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Online visibility these days is deeply linked to how a business performs. People, for the most part, do not make decisions hastily and do not bet on the first choice. So you have to meet the requirements and beat the competition in this aspect. From today's post you will learn how to do an analysis of your competitors' online marketing activities on your own, using publicly available and free solutions.
We will spare ourselves in this article complicated SWOT matrices, PEST analyses or group interviews. However, we will try to answer the question of how to find out in a simple, quick and efficient way what your competitors are doing, how they are advertising, and how to implement actions that will help grow your business.
Where to start?
The first step in starting such an analysis will be to identify our competition. To do this, it's a good idea to start with introspection so that you know what to follow when identifying your fellow competitors. What exactly do we do? What are our USPs? Do we work with companies or individuals, or maybe we combine the two? What does our business model look like? Are our operations local or do we have no such restrictions?
By knowing our own business, we will be able to more effectively identify differences with our competitors and find niches where we can stand out. The first sticking point is, of course, our own knowledge. It is rare that those running or planning to establish a business are completely unaware of potential competitors. That's why it's a good idea to start by listing the companies you know and tabulating them against each other. It is also worth supplementing this list with a simple search.
In this analysis we will focus only on online marketing activities, and we will limit ourselves to publicly available and free tools. The purpose of the post is to provide a brief guide on how to start analyzing the market you operate in and potential competitors.
Website
We will start the evaluation of communication channels with the website, due to the fact that it is the most obvious choice when evaluating a company. It's worth testing it for UX and evaluating its design. Is it better than ours? Is it more user-friendly? Does it load faster than our site? Are the CTAs and USPs more clearly marked? Does the site more bluntly direct the user to take the action we want? If so - people are likely to stay there and not choose our offer. A tool that will help us diagnose a site's performance for free is PageSpeed Insights. After typing in the URL of the site, it will show us comments and a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 in the following areas: performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. In addition, we will also learn from it what can be done to optimize the shortcomings encountered.
Search results
What if a customer doesn't know any of the companies yet, but searches the Internet for service X, which is offered by 5 sample companies. Most likely, he will click on the first link that appears in the search results. We are used to Google placing the most valuable page at the top, hence we do not question their placement in the results. If we are displayed in 5th position, according to statistics, 1 in 14 people will enter our site, while 1 in 4 people click on the first link. Thus, taking care of the high positioning of our site is crucial for organic marketing. We can analyze the SEO of our site using the free tool Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. This allows us to check our current SEO efforts and compare them with those of our competitors.
Google My Business
Also directly related to the search results is the company's business card in Google My Business. It is always visible to the right of the search results. Analyze your competitors' business cards by asking yourself a few questions. Do they have a higher average rating than us? Do they have more ratings and reviews? Is the business card aesthetically pleasing and professional looking? Is it fully completed? Does it display locally higher on Google Maps? If so - then we need to ensure that the business card is properly optimized and has valuable reviews. People looking for services locally often rely on Google Maps reviews.
Advertisements on the Internet
All advertisers have a transparent advertising policy, which means that each of us is able to see the ads currently displayed by an entity. This allows us to analyze the ads aired by our competitors in, among other places:
Google - when you hit a competitor's ad, click the arrow to the right of the URL.
Then click the "See more ads" button.
This will take us to Google's advertising library, where we can search for any ads emitted by the entity.
Facebook - after entering the company's page, search for the "Page Transparency" tab. It is usually located on the left side, under the tab with photos and videos.
However, it may happen that it is in a different place. In that case, go to "Information" and from there go to "Site Transparency".
After clicking "See all," we are able to go to the Meta ad library and proceed to the analysis.
LinkedIn - go to the company's website, go to "Publications" and then to the "Ads" subsection.
By analyzing the ads of competitors, we can estimate how they are doing online. Do they have nice, eye-catching ads? Is the text of the ads inviting? Are the ads properly created? Or do they not have ads at all? This would be the best scenario, we would avoid fighting to display the ads. We can also take inspiration from some solution that we consider good and aesthetically pleasing.
Social media
The analysis of marketing activities also includes organic social media activities. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or maybe Pinterest - depending on the industry, we need to search for accounts on the above channels and assess their quality. How often do competitors insert posts? How large is their reach? Do page likes coincide with engagement under posts? What are they bragging about? Do they establish a dialogue with the customer?
In conclusion, knowing the answers to all the questions in a simple and quick way each of us is able to conduct an analysis of the online marketing activities of his competitors and thus start making improvements and corrections in his business. It's worth remembering that without proper online visibility, we incur an opportunity cost.
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