5 Reasons to Watch Your Competitor’s Online Marketing

When was the last time you conducted a social media competitive analysis? Do you know where exactly your social media strategy stands compared to your competitors? What is the true business value for your brand to watch your competitors’ online marketing?

Let’s deal with these questions today!

There is something to the saying “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” that is relevant also for business and in particular for digital marketing where very few things are private and so many things can be easily exposed literally in an instant.

Thinking about your competitors as potential enemies, however, is not something we would like to encourage you to do here, rather than that, we would like to focus your attention on monitoring your competitors’ online marketing very closely and…what is even more important on a regular basis. Keeping an eye on what other brands in your sector are doing  – their websites, social media profiles, blogs, paid ad campaigns, email marketing sends, PR coverage –  can do much more than just tell you what you are up against, it can actually help you to formulate your own killer online marketing strategy.

What is more, the benefits you can earn as a result of a properly conducted social media competitive analysis go far beyond the marketing department itself. With the information you obtain while watching your competitors’ online you can help out your sales, customer service and product, which makes pretty much all of your business. Still not convinced? We bet you will change your mind after reading this piece.

5 Important Reasons to Watch Your Competitor’s  Marketing

1.Get Ideas for What Not to Do

Learning from someone’s else mistake is the best way you can actually progress. Do you know why? Because it is not you who pays the bill for going the wrong way. Monitoring your competitors social marketing campaigns bring in ideas of what works well and what does not. Keep an eye on the main market players in your industry to fuel your strategy and avoid their reputation and branding mistakes. Or, if you wish to show off your real-time marketing skills, nothing really stops you form using your competitors’ mistakes to promote your own business. A brilliant example for this kind of tactic is the case of bending iPhone 6 Plus and brands that took advantage of the Apple’s product failure.

2. Get Ideas for What to Do

The same way as you can learn from your fellow market players what business practices to avoid in your online marketing, you can figure what is worth testing. For example, if a competitor A rocks at a strategy you are struggling with, you can observe the differences between and learn what you can do better at your playground. Let’s say your customer service. In Brand24, you can set up an alert for your competitor’s name to see all the mentions customers share online about their product and services. You can also see the way your competitors address these comments and how they win peoples’ hearts.

Check out some examples of exceptional customer service cases found on social media.

3. Identify Market Opportunities

One of the most important social monitoring blessings is the countless customer insight, which properly used can produce strong competitive advantages. Probably never before (read: before social media), people were so willing to share so much about their private life with complete strangers. Social media users love to share their stories! Often, this covers their experience and suggestions about tested products and services. Both yours and your competitors’. Collecting feedback about your own product is surely your bread and butter, but when was the last time you checked what people say online about your competitors’ business? You can use social media competitors’ research to identify gaps in the rival brands’ offer and use this insight to improve your own services. Look how easy is that:

4. Find Their Backlinks

The total number of backlinks that you receive affects you and your competitors’ pageranks. The more authoritative the source of backlinks, the higher the chances for better Google rank. Backlink research lets you see what type of links are connected to your rival brand and possibly leverage them to increase your own authority online. There are plenty of tools to help you find links to a particular website or URL, such as Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Seokicks or Openlinkprofiler.

You can also use Brand24 for getting real-time updates on who is linking to your competitors’ website by setting a particular main domain as a keyword in your search. Backlink research can also bring benefits to your content strategy, since seeing what content is earning more interest and links can help decide what to create yourself. What is more, using this method you can even significantly improve your content distribution strategy, not to mention getting an insight into your competitors’ keywords and SEO strategy.

5.  Generate Leads From Unhappy Customers

Do you want to know the key to actually monetize competitors’ research? Well, find their unhappy customers and offer them your, hopefully better, solution to the problem. Not too pushy, though, but with an intention to really help. Remember what Gary Vaynerchuk said about selling? “Selling is the act of giving, not getting; serving, not selling” Monitoring your competitors will provide you with mentions of what their prospects and customers are saying on them online, including their sorrows and complaints. With Brand24, you can get access to these mentions in real time and be able to address them before another competitor does.

Still not sure if to include social media competitive analysis into your priority list? Or maybe it feels like we have missed some powerful reason that speaks in favour of keeping your “enemies” close? Leave us a comment!

If you want to know more about social listening, feel free to browse our blog!