You can learn a lot from your competitors, such as the trends worth pursuing and those that aren’t. If your competitors have already paved the way, you can learn what worked, what didn’t, and maybe even find inspiration for something much better.
1. Keywords
For marketing intents and purposes, you should focus on broader keyword categories rather than individual keywords. Whether you’re just starting to build your keyword categories, updating them, or just doing some general research for PPC advertising, your competitors can provide a wealth of information, like long-tail opportunities you might be missing. If you’re in luck, your competitors might be missing them too.
2. Content Ideas
The information you’ve gleaned from keyword research can help identify new topics for content creation. Based on what you see, you can also extract ideas for blog posts, infographics, and other content pieces. You may be able to identify content gaps; though people are querying the search engines for these topics, they might not have a lot of available information already created.
You can also look at the types of content your competitors have been producing. You may be able to take a general idea and create something with a new twist. It could be updating a study with new, game-changing information or simply gaining inspiration for a new idea based on what’s performing well (or poorly) out there already. Taking a look at what’s going on in the content world can be a great trick for jumpstarting an awesome brainstorming session.
3. Social Media
Your competitors tend to have a similar target audience as you do. By keeping tabs on what platforms they use and how often, you can determine which platforms you should be active on as well. Take it a step further and see what types of posts they’re publishing and which types get the most engagement. This will help you gain insights and inspiration for your own social media campaigns & strategies, and determine what types of content may resonate the best with your audience.
4. Best Practices
Everything has a set of best practices, successful tactics, and proven methods for functioning. These guidelines often change over time (just look at the major Google algorithm updates). Your competitors can be a good source of ideas for practices that have been working and can provide inspiration for progress too. Pushing the envelope can be considered a risk, but doing it intelligently with data on your side can produce great results. With the right moves, you can be the market leader that revolutionizes the industry and sets the standard for success.
5. Mistakes to Avoid
If your competitors are running PPC campaigns, you can use a tool, like SEMrush, to see what keywords they are currently paying for and those they were paying for, but aren’t anymore. Verify with your own tests, but this drop-off could indicate that particular keyword or keyword category was too competitive or just didn’t perform well for some reason or another. For a lot of other things, if you have Google Alerts set up for your biggest competitors, you’ll know if they’ve done anything big and how that went over with their customers.
6. Differentiation
Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is what sets you apart from the competition. Discover it, define it, and develop it. Analyzing your competitors’ offerings can help you discover and define your UVP. Look at not only what they are selling, but how they are presenting & selling it as well. This information will help you figure out different ways to develop your UVP. It’s one of the many things you can do to build a better business for yourself and a better experience for your customers.
7. Products
If you monitor what your competitors are adding and removing from their “shelves,” you’ll be able to gain insights about what products are performing well, which are performing poorly, and you might even be able to gain some ideas for new products. Are your competitors offering multiple products to accomplish a function? If you could consolidate and reduce the necessity for multiple products with one product, that’s a problem your customers have to which your business can be the solution.
Your competitors can also provide valuable information on relating products. By examining how they are separating categories and bundling products, you can gain inspiration for some creative combinations that delight customers. You can bundle products in new and useful ways or simply improve your related product, cross-sell, and up-sell lists.
8. Promotions
There are tons of possibilities for promotions and promotional materials; it can be overwhelming at first. Too many distractions (even if they do benefit the customer) can be overwhelming for your visitors, so it’s important to experiment with different types of promotions in order to choose those that encourage the most conversions. Your competitors can provide some inspiration and guidance to help narrow down the promotional options to a couple of types, instead of tons of possibilities. At the least, you’ll have a few potentially high-performing types of promotions to kick off your rounds of testing.
9. Customers
Your customers are people – don’t forget that. Yes, on average, they may fall nicely into your identified personas, but they do have their own thoughts, needs, and desires. As long as your target audience and that of your competitor are similar, you can gain insights into customer groups you might be missing and successful ways in which to interact with them on-site. Pair those insights with data from your analytics account to identify new opportunities and areas for improvement.
10. Pricing
By keeping an eye on how your competitors change pricing, you can determine appropriate pricing for some of your products as well. You want to be reasonable with your prices to stay competitive and your competitors can give you a good idea of what might be too low or too high. The more price-oriented your industry is, the more important it is to monitor competitive pricing levels.
Your competitors will continue to provide a wealth of information as they keep forging towards greater success and growth. Use this information as a guide, a reference point, or just a place to start. Continue to strive towards originality, but do not ignore the competition – doing so only limits your potential. Learn what to do (and what not to do) from your competitors to build a better business and succeed.