Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing

When companies want to develop digital marketing strategies they also start their competitor analysis. Digital competitive analysis is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. It helps you understand the digital strategies of your competitors so you can leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses to build and grow your business.

It is important to stay ahead of the competition as it highly affects the growth of your business. The competitive analysis involves knowing the ins and outs of your competitors to identify ways you can outperform them to engage and influence your customers.

Below we will have a look at how to analyze a competitor and be able to use the USPs of your business to gain that all-important edge.

What is a competitive analysis?

In digital marketing Competitive analysis is the process that researches competitors to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Competitive analysis can examine the strategies that companies use for their pricing, product, marketing, development, and distribution in order to gain insights. It’s a process that can help you to keep on top of trends in your sector and identify digital strategies that will drive brand awareness, customer engagement, and, revenue.

Why do you need Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing?

The purpose of a Competitive Analysis depends on what you want to discover. If for example, your aim is to focus on optimizing your website. You need to check competitors’ websites and look at their content, UX, and lead generation strategies. What you learn can then be applied to your CRO strategies.  

By conducting an analysis, you can get many benefits, you can:

• Identify barriers and opportunities in the market
• Identify your value proposition and how it differs from your competitors
• Highlight where competitors have weaknesses or are not delivering
• Target the most effective digital strategies in your marketplace
• Identify new customers
• Uncover market trends
• See the potential for a new product or service
• Establish a benchmark to measure your performance against

A competitive analysis allows you to analyze the different platforms of each of your competitors and check how those platforms contribute to their growth. how they contribute to growth.

In order to do that first, you need to determine competitor types. You need to split your categories based on their level of competitiveness.

Split them into:

• Primary Competitors – Primary competitors are direct and they sell a similar product or service to your audience.  
• Secondary Competitors – Secondary competitors offer a similar version of your product or service (low or high-end) to a different audience.
• Tertiary Competitors – Tertiary competitors are related to you but don’t compete with your product/service or audience.

Segmenting your competitors can help you see how they relate to your business.  Be aware that they are many available competitor tools out there that can help you. Those tools can help you make your data collection simpler, more accurate, and more efficient.

The best tools specific to key areas are:

For SEO Analysis you can use:

1. Use Ahrefs: It can help you to check the top-performing keywords of any website and get estimated keyword traffic.
2. Use SE Ranking: SE Ranking shows paid and organic search performance and keywords.

For PPC Analysis you can use:

1. SEMRush: SEMRush performs as a site audit, it shows competitors’ keywords and backlink analysis.
2. Spyfu: This tool researches your competitors’ most profitable keywords in PPC campaigns. 
3. Google Ads Auctions Insights help you to compare your performance with other companies that are bidding in the same auctions.

For Keyword analysis you can use:

Similarweb is a tool that can provide you with information on web and channel traffic, uncovers keyword trends, and reveals engagement metrics. 

For Social media analysis you can use:

Sprout Social, can help you measure follower growth, engagement, hashtag trends, conversions, and paid content performance.

Facebook ad library which allows you to search for ads that are run across Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta products.

Profile competitors’ target customers

It is important to understand your competitor’s audience which can tell you a lot about a business, and also can help you to check who they target and which digital channels they use.

In order to see who, the brand is appealing to the most you need to look for:

• Blogs and free downloadable assets
• Webinars or podcasts
• Customer reviews or user-generated content
• Their mission statement or ‘About Us’ section
• Social media messaging and interaction

By reviewing the content, interactions, and goals of your competitors, you can learn more about their audience, this can help you develop tactics that can make you unique.

There are several types of competitive analysis depending on your company and needs. Each one will focus on a niche area that you are looking to analyze and improve to drive targets and KPIs such as leads, revenue, and brand awareness. There are several types of competitive analysis depending on your needs and your company. Try to find which works best for you and adapt to it.

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