeting high volume, quality keywords.
Track Social Media Pages Social media competitive analysis is the constant monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.
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