Category: Competitive Research

Email Marketing Competitor Analysis: The Ultimate Guide

March 25, 2024 No Comments

As competition grows, the simple act of sending emails no longer guarantees engagement. This reality ushers in the importance of email marketing competitor analysis. It has transformed from a minor consideration to a vital strategy in marketing planning. This guide aims to demystify email marketing competitor analysis, explaining its definition, the advantages it offers, and how to apply it effectively to enhance your email marketing strategies.

Definition of Email Marketing Competitor Analysis

Email marketing competitor analysis is the methodical examination of your competitors’ email marketing strategies. It involves a detailed look into the strategies, tools, and tactics used by competitors to engage with and convert their audience. By evaluating your competitors’ email campaigns, you can discover important insights into what strategies are resonating with audiences, including trends within your industry and effective communication techniques. The primary goal is to gather this information not to mimic others but to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement in your own email marketing campaigns.

The Benefits of Email Marketing Competitive Analysis

Understanding the landscape of your industry’s email marketing can unlock a multitude of benefits for your business. Here are the key advantages that conducting an email marketing competitive analysis can bring:

1. Identify Industry Trends: By keeping a close eye on your competitors’ email marketing efforts, you can quickly spot emerging trends and adapt your strategy accordingly. This could range from design preferences, the popularity of certain types of content, to shifts in sending frequency.

2. Benchmarking Performance: Competitive analysis allows you to gauge how your email marketing performance stacks up against others in your industry. This benchmarking can highlight areas of strength and pinpoint where there’s room for improvement.

3. Inspiration for Content and Design: Analyzing the emails of competitors can spark ideas for your own campaigns. You might discover effective email designs, compelling calls-to-action, or engaging content formats that you can adapt to fit your brand’s voice and goals.

4. Innovate and Differentiate: With insights gained from competitor analysis, you can find opportunities to differentiate your email campaigns. This could mean refining your value proposition, experimenting with new email technologies, or tailoring content more precisely to your audience’s preferences.

5. Improve Audience Engagement: By understanding what resonates with audiences in your sector, you can tailor your emails to better meet their needs and interests, potentially boosting engagement rates.

6. Optimize Email Campaign Strategies: Insights from competitor analysis can inform more strategic decisions regarding your email campaigns, from segmentation and personalization strategies to timing and frequency of emails.

In essence, email marketing competitive analysis serves as a foundation for informed decision-making, helping you to refine your strategy in a way that resonates with your audience and stands out from the competition.

How to Find Your Email Marketing Competitors

Identifying who your email marketing competitors are is a crucial step in conducting a thorough competitor analysis. Here’s how you can pinpoint the businesses that are vying for your audience’s attention:

1. Start with Direct Competitors: These are businesses that offer the same products or services as you do, targeting a similar audience demographic. They are your most apparent competitors in email marketing strategies.

2. Look at Indirect Competitors: These companies may not offer the exact same product or service but are competing for the same audience’s attention in your industry. Their email marketing strategies might reveal innovative approaches to audience engagement that you haven’t considered.

3. Use Search Engines: A simple Google search can help identify competitors by using keywords related to your business. Look at who ranks well for these terms and explore their email marketing strategies if possible.

4. Social Media and Forums: Platforms like LinkedIn, industry-specific forums, and social media channels can be goldmines for discovering competitors. Often, businesses share their content, including email sign-up promotions, that can give you insights into who your competitors are.

5. Use Competitor Analysis Tools: There are numerous digital marketing tools available that can help identify your competitors and provide insights into their email marketing strategies. These tools can track various metrics and offer comparative data.

6. Attend Industry Events: Whether online or in-person, industry events, webinars, and conferences can be excellent sources for identifying competitors. These events often attract businesses keen on showcasing their latest offerings, including their approach to email marketing.

7. Customer Feedback: Listening to your customers can also reveal competitors. They might mention emails from other companies in discussions, feedback, or reviews, pointing you towards competitors you weren’t aware of.

By identifying both direct and indirect competitors, you’ll gain a comprehensive view of the email marketing landscape within your industry. This broad perspective is essential for developing strategies that not only compete more effectively but also carve out a unique space for your brand in the crowded inbox.

The Best Email Marketing Competitive Intelligence Tools in 2024

In the quest to stay ahead in email marketing, having the right competitive intelligence tools at your disposal is crucial. These tools can help you gather, analyze, and act on the information related to your competitors’ email strategies. Here are some of the top tools available in 2024 that can aid in your email marketing competitor analysis:

5 Steps of Developing an Effective Email Competitor Analysis Strategy

Crafting a strategy for email competitor analysis involves more than just observing your competitors’ moves. It requires a systematic approach to gathering data, analyzing it, and then applying the insights to enhance your email marketing efforts. Here are steps to develop an effective email competitor analysis strategy:

Step 1: Competitor Email Monitoring

Start by identifying who your main competitors are and subscribing to their email lists. Use different email addresses to subscribe to various segments if possible, giving you a broader view of their strategy. Tools like MailCharts or Owletter can automate this monitoring process, providing you with comprehensive insights without cluttering your inbox.

Key Elements to Analyze in Competitor’s Email Campaigns

When analyzing your competitors’ emails, focus on these key elements:

Target Audience: Understand whom they are targeting by analyzing the language, content, and offers in their emails.
Email Design & Templates: Note the layout, color schemes, and use of images or videos. This can give you ideas for your own email designs.
Email Content: Look at the type of content they are sending. Is it educational, promotional, or a mix?
Call-to-Action (CTA): Analyze the effectiveness of their CTAs. Are they clear and compelling? Do they use buttons or links?
Subject Lines: Note which subject lines grab your attention and consider why they work.
Email Sending Frequency: Track how often they send emails and identify any patterns related to days of the week or times of day.
Sender Address: See if they use a personal name vs. a company name, which can affect open rates.
Personalization Tactics: Look for signs of personalization beyond just using the recipient’s name.
Landing Pages: If they link out to landing pages, evaluate the consistency and effectiveness of these pages in relation to the email content.

Step 2: Key Metrics to Evaluate in Competitors’ Email Campaigns

Although you won’t have access to their internal metrics, you can infer certain aspects based on your observations:

Open Rates: While you can’t see actual numbers, subject line effectiveness and sender reputation can give clues.

Click-through Rates (CTR): The effectiveness of CTAs and link placements can indicate how engaging their content is.

Unsubscribe Rates: High frequency or irrelevant content might lead to more visible complaints or mentions on social media.

Step 3: Gathering Data

Use the tools mentioned previously like competitors.app, Optimail to systematically collect data on your competitors’ email strategies. Organize this data in a way that allows you to spot trends and patterns over time.

Step 4: Leveraging A/B Testing Insights

Apply insights from your analysis to conduct A/B tests on your own campaigns. This could involve testing different subject lines, email designs, or CTAs to see what resonates best with your audience.

Step 5: Turning Insights into Strategic Actions

Finally, use the insights gathered to inform your email marketing strategy. This might mean adjusting your email frequency, adopting new personalization techniques, or refreshing your email design to better engage your audience.

Remember, the aim of email competitor analysis is not to replicate what others are doing but to understand the competitive landscape and find opportunities to innovate and improve your own email marketing efforts.

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

While conducting email marketing competitor analysis, you might encounter several challenges. Recognizing these obstacles and knowing how to navigate them can enhance the effectiveness of your analysis. Here are some common challenges and strategies for overcoming them:

Challenge 1: Data Overload

Solution: Focus on Key Metrics and Competitors

– Avoid getting overwhelmed by too much information by concentrating on a select group of direct competitors and key metrics that align with your marketing objectives. Use tools that aggregate and simplify data to make analysis more manageable.

Challenge 2: Identifying Relevant Competitors

Solution: Broaden Your Perspective

– Sometimes, the obvious competitors aren’t the only ones worth analyzing. Look beyond direct competitors to those in adjacent markets or those targeting similar audience segments for innovative email marketing strategies.

Challenge 3: Lack of Access to Internal Metrics

Solution: Infer Performance Through Observation

– While you won’t have access to your competitors’ internal analytics, you can infer the success of certain strategies by observing engagement indicators, such as social media shares or mentions, and the frequency and consistency of their email campaigns.

Challenge 4: Keeping Analysis Current

Solution: Regularly Update Your Competitive Analysis

– The digital marketing landscape evolves rapidly, making it crucial to regularly update your competitor analysis. Set a schedule for periodic reviews to ensure your strategy remains informed by the latest trends and tactics.

Challenge 5: Differentiating Between Trends and Fads

Solution: Validate with A/B Testing

– Before fully integrating observed tactics into your strategy, validate their effectiveness for your audience through A/B testing. This approach helps ensure that the changes you make are genuinely beneficial.

Challenge 6: Translating Analysis into Action

Solution: Create a Structured Action Plan

– It’s one thing to gather insights from competitor analysis, but another to effectively implement them. Develop a structured action plan that outlines how and when you’ll test new strategies, ensuring that insights lead to tangible improvements in your email marketing efforts.

By understanding these challenges and implementing the suggested solutions, you can maximize the benefits of your email marketing competitor analysis and maintain a competitive edge in your industry.

Emerging Trends in Email Marketing Competitor Analysis

Staying ahead in the competitive world of email marketing requires not only understanding current best practices but also anticipating future trends. As we move through 2024, several emerging trends in email marketing competitor analysis are shaping the landscape, offering new opportunities for marketers to refine their strategies. Here are some key trends to watch:

1. Increased Use of AI and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies are becoming more prevalent in analyzing competitor email strategies. These technologies can predict trends, automate the collection and analysis of competitor data, and provide actionable insights with greater accuracy and efficiency.

2. Greater Emphasis on Personalization

As email marketing becomes increasingly crowded, personalization is evolving beyond just using a recipient’s name. Advanced segmentation and targeting based on behavior, preferences, and purchase history are becoming crucial. Analyzing how competitors implement these tactics can provide valuable lessons in enhancing your own campaigns.

3. Focus on Privacy and Data Security

With growing concerns over privacy and data protection, email marketers are adapting their strategies to comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Observing how competitors manage consent and privacy can offer insights into best practices and innovative approaches to privacy-conscious email marketing.

4. Integration with Omnichannel Strategies

Email marketing is becoming more integrated with other channels as part of a holistic omnichannel strategy. Analyzing competitors’ email campaigns in the context of their broader marketing strategy can reveal how email complements other channels and drives overall marketing success.

5. Use of Interactive Email Elements

The use of interactive elements in emails, such as polls, surveys, and interactive infographics, is on the rise. These features can significantly increase engagement and provide valuable data. Keeping an eye on how competitors utilize these elements can inspire ways to make your own emails more engaging.

6. Emphasis on Email Deliverability

As email filters become more sophisticated, ensuring emails reach the inbox is increasingly challenging. Analyzing competitors’ strategies for improving deliverability, such as sender reputation management and email list hygiene practices, can provide insights into maintaining high deliverability rates.

By keeping these trends in mind and regularly analyzing how your competitors adapt to these changes, you can ensure that your email marketing strategy remains effective and innovative. Remember, the goal of competitor analysis is not to copy what others are doing but to understand the landscape and find opportunities to differentiate and excel.

How often should I conduct email marketing competitor analysis?

Conducting email marketing competitor analysis should be a regular activity, but the frequency can depend on several factors, including the pace of your industry and the resources available to you. A good practice is to perform a thorough analysis quarterly. This schedule allows you to stay updated on competitors’ strategies and industry trends without being overwhelmed by the fast pace of change. However, for rapidly evolving industries, a monthly review might be necessary to keep pace with the competition.

What is the best software for email marketing competitor analysis?

The “best” software can vary based on your specific needs, budget, and the depth of analysis you require. However, tools like Competitors.app, MailCharts, Owletter, and SendView are highly regarded for their comprehensive features tailored to email marketing competitor analysis. These platforms provide insights into email frequency, content strategy, and design trends among competitors. For a broader marketing perspective, SEMrush and SimilarWeb offer functionalities that can complement your email marketing analysis by providing insights into competitors’ overall online presence and strategy.

How do I find competitors’ emails?

Finding competitors’ emails for analysis can be straightforward. Begin by identifying your direct and indirect competitors. Visit their websites and look for opportunities to subscribe to their newsletters or email updates. Additionally, consider using tools like Competitors.app to find email addresses associated with their domain if direct subscription options aren’t readily apparent. Attending industry events or webinars and networking can also provide opportunities to exchange email communications with competitors.

Are there free tools for email marketing competitor analysis?

Yes, there are free tools available that can assist with various aspects of email marketing competitor analysis, though they may offer limited features compared to paid versions. Tools like Competitors.app, Hunter.io offer a free tier for finding email addresses, and Google Alerts can be used to monitor competitors’ mentions online, which might lead to email campaign insights. For more in-depth analysis, free trials of platforms like MailCharts or SendView can provide a glimpse into competitors’ email strategies before committing to a subscription.

Can competitor analysis benefit small businesses?

Absolutely, email marketing competitor analysis can be incredibly beneficial for small businesses. It provides insights into what strategies are working (or not) within your industry, helping you make informed decisions with your limited resources. By understanding your competitors’ approaches, small businesses can identify gaps in the market, refine their value proposition, and tailor their email campaigns to better meet their audience’s needs. This strategic approach can level the playing field, allowing small businesses to compete more effectively against larger companies.

Irene Tzanopoulou

The Ultimate Guide to Competitive Intelligence

April 15, 2021 No Comments

Competitive intelligence refers to the monitoring, gathering, and analyzing of information related to your competitors, marketplace, and industry. Data alone is never enough, and such intelligence enables strategic decision-making while taking into account competitors’ activities.

Without timely and adequate insights, you will be losing the competitive advantage of your database. According to the Crayon 2018 State of Market Intelligence Report, 77% of businesses reported that intelligence is crucial to every business function in order to gain a competitive advantage over rivals.

Besides, competitive intelligence significantly relies on the digital footprint of businesses. Ranging from huge multinational corporations to small and medium-sized enterprises, every business in today’s era needs competitive intelligence to analyze the competitive market and identify market gaps.

Competitive intelligence not only helps raise the effectiveness of your marketing strategies but also saves costs as your strategies become more targeted. It is a more in-depth form of competitor analysis, and it enables actionable insights to improve your existing marketing tactics. Needless to say, information is turned into intelligence when information is analyzed to derive insights that help drive decisions and actions.

Moreover, competitive intelligence not only deals with industry factors like – technologies, distributors, customers, and competitors but also macroeconomic factors such as – unemployment, economic growth, and inflation. It involves the following steps: Planning, Collecting, Processing, Analyzing, and Intelligence Sharing. The last bit, ‘intelligence sharing’, means that you need to share whatever inferences you pull from your research with the entirety of your organization for informed and integrated decision-making.

Benefits of Competitive Intelligence

Today’s world is no doubt filled with heaps of data. A systematic competitive intelligence program must be in place to handle this information overload effectively. Let’s take a look into how competitive intelligence helps your organization:

Identify new market segments
Foresee rival attacks
Predict technological advances
Improve customer interactions
Create a distinct brand identity

Therefore, competitive intelligence lets you be on top of trends by scrutinizing every competitors’ digital actions and share of voice. It involves extensive and intensive mining of insights from different sources, including websites, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, blogs, forums, reviews, and so on.

Furthermore, competitive intelligence helps us set benchmarks and standards against which we can compare our current marketing strategies. While conventional market research is mostly focused on consumers, competitive intelligence focuses more on industry and competitor actions. This particularly helps because you are not the only one operating in the market. Your competitors have done their share of research, and hence, your next move must take into account your rivals’ moves.

But needless to say, competitive intelligence and competitor benchmarking are not the same as industrial espionage. Rather, it’s an ethical approach to making the most of the data already available to the public. Websites, blog posts, social media channels, and so on are the key sources of digital competitive intelligence.

But you need to know how to use it.

Steps to Competitive Intelligence

Unless you are operating in a cave, you know data is important. Everyone does. But the real question lies in how you can utilize and make the most out of data that is already widely available. Here are a few steps:

Identify your competitors

While we bet you already know who and how many rivals you have, you need to check regularly. Are there new entrants? Did any already leave? Is there one you missed? Consequently, understand the distinction between direct and indirect competition. Considering you are an online book store, is it alright to consider Amazon your competition? Side by side, some days, you have to consider competition from a different industry just because you are fighting for the same keywords in search engine rankings.

Set your standards

You must establish first hand which channels and performance metrics matter to you first. Keep your list simple, initially. Make it easier to track and monitor. Depending on your industry, establish which channels matter to you most and progress accordingly. Some metrics you may want to look into include:

Website Traffic
Social Media Engagement
Keyword Rankings
Conversion Rate

Sort and visualize your data

Categorize all the collected information and organize them in charts, graphs, and figures. You can’t see until you actually see it. Visualization of data will help you pull inferences more easily. Prepare dashboards to aid your decision-making like never before.

Share findings with the team

All this data wrangling will go in vain if they do not leave your desk. An integrated understanding of rivals will help you benchmark all your business functions against those of competitors. It will aid not only your present plans but also those of past and future. Insights derived from competitive intelligence will help fuel sales pitches, marketing copies, and product development.

Monitor and evaluate

Now that the ground is ready, time to take off for real action. Monitor how your derived insights and inferences are incorporated into your marketing strategies. You must understand whether and how your competitive intelligence is affecting your sales performance. Collect feedback and identify solutions to be implemented.

Figure out whether all the efforts actually worked? If not, why not?

Too many steps to follow, right? No real-time update means by the time you reach the end, the market has already evolved 360 degrees. The collection and organization of data, though important, take up a lot of time and effort when done manually. The accuracy of your competitive intelligence is also affected if you are not using the right kind of competitor software tools.

Then, where is the magic wand? How can you spend more time analyzing data while ensuring that the data sources and data themselves are relevant, accurate, and up to date?

Some Competitor Software Tools

There are widely available SaaS competitor benchmarking tools available online. That makes not only competitive intelligence accessible but also affordable. Some of them are as follow:

Similar Web

Similar Web is a great tool for website analysis and data mining. It enables you with a very detailed and comprehensive overview of any website, including those of your competitors. It provides data on a website's:

Estimated monthly visitors
Average time visitors spend
Bounce rate
Average page views per visitor
Top referring websites
Percentage of traffic from different social networks
Display ads banners
Organic search keywords
Paid search keywords
Audience interests
Other websites visitors view

All you have to do is install its Chrome Extension and click on it every time you visit a website. However, its free version provides very limited data, meaning you only get five results for each website metric that you’re analyzing. Subsequently, its premium plan's pricing is modular and will vary widely according to your unique needs and usages.

SpyFu

This tool helps you identify your competitors’ most profitable keywords. Plus, it provides you with both the paid and organic search keywords competitors are targeting. Handily, it is a great tool to identify keywords you might have previously missed out on.

Point: SpyFu offers a free version of its service, which you can check out if you’re dipping your toes initially. Moreover, the Basic plan charges $39/month while the Professional plan costs $78 /month. Consequently, the Agency plan costs $299/month.

Buzzsumo

It enables you to discover the top-performing and trending contents relevant to your brand and industry. It helps you identify potentially hot and trending topics on the web and social media to explore yourself.

If you are looking for your competitors' most popular content, Buzzsumo provides you with exactly that. Its paid packages may widely vary in prices ranging from $99/month to $499+/month.

MailCharts

MailCharts gathers emails from competing campaigns enabling you with subject lines, timing, frequency, length, and so on of your competitors to fine-tune yours. Additionally, it helps you draw inspiration pulling from some of the biggest campaigns out there. It educates you on how top-performing emails look like.

MailCharts has a free version to search for content by keyword or entering a competitor’s URL. It entails more data and tools with its paid version at $99+/month.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social media competitor analysis tool gathers competitors’ data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Besides, it allows you to compare key performance metrics and discover which kind of content trends and converts most.📷

Moreover, this tool offers competitor reports that list fundamental metrics like audience growth, engagement, and post volume for each social medium. It enables real-time and multi-channel tracking of engagement, influencer, and post schedules.

The good news is it has a 14-day free trial version, and its pricing ranges widely from $99/month to $249/month across various packages.

Competitors App

All the above tools are good ways to unravel your competitors' moves. They have amazing features each to tackle a specific category of your competitors’ activities.

But what's great?

A tool that encompasses all the features within one software – in other words, Competitors App.

Competitors App is an extraordinary competitor benchmarking tool that gathers competitive intelligence from multiple sources under one station. It helps you analyze the website, SEO, online ads, social media, emails, and newsletters of competitors under one package. Over the past 3 years, Competitors App has monitored around 13497 competitors for its clients worldwide. There are two plans that you can choose from:📷

Flexible: Priced at $9.90 per month for each competitor, this plan is more suited for small and medium businesses with a few domains and a couple of competitors.
Agency: Priced at $14.90 per month for each competitor, this package is more relevant for agencies with multiple users.

Great news: A 15-day free trial option is also available for the ease of users!

How To Use Competitors’ App

You can always schedule a demo in case you want to get first-hand training on how to optimize your use of the tool. After you are signed up and enrolled, the first step is to add competitors you want to learn more about. But beware of choosing competitors that you are ready to take a hit on. This provides you with a very user-friendly interface.

Firstly, the timeline panel allows you to get a snapshot of your competitors' most critical promotional items. Your timeline lets you have some final insights on the rivals’ actions on different channels based on your needs. Its advanced filter and checklist mechanism helps you select your competitors, data type, and time.

Plus, you can mark the most important items received on your timeline. You'll be saving the items as more accessible by pressing star. If you want to see specific data gathered or saved during a certain period, then you can use the calendar for this.

Secondly, the dashboard panel enables you with a well-curated board consisting of self-explanatory, real-time graphs and charts. These charts will reflect social activity posts, social activity engagement, most popular posts, and Google rankings summary, follower count, and follower growth of your competitors.

The visualizations are updated in real-time and prepared automatically. All these mean now you have only one task left- analysis! The app is like a virtual assistant that automatically prepares competitor reports, which you can also export as PDF anytime you want.

Finally, the keywords panel will help you to track and monitor the keyword performance of your rivals. Comprehensive analysis of keywords means you are in a better position for SEO.

Additional Competitive Features

Slack in a Snap

The app's monitoring tool gets you notified each time when a competitor makes a move in your preferred Slack channel. All you have to do is enable Slack notifications – you can then access updates easier and faster.

Scale the ratings

Going through your competitors’ reviews can give a full-fledged awareness of competitors' online reputation and brand image and consumer perception in the market.

Adapt to your needs

The app offers full white-label features available only for Agency Plan, with a custom domain and client login. Meaning? You can now access your clients to see their own dashboards and reports on your very own custom domain with reports personalized according to your brand.

What More Does Competitors App Offer?

The app keeps you informed based on the set alert frequency. It thus helps you with the following updates on your competitors.

Fast Access to Trial Emails and Newsletters

While account emails involve engagement with direct users through alerts on accounts and account-related activities, newsletters help you engage with prospects through information on companies’ news, deals, and special offers. You can send emails to retarget inactive users, celebrate user achievements, provide personalized recommendations, and so on.

The best part of the app is that it lets you be the first to know about your competitor's new actions, bonuses, and updates – even before their own subscribers and customers. Consequently, it helps you analyze the arrival time and frequency, email subject line, email body, promotional material design, and Call To Actions (CTAs) of your rivals through the app.

You can also identify key customer triggers and touchpoints. Add to that – analyzing your competition newsletters will give you insights into their creative style, tone, so you’ll know better what your gaps are and what you could improve on. The app will also enable you to see things from the perspective of a customer within your industry.

Understand What’s Trending on Blogs and Social Media

The app also helps you analyze the most popular social media channels, posting frequency, and engagement rate of your rivals can be a useful tool to discover uncharted and unprecedented opportunities.

Subsequently, your competitors’ online mentions, backlinks, and content marketing strategies can be wonderful factors to analyze while identifying your rival brands’ personalities. Throughout competitor benchmarking, some things to keep in mind are:

Do not try to follow and be on every social networking site – reign one network at a time.
Identify how your competitors position themselves and design your distinct brand identity to be communicated in elevator pitches. Remember: You need to be unlike your rivals to be liked by your target audience.
Keep tabs on when your competitors receive negative comments and see how they react to the brand image crisis. Learn from their strengths and weaknesses.
Take notes on online mentions and trending industry topics. There is a lot of takeaway on your way to market share takeaway.
Get inspiration and insights from the sentiment, voice, query management, sponsorship, affiliations, and reach of your rivals’ social media and blog strategies.

Easy Review of Online Ads and Keywords

Picking the right keywords is vital to any great search marketing campaign. Start with following the leading websites in your field or industry. Analyze the keywords bids, the average paid traffic, and historical performance to spot opportunities and market gaps. You can take a better look at competitor advertisements to capture all the pay-per-click campaigns, main keywords used, and their rankings for each ad.

Unravel fast and monitor all of your competitors' PPC campaigns to hoard all the insights you need to create better Google Ad campaigns. Any new keyword to look into? Any old one to drop? Look no further than your own market competitors. Keeping tabs on competitors' keyword activities will help you to focus your SEO and backlink building efforts where you need them the most.

Understand Website Structure and SEO Rankings

New website pages, page content changes, new product arrivals, seasonal influences, revamps in pricing strategies, fresh keywords, tweaks in value propositions, a brand refresh, and boilerplate updates- you name it, we show it! Analyzing your competitors’ website traffic, site structure updates, and pricing strategy can help you track and evaluate the extent and effectiveness of their web presence.

You can also receive data insights for your location-specific campaigns through Competitors App. Furthermore, UI/UX or online ad design changes due to a brand refresh can help you get insights into the direction of competitors’ plans. Whether they are dedicated features pages or FAQ- you can be the first to know everything!

Besides, studying the SEO ranking, organic search visibility, best-selling keywords, and page traffic might help you tweak and master the SEO strategies of your valued business. Whenever your competitors make SEO changes such as changing a blog post title and focusing on another keyword – Competitors App will be the first to notify you.

Page speed and Alexa Traffic Rank tracking

With time, the competitive landscape is evolving to be more dynamic. Companies must capture real-time data and derive fast and accurate insights. Ultimately, competitive intelligence provides your business with useful insights on current and emerging competitors plus their activities, target customer profiles, pricing strategies, and so on. Such knowledge advantage can hence be leveraged to ensure competitor benchmarking and derive the highest sales and profitability.

A deeper dive into your rivals' moves will require more exhaustive data mining and analysis efforts.

Deal-breaker: Data collection crowding too many resources from data analysis. This hints at the increasing need for efficient competitive intelligence solutions so that your competitor benchmarking efforts run fast and smooth!

Delivering actionable intelligence is necessary when analyzing data becomes the only task left- once you have an efficient tool like Competitors App on board. This helps you to ensure the applicability and validity of collected data due to its extraordinary Ai mechanisms.

Clearly, you must be able to understand the distinction between consistent patterns and outliers. Narrowed down data into valuable insights is intelligence. Make sure your findings uncover competitor strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies while identifying overall industry opportunities and threats.

Remember: Long are gone the days of guessing and “gut feeling” assumptions. Usually, markets become echo chambers for commonly misinterpreted information. Insightful data on your competitors' digital moves may enable you with tested solutions that have simple implementations.

Don’t forget to sign in now for a 15 days free trial period and take off your own flight to success through leveraging competitive intelligence!

Five Ways Your Competitor Is Using Instant Messaging Options to Improve Their Customer Success

January 4, 2021 No Comments

(header image: People vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com)

If there is anything that’s become apparent in 2020, it’s the fact that customers are demanding more in terms of ease of purchase, speed of delivery, and personalized communication. Businesses (including your competitors) that take advantage of this knowledge by positioning themselves appropriately to cater to these needs, will keep their cash flow steady and customer success high.

What contributes to customer success?

To understand how to achieve good customer success, it’s imperative to know the factors that contribute to it. They are as follows:

Good customer service
Good communication channels
Speedy delivery or service times
Good brand reputation
Continued support after product purchase

Communication is the thread that holds all these together. For these factors to work, communication must be timely, specific, efficient, and accurate, and good communication is aided by the right communication tools. In this article, we will focus on instant messaging as a veritable means of communication, with examples of how your competition is using it—especially in a time when most people want communication that is timely and responsive.

Monthly instant messaging usage worldwide via Statista

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Why you should NOT ignore your competitors

October 14, 2019 No Comments

To ignore or not to ignore your competitors?

That’s the big question that can change the whole game, especially in business. Investigating what your competitors are doing or not, figuring out what they plan, what will be their next move, and analyzing their strategies could give you valuable insights to use for your good.

Of course, researching behind competitors’ moves can be a struggle and a waste of time. Watching all your competitors’ channels can take hours, plus there are tons of different things to look at (Website, Social Media channels, Emails, Keywords, Reviews and more) and you might think that it’s quite impossible to gather all this data in a single place, right?

Don’t worry, monitoring tools and software can make things easier for you, so you’ll be able to track automatically all your competitors’ marketing activities with very little time investment and almost no effort. That means you have no excuse to start monitoring your competitors you need to know who you’re up against, right?

How to identify your competitors?

Don’t want to make it sound like a cliché, but let’s make it clear from the beginning: you DO have competitors, and competition exists in every single field and domain, no matter the business. The question is: when it comes to your brand, who are you considering?

Correctly identifying your competitors can be a challenge, especially if you did not discover them from an initial phase of your business. Still, it shouldn’t be a hard task to spot them if you follow simple steps.

Defining your relevant competitors, it’s the first objective in your competitive research. To identity competitions that count for your business, you should start by understanding which types of competitors you should include in your investigation:

What are the two main types of competitors?

Direct competitors

A direct competitor is the one who offers the same product/service as you do, the one that suddenly pops up in our mind when you think of “competition.” Also, it’s the one that comes in your customers mind before choosing to make a purchase or converting to your service, the one that is targeting the same audience as you, with the same goal of profit – so ignoring him might not be a good idea, if you care about your business’ future. 🙂

Burger King and McDonald’s are direct competitors. Intercom and Zendesk are direct competitors, and so are Nike and Adidas – brands offering similar services and products.

To identify your direct competitors, you have to take a closer look around your business environment and to stay relevant by knowing your business-level and your position on the market.

To stay relevant and pick those competitors that count, you’ll need to have a clear overview of your business, products/services, and marketing strategies so that you can compare it with your direct competitors. Understanding “who you are?” will help you to discover “who your competitors are?”.

2. Indirect competitors

Call “Indirect competitors” those businesses that don’t necessarily sell similar or related products, but target the same group of customers as you do, to satisfy the same need. Nearly every business has indirect competition, so try to keep your eyes on those too, even if your focus is mainly on your direct ones.

Your indirect competitors may not have similar products or services, but they are direct competition with your business digitally. They may focus on the same marketing strategies, deliver the same type of content as you, competing for the same keywords, and wanting the same things as you, which is your customer’s/user’s attention.

Domino’s Pizza is an indirect competitor for Burger King – a hamburger fast food restaurant and a fast-food pizza restaurant – two companies that make slightly different products but target the same customers (hungry people).

Your competitors’ actions, whether direct or indirect competitors, can affect your business’ success, so it’s essential to take into account both types of competition when planning your business or your marketing strategies.

Moving forward, let’s see some ways to start our competitive research and how to start searching for competitors:

How do I find my key competitors?

Market Research

Take a closer look at your industry and product’s market, and analyze which other brands are offering a service or product that would compete with yours. I advise you to can start your competitive research at a local level, and once you’ve discovered which key competitors are around you, search for your national competition.

Also, take into account that there may be a business in another country that offers the most similar product to your own. Even if you don’t feel “attacked” by their presence, it’s better to know that they exist so that you can be aware of their marketing efforts.

Search on Google for your product/service, add your location to be more precise, and write down the results.

If you decide to use a competitive intelligence tool, on Competitors App you can automatically find your competitors’ based on your brands’ keywords. Once you add your details, domain, and keywords, you’ll receive a list of competitors.

Ask Customers Feedback

Your customers can help you to get straight to your key competitors. Once they’re on your side (they decided to subscribe, or they’ve bought your product), you can ask them which other brands/products they were evaluating before taking the final decision.

Leads can also bring you valuable information regarding your direct competitors. During the sale process, ask your potential user/customer which options they are taking into account or send a survey to find out more information. Try to understand customers’ logic behind choosing your product or service in one situation and competitors’ in another.

Check Social Media groups, Community Forums

Nowadays, people tend to seek out advice and recommendations online, on Social Media groups, community forums like Reddit, Quora, Slack groups. Join relevant groups for your industry and keep an eye on the conversations to find out your potential customers preferences, what are people’s options when it comes to choosing a service/product as yours and what influences on their buying decisions. Gather insights and take action!

After you have identified your competitors and made a list of your key competitors (the ones that are relevant for your business), you can start creating a competitor analysis plan or better say … start digging into your competitors’ businesses. You must keep an eye on their products, marketing strategies, sales efforts to stay competitive in your industry.

As mentioned before, you can start monitoring your competitors’ activities using a monitoring tool, so you’ll automatically gather competitors’ data and get notified each time when a competitor makes a move. Here’s a detailed article on how to conduct a competitive analysis effectively.

Why is it important to know who your competitors are?

Researching your competition its, for sure, an excellent idea, especially when it’s done automatically, with a monitoring tool. You’ll get valuable details on your competitors’ actions without wasting time and resources. Still, you’re asking yourself if investigating your competitors should be a priority for you?

Here are the top four reasons why you should identify your competitors and start tracking their moves:

Why should you NOT ignore your competitors?

Competitors help you to develop your content strategies

Monitoring your competitors’ content will give you insights on what you should post on your channels. Track your competitors’ Social Media channels; see what type of content are they sharing, how often, and what feedback are they receiving from the audience.

By analyzing how the public interacts with your competition’s content and marketing efforts, you can understand what you can do differently to improve your content strategies.

2. Competitors help you to spot new market opportunities

Identifying your competitors can open your eyes to new consumer demands and preferences. Also, finding out what people think about your competitors’ products or services will give you valuable hints on what you can improve to overcome your competition and to attract the attention of unsatisfied clients/users.

3. Competitors help you to deliver an outstanding customer experience

See how competitors are treating their customers/users and pay attention to each detail that can make a difference between your business and your competitors’ brands.

Are your competitors sending promotions and offers frequently? Are they friendly with their users? What’s the users’ experience on competitors’ websites?

4. Competitors help you to differentiate and develop your brand

By identifying your competitors, tracking, and analyzing their moves, you can grow your business and strategically position your products & services in the marketplace. The simple fact of being aware of what your competitors are doing and what strategies are crafting can give you clear directions on how to differentiate yourself from them and how to transform your business into a profitable one.

Identifying your competitors and investigating their actions, what they do/don’t, and how they build their brands can help you to make your services and strategies stand out. Gathering competitors’ data will help you to improve your business performance and to position your service/product on the market strategically. So the questions are: To ignore or not to ignore your competitors? I’m sure by now you have an answer. 🙂

Stay up to date with your competitors’ marketing activities and gather valuable insights on how you can improve your strategies. Sign in for a free trial period on Competitors App and start tracking your competitors’ moves.

5 Unique ways to recapture competitor’s customers

August 27, 2019 No Comments

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.

When you create your landing page to recapture competitor’s customers, you do not have to follow this example blindly.

Use it as an idea in which order should the information go when you decide to write your comparison.

First, introduce people into your mission and purpose, and then point out key differences and evidence.

In the end, do not forget to set up a CTA button so people could be able to try out your product or service as soon as possible if they wanted to.

2. Write a catchy and objective article

Competitive analysis is another great way to recapture competitors’ customers.

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.

So keep it real.

Another good example to look at is Userpilot’s article about 5 Appcues alternatives.

3. Outreach to the competitor’s customers

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.

You should monitor the following:

emails and newsletters
social media
SEO
website changes
keyword rankings
blogs
ads

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.

It’s time to start using it.

Good luck!

How to evaluate, analyse and beat the business competition

July 3, 2019 No Comments

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.

The bottom line

If you decide to follow these steps, you will have a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of your business competition, and you will know in which direction you need to go.

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.

Be ready to beat the business competition!

5 Best ways to create a killer competitive advantage

October 2, 2018 No Comments

All of us have something in common – we have competitors. And sometimes, how will we beat them and create a competitive advantage is our biggest concern.

I talked with several professionals and experienced CEOs and CMOs in their industries. All of them shared their valuable insights about how they created a competitive advantage and scaled their business among many competitors.

Together with our experience, this article represents an ultimate guide on competitive advantages – what are and how to use them to beat your competition.

First things first – How to do your competitive research.

Before you even think about creating competitive advantages, it’s time to do your competitive research.

Competitive research is a must, and there are various ways how to do it efficiently. Because this isn’t the main topic of this article, we will cover the most critical steps.

Whether you are starting a new business or already have established one, some new direct or indirect competitor is born every second day. So competitive research is a renewable process; you should do it at least every second week.

The best way to find new competitors is to try keywords research.

Look for the following information about your competitors:

Founders – It’s essential to know who your competitor decision-makers are
Social Media Networks URLs – How are they, for God’s sake, communicating with their customers? What content are they creating?
Distribution channels – How are they finding new customers?
Core Value propositions – What are the main differences between them and you? What are their Core Value propositions, and how my product/service can be more useful to my customers than theirs?
The number of employees, headquarters, stage, and the size of the investment – This helps you to understand how big their resources are, and you can imagine what they are capable of.
Other information (Number of customers, website visitors, etc.)

Here’s a list of websites that can be quite useful for you and it can save you a lot of time:

For this, you can use our Ultimate Competitor Analysis spreadsheet to ensure you didn’t miss any information about your competitors (By the way, it will save you a lot of time and make organization easy).

Our friend, Ognjen Vuković from Reportz, explained in a few sentences why competitive analysis is so vital for your business:

“Knowing your competition is good. Knowing what works for them is even better, and knowing how to do that better than them is the ultimate goal you should set regarding your competitor analysis.

In Reportz, we use multiple tools and techniques to monitor and outperform particular clients’ competitor activities, such as social behavior, paid efforts metrics, and SEO/SEM stats.

Every good strategy has to have competitor analysis at its core since having in-depth info about what works best for your competitors can give you an overview of what to focus on and how to outperform them to make a success.”

What is a competitive advantage?

Without good competitive advantages, we will never get our market share. So it’s really important to understand what competitive advantage is.

Let’s understand it with the example:

We have two companies specializing in “connecting people in the world.”

The first company is older and already has a relatively big customer base. The second one is new but promising and more attractive.

The second company had more features and was entertaining, while the first company wasn’t.

They empowered people to connect and to make relationships.

Later, the second company got funding and monopolized the market.

You probably know which companies I’m talking about – they are MySpace and Facebook.

So, a competitive advantage is anything that can help you to outmaneuver your competition. It can be price, unique value proposition, better product, better communication, or better marketing and sales.

In the case of Facebook – It was a better story. A story that empowered people to take action.

Storytelling – the art of making your customers special

Today people do not follow brands and logos. They are the following stories.

They identify themselves with the stories of other brands.

Coca-Cola is a great example: Its competitive advantage is based on empowering people to take actions with various marketing campaigns that are alluding to happiness, love, relationship, and friendship.

Nike is another great example of perfect storytelling (Especially with their campaign with Colin Kaepernick).

Beverley Theresa, CEO of Social Media with Beverley Theresa, told us her story and how she created her competitive advantage with content and personal branding:

“Content is key. I’m consistently creating and offering free valuable learning for people looking to set up their social media. It helped me to grow my business immensely.

Also, my background helped me to build credibility. So people told me that my attitude and personal brand give me a competitive advantage. They are usually contacting me and saying that they want to work with me because of the way how I’m communicating.”

Don’t be afraid to tell stories. Explain to your potential customers what drives you and why you are doing what you are doing. What’s your idea, mission, and vision?

Research your target audience and find out what are their main problems and create engaging content with a lot of useful information and resources based on your potential customer’s problems.

But remember this – content isn’t only the blog post – it’s much more. You can engage with your potential customers in various ways:

Create funny videos with explanations and solutions to your potential customers’ problems
Create Infographics
Make Quizzes, How To’s, Guides, Playbooks, Workbooks, and Spreadsheets

One thing matters more than the content itself – its distribution.

Here is some advice on how you can distribute your content very well:

Prepare your content in different formats – Instagram posts, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, etc.
Distribute your content on Guest blog posts, your blog, Quora, Medium, Reedit, etc.
Post in different Facebook Groups
Ask Influencers to share
Motivate your customers to share it by giving some offer or other free resources (spreadsheet, for example)

Prepare your content based on your potential customers’ needs – make them feel special! 🙂

Focus on your users

Good business is based on two things:

Good team
The loyal and engaging user base

Sometimes everything which matters is creating a good relationship with your users.

Baptiste Debever from Feedier explained to us how they managed to create competitive advantages in an industry full of competition – both direct and indirect:

“Any feedback tool is a competitor of Feedier. But that’s okay. Feedback is a huge market, and the so-called surveys are just a part of it.

We want to create our crusade focusing on feedback, and the user is what matters the most. So gamification, experience, and rewards are what’s important to create competitive advantages in the overcrowded industry.

– Feedier is built from scratch to engage your customers. Our technology knows whether the customer is happy or not, and therefore, we can provide the right engagement to the right user. Asking for 5-star reviews only to customers being at least 80% satisfied, for example.

– Feedier adapts the questions to the customer. Thanks to the first step, we know whether the customer is happy or not and why. We can, therefore, adopt the question to any customer based on that. The experience is unique!

– Feedier aims to create a relationship between your team, customers, and products.

– it makes it easy for you to share your surveys with the right customers. We will send the emails for you, write your social posts and even let you embed them right into your website.

– And finally, Feedier is gamified with a complete framework and the ability to send rewards at the end of the survey.”

Anita Erker from Linkchain shared with us their way to create a competitive advantage by focusing on her users:

“Listening, listening, and listening. Value creation is a constant, ongoing art.
Each day I conduct a micro-research, which helps me to gather more in-depth details – not just about the competition, but users, the marketplace, partners,… Each segment of the audience is equally important. To keep the balance and differentiate yourself is in the middle of that matrix.”

From their practices, we can find out that building a loyal customer base and good user experiences helps you to create proper competitive advantages.

Find the niche where you can make a difference.

Sometimes it is not easy to compete with big companies and dinosaurs. With much effort and money invested in getting low results, it can be hard.

Sometimes, the best solution is to be specialized in one-two unique thing.

The best example of this is Trello. Trello created an industry monopoly over the much bigger competitor – Astana – by focusing only on one thing.

Nemanja Zivkovic from Default Design described to us how they are creating competitive advantages by delivering results and focusing on a unique niche:

“We’re focused on giving a constant value, daily, on one side. We’re present in communities everywhere where our customers are.

Conversely, we focus on delivering results in conversions and leads.

When our customer is making profit, he has enough to pay us, and everybody’s happy.

On the other hand, we’re organizing the 1st online conference in the ExYu countries focused on conversions and marketing automation while creating a platform for marketing automation and pioneering website personalization.

We found a niche within marketing where we can make a difference.”

Kady Hobbins from Kaden Ave Communications is another great example of how to create competitive advantages with delivering the best results:

“We’ve set ourselves apart by really drilling down and specializing in what we’re truly good at – making high-quality social media content that helps generate conversions and build brand awareness. We try not to spread ourselves thin and do things we’re just okay at, nor do we take on clients we don’t think are the right fit. In return, we’re happier, and our clients are happier.”

Build a respected brand and community.

Sometimes, building a good brand is everything you need. But this process is long and hard.

Building a good brand is easiest to do with building communities.

Communities are one of the greatest things humanity ever invented! Building a community allows us to share more value and knowledge with our potential customers.

If you don’t want or don’t have time to build your community, sometimes it is enough to actively participate in the existing one.

Ioana Budai from Apart25 shared with us their secret to creating competitive advantages by actively contributing to communities and networking events:

“We’re standing by a ‘Go the extra mile’ approach, so we always aim to offer some extra insights besides our main service lines. Apart from this, we also get involved in the community and create networking spaces for people in our industry and the local startup environment.

In short, this is what makes us great at better grasping the needs of our clients and partners.”

Solve Big Problems

Sometimes solving problems with significant pain is everything that you need.

If your potential customers discover about your product benefits, which provide them value, they will buy it.

Vlad Calus from Planable shared with us how they managed to create a relatively new market and solve the actual problems:

“As a team, we worked a lot in the past with brands and agencies and struggled ourselves with the issues of content, collaboration, and approvals. We started from the premise that we wanted to build a product that essentially solves their problem from the group up. That’s what resulted in Planable becoming the most visual content collaboration platform, which is our biggest advantage.”

Creating competitive advantages isn’t easy, but creating a monopoly in some industries is necessary.

Maintaining an eye on your competition helps you create a competitive advantage and be better than them. That’s the reason why we always need to monitor their:

Social Media
SEO and PPC campaigns
Newsletters
Website changes and keywords

Competition never sleeps, that’s the reason why you shouldn’t too.

Claim your 15-day free trial of Competitors App, and be one step ahead of your competition even today!

CEOs Playbook: Ultimate guide on how to beat your competition

September 4, 2018 No Comments

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.”

This sentence is mind-blowing!

(more…)

Competitive research. Why it’s so important and how to do it.

August 13, 2018 No Comments

No matter are you starting a new business, or you already have established one. Competitive research is a must! Everyone has some “mortal enemies” and “desirable customers.” In this article, you will learn:

How to do your Competitive research

How to monitor your competitors on the Web

How to get the desired customers

How to beat your competition

So, come on, my dear Sherlock, let’s do some research! (At least, you can be a real detective for a few hours! 😉 ).

How to do your competitive research

Carefully planned and executed competitive research may save your business. What also matters is what to do with that data after.

My mentors and advisors once said:

“If you do not do your homework, you can hit bottom. Do it, and you can build an enduring business.”

Competitive research is a must for your business for several reasons:

You will find all their data which you need to start a business
You will skip a “trial and error” for a lot of times
Based on the data you find, you can monitor them, and find the holes in their strategies, which can be essential for you.

Doing competitive research is not an easy thing to do. It can sometimes be very time-consuming. But, if you plan everything carefully, you can do it in a few hours.

If you already don’t know who your competitors are, try typing 10 – 20 main keywords for your industry in Google.

In the beginning, just wrote on the piece of paper the names of your competitors.

When you have done that, now it’s time for the hell spreadsheets!

Finding the names of your competitors isn’t the only thing you should do. But it’s the beginning.

Here’s the list of data of your competitors you should find out:

Founders – It’s essential to know who your competitor decision-makers are
Social Media Networks URLs – How are they, for God’s sake, communicating with their customers? What content are they creating?
Distribution channels – How are they finding new customers?
Core Value propositions – What’s the main differences between them and me? What are their Core Value propositions, and how my product/service can be more useful to my customers than theirs?
The number of employees, headquarters, stage, and the size of the investment – This helps you to understand how big their resources are, and you can imagine what are they capable of.
Other information (Number of customers, website visitors, etc.)

For this process, you will need about 1 – 3 hours, based on the number of your competitors.

Here’s the list of websites which can be quite useful for you, and it can save you a lot of time:

What also matters in competitive research is organization! We have prepared for you a complete Ultimate Competitor Analysis Spreadsheet!

Everything you will need, you can find in one place – in one spreadsheet!

Here you can download for free your ULTIMATE COMPETITOR ANALYSIS SPREADSHEET!

Now, when you have done your competitive research, It’s time to see what we can do with that data

Like every founder, you want to be the best on the market. You want to hold a monopoly over some products or services. But, you’re always leading battles with your competitors.

What if I say to you that you can be, almost all the time, one step ahead of your competition? Don’t you believe me?

Well, yes, you can, and I will show you how!

Monitor competitors website changes

“Hell, what?”

Yes, you can do that. There is various software that allows you to do this.

But, before we dig into every step how you can do that, let’s first explain why it’s so important.

There are a lot of use cases, but, I will mention just a two of them:

1. Your Competitor can change his homepage call to action button from “Register here” to “Start your free trial now, no credit card required.”
2. He can also change his meta <title> and <h1> to target a different keyword.

This information is very valuable for you because you can easily find out what’s your competitor strategy.

Competitors App is a competition monitoring tool, which allows you to monitor competitors’ website changes every single day. The best part of it – it’s all automatic. Everything you will need to do (except to insert your competitor names at the beginning), is to read the data every day. That is not more than 3 minutes per day.

After you create your competitors.app account and insert your competitors, the app will automatically start to inform you about their newest website changes. Also, competitors.app will monitor them every day, and whenever some new change becomes visible, you will be informed – both in your app dashboard and in your email inbox (So, sometimes, you even don’t need to log in to your account).

Monitor competitors’ Social Media

Monitoring your competitor’s social media is very important. Reason? That’s the place where we communicate with our customers, share content, and very often – that’s the place where we find new customers.

If you carefully monitor your competitor’s social media marketing and strategies, you can be one step ahead of them. You can see what content are they publishing, so you can see and write better, exciting, and trending articles.

How are they treating their customers, how are they rewarding them, and what’s their relationship with them.

If you monitor your competitors’ Social Media Pages very well, you can see what posts performed very well, and you can inform your team to work better with previous knowledge.

Monitoring competitors’ Social Media can be very hard and time-consuming. Sometimes, you will need to waste hours and hours, manually monitoring them.

But it doesn’t need to be so boring and exhausting. Here are some examples of how you can save your time:

Obligate someone from your team for daily monitoring and checking your competitors’ social media channels
Turn on post notifications
Use competitors.app for tracking your competitors’ social media channels.

Here you can learn more about tracking your competitors’ social media pages with Competitors App

Grab here your free 30-day trial Competitors App account, with no credit card required!

How to recapture your competitor customers?

Once you have found out your biggest competitors’ data, and while you are monitoring them on every single step on the web, it’s time for you to beat them!

With monitoring, you can find out what your competitors’ strategies are. You can be one step ahead of them.

The next step is: Interview your competitors’ customers.

Reach to them through your competitor’s social media pages. You can pick 15 – 20 people or you can scrape your competitor follower base and make a bulk email.

Ask them the following questions:

What are your biggest pains about [the problem]?
Do you have some solution?
Are you using [competitor product/service]?
What do you like best about it?
What would you change in [competitor product/service]?

(For more details about customer development, I suggest you read “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick)

Once you have answers to the questions above, you can create more personalized content and marketing strategies with solutions to their biggest problems.

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.

BEST COMPETITORS GUIDES

Monitor competitor website changes
You can get alerted when your competitors are making changes to their website.

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.

Competitor Email Monitoring
Tracking your competitors’ emails takes some time, but it’s well worth it!

How to do competitor analysis
One important step is to conduct an effective competitive analysis to evaluate your competitors’ brands.

Category: Competitive Research

Definition of Email Marketing Competitor Analysis

The Benefits of Email Marketing Competitive Analysis

How to Find Your Email Marketing Competitors

The Best Email Marketing Competitive Intelligence Tools in 2024

5 Steps of Developing an Effective Email Competitor Analysis Strategy

Step 1: Competitor Email Monitoring

Key Elements to Analyze in Competitor’s Email Campaigns

Step 2: Key Metrics to Evaluate in Competitors’ Email Campaigns

Step 3: Gathering Data

Step 4: Leveraging A/B Testing Insights

Step 5: Turning Insights into Strategic Actions

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Challenge 1: Data Overload

Challenge 2: Identifying Relevant Competitors

Challenge 3: Lack of Access to Internal Metrics

Challenge 4: Keeping Analysis Current

Challenge 5: Differentiating Between Trends and Fads

Challenge 6: Translating Analysis into Action

Emerging Trends in Email Marketing Competitor Analysis

Identify your competitors

Set your standards

Sort and visualize your data

Share findings with the team

Monitor and evaluate

Some Competitor Software Tools

Similar Web

SpyFu

Buzzsumo

MailCharts

Sprout Social

Competitors App

How To Use Competitors’ App

Additional Competitive Features

Slack in a Snap

Scale the ratings

Adapt to your needs

What More Does Competitors App Offer?

Fast Access to Trial Emails and Newsletters

Understand What’s Trending on Blogs and Social Media

Easy Review of Online Ads and Keywords

Understand Website Structure and SEO Rankings

What contributes to customer success?

To ignore or not to ignore your competitors?

How to identify your competitors?

What are the two main types of competitors?

Direct competitors

2. Indirect competitors

Market Research

Ask Customers Feedback

Check Social Media groups, Community Forums

Why is it important to know who your competitors are?

Why should you NOT ignore your competitors?

Competitors help you to develop your content strategies

2. Competitors help you to spot new market opportunities

3. Competitors help you to deliver an outstanding customer experience

4. Competitors help you to differentiate and develop your brand

1. Create a high-converting landing page with competitor comparisons

2. Write a catchy and objective article

3. Outreach to the competitor’s customers

4. Point out competitor’s weak spots

5. Monitor competitor’s online campaigns

The bottom line

1. Who are your competitors?

2. Different sales channels, content and the tone of communication

3. Customer support

4. Find out your USP!

5. Search engine optimization

The bottom line

First things first – How to do your competitive research.

What is a competitive advantage?

Storytelling – the art of making your customers special

Focus on your users

Find the niche where you can make a difference.

Build a respected brand and community.

Solve Big Problems

How to do your competitive research

Monitor competitors website changes

Monitor competitors’ Social Media

How to recapture your competitor customers?