Your competitors hold the key to your online marketing strategies.
In business, for as long as free enterprise has reigned, new companies formed based upon the ideas of already established businesses. The hidden tool is espionage. In order for businesses to grow they literally spy on their competition. From them, new concepts, improved knowledge, and better products are formed.
Here are 10 things you can learn about online marketing from your competitors:
1) Clarity
Start with your chosen keywords that are related to your business. Research your competition. Spy on their sites and their social media hangouts. Adopt or modify your keywords based upon your findings. Develop an understanding of what they do on their site, and on social media and how they make use of keywords. Take the information you gather and cater it to your niche and put it to use.
2) Weaknesses
Look for things they could improve upon and integrate the improvements into your online business. When you look at their home page, does their content draw you in within a few seconds? How is it worded? How can you take their concept and apply it to your own site? Is there anything that distracts attention or bores you? Lastly, what is their call to action like? Based on your findings, apply these in your own business. Content services are excellent at social espionage too.
3) Products
Get a good grasp on their products and find holes in their development that you can incorporate into your own products. Take their products, combine them with your expertise, put a different, more effective spin on it and market it at a competitive price.
4) Audience
The best information you will find is on blog comments. Carefully comb through them looking for what the audience says. For example, they comment on a product and how valuable it is, and then ask a question. There’s a little gold nugget right there. Or they could say what they need next, or share something that they didn’t understand. Take these gold nuggets and work them into your product so that they’re already included in yours.
5) Social Media Behavior
What social media platforms are your competitors using? What content are they providing in them? Is it links to articles, to infographics or to videos? Are they using their keywords in their social media posts? What about in their profiles, such as LinkedIn? Finally, take a look at the groups in which they interact with and find similar ones. Social media plays a key role in online marketing.
6) The Google Spy
Google Alerts can spy for you. You can set up notifications that you can receive whenever there’s a new post from a competitor or new information within your scope of business.
7) Strategy
You can also research business practices of your competitors simply by researching their mission statement, their squeeze pages, their sales letters, their email drip campaigns etc.
8) User Experience
Online marketing has vastly transitioned into responsive format in order to accommodate all screen types and sizes on various devices. With the insurgence of mobile marketing, user experience will continue to play a key role in customer satisfaction. Spy on what your competition is doing so that you can keep up as technology advances.
9) Conversion Techniques
Some online businesses use lead magnets, or free offers to entice potential clients to sign up for their mailing list. What types of lead magnets are they using and what can you do to increase the value of it for your own online business?
10) Content
Yes, you can spy on what your competitors are providing as content as long as you don’t plagiarize. The best way to use this isn’t just by taking what they’ve said and rewording it. Take it, and build on it. Weave your own products into the content. Find missing details and include them. Make it better and more engaging. Basically, by spying, you will continuously be challenged and inspired with new ideas.
Spying on your competitors is the key to growing your online business. Dedicate time for this at least once per week so that you can get an early warning of any new product releases or webinars they may be getting ready to launch. If you really want to know what your competitors are up to on a regular basis, consider hiring a content writing service whose staff are trained in online marketing and can arm you with the newest, most competitive content that fits your business and saves you time.
