Competitors App – How To Do A Competitor Analysis In 2021Estimated Reading Time: just 8 min

Unless you are running a monopoly, your business is highly likely to operate in a competitive market. An effective competitor monitoring strategy is an integral part of running a business. It helps a business to adapt to changes and developments in the business environment it operates in.

• Monitor Emerging Threats
• Stay Informed About Their Content Strategy
• Learn From Their Mistakes
• Adapt To Market Needs

Competitor analysis involves the evaluation of the marketing strategies adopted by the companies that operate in the same market as your business. You might be wondering if monitoring your competitors is worth the effort and resources.

Why Do Competitor Analysis?

Monitor Emerging Threats

A shift in market dynamics may or may not work in your favor, which makes monitoring the market an essential task for you.

The entry of a new competitor or a merger between two competitors can have major consequences in shaping market trends. Such consequences may not always involve the number of players in the market. The introduction of new products by competitors that can affect the need for your product or service can pose a significant threat.

Staying uninformed of major shifts in the market puts you on the verge of losing your market share. Analyzing your competitors allows you to stay informed about these abrupt shifts in the market. If you notice an abrupt change in the market early, it gives you enough time to adjust your strategies and countermeasures.

Stay Informed About Their Content Strategy

Competitor analysis is particularly important in crafting your content marketing strategy. You might have to wait for a quarter or more to understand how you compare with a competitor in terms of revenue. But monitoring content strategy requires real-time updates.

To get an overall picture of their content marketing plan, you need to monitor the specifics first. This includes monitoring the topics, frequency, length, and tone of their content. You also need to monitor the mediums they are using to distribute their content and how they are engaging with their audience in these mediums. This can help you gain the perspective of your competitors on how they want to engage with their customers.

Moreover, this allows you to identify gaps in their strategies and leverage these gaps to gain an upper hand over your competitors.

Learn From Their Mistakes

Monitoring your competitors allows you to turn their failures into your pillar of success. Analyzing competitors also involves analyzing their customers. This means you can stay updated on how customers are reacting to their strategies or how prospects and customers are discussing their product or service online.

Analyzing customer feedback provides you an opportunity to redirect unhappy customers of your competitor to your brand. This simple tactic can prove to be very effective and directly lead to sales.

You can also focus on the aspects of the product or service that your competitor’s customers prioritize over others. This can be especially helpful if you are planning for a product extension or launching an entirely new product category.

Competitor monitoring is also essential when you are setting a performance benchmark for your product or service. Proper benchmarking gives you an accurate picture of your position in the market concerning your competitors.

Adapt To Market Needs

A competitive market witnesses frequent changes and shifts in market dynamics. The ultimate goal of any business in such a market is maximizing profit by performing better than its competitors. To gain this advantage, businesses need to be flexible and adapt to these changes in a way that suits them the most.

Adapting to market disruptions and changes in demand requires an efficient competitor monitoring strategy. It is essential to monitor how your competitors are reacting to the changes in the market before proceeding with your strategy.

Therefore, to improve the responsiveness of your business strategy, first, monitor what others are doing, then adjust your strategy to adapt to changes better than them.

How To Monitor Your Competitors

Now that you have understood the importance of doing competitor analysis, let’s guide you through the process.

1. Pick The Right Competitors.

To get an accurate picture, you need to identify who your competitors are. There may be brands that are similar to you but don’t cater to your target customer group.

Competitors can be broadly divided into two groups: direct and indirect. Direct competitors operate in the same geographical region as you do and offer products or services that can directly serve as an alternative to the one you are offering. While an indirect competitor offers a product or service that is not of the same type as yours but solves the same problem of the customers that your product or service does. It is important to understand the difference between these two types of competitors for crafting an optimum competitor monitoring strategy.

Your primary focus your monitoring strategy should be your direct competitors. Because they are the easiest alternatives that your customers have if they are dissatisfied with your product for any reason.

This doesn’t imply that you should ignore the indirect competitors. In a flexible business environment, your indirect competitors can adopt a new product development strategy and choose to enter the market that you are directly competing in. This is why you need to stay updated on the latest trends among your competitors and adjust your marketing and product strategies accordingly.

2. Choose What Strategies To Monitor.

Ad Campaigns

Monitoring the ads of your competitors lets you identify what offers or messages they are using to reach the audience.

Analyze what is working for them and what is not. This will give you a head start before launching your ad campaign.

Besides, you can also identify the keywords they are using in their ad campaigns, which can play a big role in their search engine marketing strategy. After you have gathered enough insights, you can then craft your ad campaign using Google Ads and/or Facebook Ads depending on your preferred channel.

Tracking competitor ads manually is a daunting task. Which is why you need an efficient tool to do the work for you. Competitors app lets you discover and monitor the Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns of your competitors. You can also see on your timeline when a competitor runs Facebook ads.

Keyword Ranking

It is essential to have a higher keyword ranking than your competitors. You need to identify the ranking of your competitors for competitive keywords and try to analyze what keywords they are aiming to rank for.

If you are looking to rank for a less competitive keyword yourself, the first step is to monitor how many of your competitors are doing the same. Competitors app lets you monitor the keyword rankings of your competitors at all times. With insights about the ranking of your competitors at your disposal, you can make the most out of your SEO strategy.

Website Changes And SEO

Monitoring your competitors’ website can keep you informed about your competitors’ strategy and allow you to set yourself apart from your competition.

You can also identify the changes in the website design or tone in their messages that are getting a positive response from the audience, and incorporate these features on your website, if suitable for your brand. Besides website changes can include significant factors such as pricing changes, which is crucial to be aware of in a competitive market.

While tracking website changes, notice the keywords that your competitors are targeting and the backlinks they are generating.

Due to the fast-changing nature of SEO, it is essential to have the latest updates about your competition. Competitors app sends you notifications every time a change is made on a competitor’s website and makes sure you are aware of your competitors’ actions in real-time. This includes changes to Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons, pricing, new features/integrations, sales offers, etc.

Social Media

Tracking the social media activity of your competitors allows you to understand how they are engaging with the customers and what content is gaining traction among the audience.

Besides, social media is also a popular platform for brands to employ unique promotional strategies that suit specific social media handles. For example, the Instagram “Stories” and Facebook “Day” are essentially the same feature, but promotional content works better on Instagram stories because of a relatively younger audience.

You can also monitor hashtags relevant to your brand, and track how they are performing. Identify what hashtags are trending and which ones are your competitors using to reach a wider audience.

Competitors App lets you monitor the social media handles of your competitors on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It will provide you reports on the latest data on your competitors’ social media reach and engagement. You can set a custom alert frequency and receive alerts on the social media activity of competitors.

Blog Content

One way to assess the strength of your competitors’ content strategy is by analyzing their best performing content. This can be particularly useful while monitoring your direct competitors.

Monitoring blog content can also be combined with social media activity tracking, as brands tend to integrate both mediums to generate maximum engagement. Track how each blog content shared on social media handles performs in terms of reach and engagement.

If you are looking for a tool that will keep you updated in real-time, Competitors app can be the perfect fit. You will receive notifications every time a competitor posts new blog content and/or shares a blog post on social media handles.

Newsletters and Email Marketing

Subscribing to the newsletters of your competitors keeps you informed about what customers are receiving from other players in the market. It will also allow you to understand their email marketing strategy and how it drives conversion for your competitors.

You can identify what strategies they are adopting to stand out among the huge number of emails an average user receives. Like any other promotional channel, compare your email marketing strategies with that of your competitors and look for loopholes. This is an essential step in gaining a competitive advantage.

But tracking every email of your competitors is no easy task. Especially when you have your email campaigns to work with. With Competitors App you will receive a notification each time a competitor sends an email to their customers. You can analyze each of the emails and track their email marketing strategies.

3. Use The Insight To Gain An Advantage Over Your Competitors.

You identified your competitors, monitored their strategies, actions, customer engagement, and obtained enough information to work with. But your job is far from over. After you have collected enough information, it is essential to turn the information into insights.

Raw information about your competitors will not give you the upper hand over your competitors, insights will.

Use the insights to identify market opportunities that arise from the gaps in your competitor’s strategies. Identify the market trends that you are aware of, but your competitors are not, and take full advantage of your knowledge.

If you plan to expand your product or service line, take notes from the success and failure of your competitors and the unfulfilled needs of their customers.

Conclusion on how to do a competitive analysis

Competitor analysis is an ongoing process for your business. Not only does it help you stay aware of your business environment, but also lets you avoid making mistakes by learning from your competitors.

Monitoring your competitors will help you refine your strategies in marketing, sales, product development, and public relations. Tracking all of your competitor information at once can be hectic. Competitors app lets you track your competitors’ marketing strategies on different channels by committing as little as 5 minutes a week! You will receive daily and weekly reports on the activity of your competitors which keeps you updated on the latest changes occurring in the market.

Sign up for Competitors app now by creating a free trial account!