How to Do a Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing

One of the best ways to expand your business is to stay one step ahead of the competition. It entails becoming intimately familiar with your rivals in order to determine how you might surpass them in terms of client engagement and impact. An essential component of any digital marketing plan is a digital competitive study.

It assists you in comprehending the digital tactics used by your rivals so that you can maximize your advantages and decrease your disadvantages in order to develop and expand. Let’s now examine how to study a rival so that you can leverage your company’s unique selling points to obtain that crucial advantage. This blog post will discuss all these things in detail, and lastly how an SEO company in London can help you with an extensive competitive analysis.

Why is a competitive analysis important for digital marketing?

What does competitive analysis aim to achieve? Okay, the extent of depending on what you hope to learn, your competitive analysis may look different. You can choose how broad or specific your analysis is.

You could wish to concentrate on optimizing your website, for instance. To do this, you would examine the content, user experience, and lead generation tactics of rival websites. You can then use what you’ve learned to implement new CRO tactics.

The following are just a few advantages of doing an analysis:

Determine a market’s opportunities and obstacles.
Determine your value offer and how it varies from that of your rivals. Emphasize any areas where they fall short or have flaws.
Focus on the digital tactics that work best in your industry.
Determine new markets and clients.
Discover market trends.
Consider the possibility of a new goods or services
Decide on a standard by which to evaluate your performance.

What is included in a competitive analysis?

In digital marketing, a competitive analysis is examining each competitor’s various platforms to determine how they support expansion. In the end, it comes down to comparing yourself to your rivals.

Identify the sorts of competitors

Not every rival ought to receive the same treatment. Sort them into groups according to how competitive they are.

Primary: These are your direct rivals, such as Asos and Boohoo, that offer comparable goods or services to your target market.
Secondary: These businesses, like Target and Gucci, provide a comparable (high-end or low-end) version of your product or service to a different market.
Tertiary: Although they are related to you, these brands are not your competitors. You can better understand how your competitors relate to your business by segmenting them in this way.

Describe the target market for your rivals

You may learn a lot about a business by studying your competitors’ target demographic. It will assist you in comprehending their target audience and the efficient digital platforms they employ to achieve it.

Finding out who the brand appeals to is the best approach to learn about their clientele. This could be discovered by looking at

Their “About Us” section or mission statement
Social media communication and engagement
Blogs and freely available resources
Podcasts or webinars
Customer evaluations or user-generated content You can gain more insight into your competitors’ target audience by examining their objectives, material, and interactions. This will aid in your growth that sets you apart from the others.

Put the four Ps of marketing to use

Any digital marketing strategy must include the entire marketing mix. It will assist you in gaining insight into your actions by analyzing the marketing strategies of your competitors.

Product: What are they offering for sale? What aspects of their product or service appeal to customers? Why is it a successful service or product? Which product or characteristics set theirs apart from mine?
Price: What pricing model do they employ? Is it subscription-based or a one-time payment? What appeals about the price point?
Promotion: How do they advertise their products and brand? Which digital platforms do they use most frequently for promotion? What strategies do they employ for promotion?
Place: Where are they selling? Are they active on the internet Or do they have branches or physical stores? Since this procedure can yield a wealth of information, you should concentrate on the topics you are interested in learning more about. Incorporate both qualitative and quantitative data for future reference.

Look for excellent practices

Because they have tried and adjusted their strategy across digital platforms over time, your top competitors are successful for a reason. This indicates that they have created best practices from which you can benefit.

On search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google or Bing, you can observe that several of your rivals have moved up the rankings. This most likely indicates that they are using SEO to use well-liked keywords and phrases to optimize for searches.

Apply an analytical framework

The technique you employ to evaluate your rivals relies on your desired information. For instance, once you have all the information, you can utilize SWOT analysis to find new market opportunities or threats. You can use this to determine your strengths and weaknesses as well.

Porter’s Five Forces is another framework to think about. An industry’s market forces are examined here, including the danger of substitutes and new competitors, the negotiating power of substitutes, competition between competitors, and the bargaining power of suppliers and new buyers.

Graph of Porter's Competitive Forces

Another option is to employ a growth share matrix created by Boston Consulting Group, which compares your goods and services to those of your competitors. This is divided into four sections (pet, cash cow, question mark, and star) according to analysis will be driven by growth and market share. Coca-Cola is used as an example to illustrate the framework in the video below.

Arrange your data so it can be analyzed

Sort any information you gather about your rivals into groups. This will enable you to review any data points later on and obtain new insights for your upcoming digital endeavors.

When collecting data from numerous competitors, this is especially crucial because it will enable you to look for similarities in order to spot chances. Price range, social media activity, lead generating strategies, content marketing campaigns, offers to new visitors, etc. are among the criteria to be examined.

What Kinds of Competitive Analysis Are There?

Depending on your business and requirements, there are various forms of competition analysis. Each will concentrate on a particular niche that you want to examine and enhance in order to meet goals and KPIs like income, leads, and brand recognition.

Analysis of competitors on social media

Any business may use social media to increase client engagement and lead generation, especially as social commerce has grown in popularity. Knowing your audience’s location is crucial for efficiently targeting them on social media.

You may find out which social networks your competitors are on, how many followers they have, and which demographics they target by performing a social media competitor analysis.

You should also consider how often they publish, what kind of content they post (e.g., videos, blog links, etc.), and when they post. Additionally, examine their content buckets or themes to discover what subjects they cover. Interactions with clients through comments may also be instructive, and engagement rates can show you which content is more popular with their readers.

Analysis of PPC competitors

Finding out which keywords or phrases your rivals are bidding on is the goal of a PPC competition study. The end objective is to develop PPC ads that outperform your rivals and provide results!

Examining the kinds of advertisements they use and the networks or platforms they use will help you do this. Are they spending money on pricey keywords or phrases that increase conversions? Or is brand recognition the main goal of their PPC?

Additionally, you can examine their landing sites to examine the CTAs and wording. Do they use a few money pages or are they making unique landing pages for each campaign? Being aware of this will offer you a sense of the goals and financial resources of your rivals.

Analysis of SEO competitors

You may find out which SEO keywords your competitors rank for with the use of this kind of analysis. This will assist you in comprehending their emphasis and determining how to compete with them for keywords.

Among the methods you can employ are:

Examine the performance of websites, such as page speeds.
Look for any gaps in your keywords.
Examine backlinks and their sources.
Examine their methods for ranking for other keywords, such as whether they have a blog or resources area.
Look at traffic and top pages.

Tools for Analyzing Competitors

There are numerous tools available to assist you with competitive analysis. Your data collection process will become more straightforward, accurate, and effective as a result. A few instances of the best resources tailored to important fields are:

Analysis of SEO

Ahrefs can be used to find a website’s top-performing keywords and estimate its keyword traffic.

SE Ranking displays keywords and PPC analysis for both organic and sponsored searches.

SEMRush is able to analyze backlinks, do a site audit, and display rival keywords.
Spyfu investigates the most lucrative keywords used by your rivals in PPC advertising.
Google Ads Auctions With insight, you can assess how well you’re doing in relation to other businesses participating in the same auctions.

Analysis of keywords

Similar web gives engagement metrics, identifies keyword trends, and offers data on web and channel traffic.

Analysis of social media

With Sprout Social, you can track conversions, hashtag trends, follower growth, engagement, and the effectiveness of sponsored content. The Facebook ad library lets you look for advertisements that are currently spanning Instagram, Facebook, and further Meta products

AI-powered tools for researching competitors:

A tool called Brandwatch keeps an eye on competing brands’ internet presence.
An AI application called Sprout Social can assist you in determining how rival brands are doing on social media.
You may also want to look into the Meta Ads Library, TikTok Creative Center, and Google Trends.
Utilize ChatGPT, the most popular AI co-pilot, to analyze the information and understanding you’ve acquired from the other tools.

Final Thoughts: Develop into an Effective Digital Marketing Strategist

Put digital tactics at the core of your company to increase sales, leads, and awareness. Develop your team management and financial skills, make the most of your digital channels, and rise to the position of digital leader. If you want to outsource it, collaborate with a digital marketing agency which will help you develop an effective digital marketing strategy leading to higher website traffic and success.