If you’re an aspiring digital marketer or an experienced digital advertiser looking to enhance your digital strategy, understanding how to do a competitive analysis is essential. Analyzing the competition can provide invaluable insights into how your digital marketing campaigns stack up against your competitors, what practices they are employing, and what you can do differently. This blog will provide a comprehensive guide on how to perform a competitive analysis so that you can make informed decisions for your digital campaigns.

In order to do a competitive analysis, you will first need to identify your competitors. You can identify your competitors by doing a search for keywords that are relevant to your business. Once you have identified your competitors, you will need to research their digital campaigns. Look at their website, their social media accounts, and any other online platforms they are using to market their business. Take note of what you see and look for patterns and commonalities.

Once you have gathered this information, you can start to analyze their digital strategy. Look at their overall goals and objectives and see how they align with their digital marketing tactics. Consider their target audience and identify any gaps in their strategy. Also, assess their strengths and weaknesses and look for areas where you can improve upon.

Competitive analysis in marketing depends upon these 5 Steps starting from understanding your competitor’s audience to developing a plan to outsmart them.

1. Understand your audience’s needs and wants

This is the first and most important step in any competitive analysis. You need to know what your target audience is looking for before you can begin to assess your competition. This involves understanding both their explicit and implicit needs.

2. Identify your competitors

Again, this seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t take the time to properly identify their competitors. Once you have a solid understanding of your target audience, it should be relatively easy to identify who your main competitors are.

3. Study their digital marketing strategy

Now that you know who your competitors are, it’s time to take a close look at their digital strategy. This includes everything from their website design to their social media presence and everything in between.

To do that here are 5 competitor analysis methods that you can use to understand your competition’s digital strategy.

1. Set up Google Alerts – This will notify you every time your competitor is mentioned online so you can keep up to date with their latest news and developments.

2. Check their website traffic – Use Alexa or similar tools to see how much traffic their website is getting. This will give you an indication of how popular they are and how much attention they’re receiving.

3. Social media monitoring – Use social media listening tools to track what’s being said about your competitor on social media. This will help you understand their brand image and customer sentiment.

4. Review their backlinks – Backlinks are links from other websites to your competitor’s website. Checking where their backlinks are coming from will give you an idea of the kind of coverage they’re getting and the websites that think they’re relevant.

5. Analyse their digital campaigns – Take a look at their past campaigns to see what’s worked well for them and what hasn’t. This will give you some insight into their thinking and help you come up with ideas for your own campaigns.

You can use SAAS Software like SemRush to generate a competitor analysis report it will give you a comprehensive report of what are your competitors up to these days. You can even download competitor analysis pdf reports from these SAAS softwares to share them with your team and company leadership.

4. Analyze their strengths and weaknesses

Once you have a good understanding of your competitor’s digital strategy, it’s time to start analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you understand where they excel and where they fall short. This knowledge can be extremely valuable as you develop your own digital strategy.

5. Develop a plan to outsmart them

Now that you know what your competitors are doing right and wrong, you can develop a plan to outsmart them. This may involve being more aggressive with your own digital marketing or finding unique ways to reach your target audience. No matter what, the goal is to find a way to stand out from the competition and grow your business in the process.

 Conclusion

Remember, your competition is not just the other businesses in your industry. It’s also the distractions and other priorities that your target audience has. If you want to win, you need to be better than both. By taking the time to understand your competitors and develop a solid digital marketing strategy, you’ll be well on your way to success.