If you choose your main competitor depending on their brand awareness, then chances are high that you are missing the real market story. After all, your business industry is vast and dynamic, so simply gauging one rival brand can never be enough.
This is where thorough competitive research comes in handy. How else do you think the most popular websites keep themselves ahead of the game every single time!
Competitive research is actually the basis for creating successful marketing campaigns and turn market trends to your advantage. And the best thing is that it does not take humongous efforts to study your competitors and reveal market insights.
In less than an hour, effective competitive research can reveal crucial market insights like –
6 Vital Insights That Competitive Research Can Reveal
Β 1. The Real Market Leader
One of the effective competitive research to get insights and strategies for your next marketing campaign is by looking at your competitor. There are many aspects apart from brand awareness, estimated market share, etc., based on which you should judge your competitors.
To understand the best strategies for increasing reach and traffic, you should find the top five companies in neck-to-neck competition with you. It will undoubtedly be one of the most legitimate digital benchmarks.
Firstly, you need to identify the competitor with the highest traffic in the last 12 months. See if the growth is exponential, stable, or it has decreased over time.
Also, try to find out if their offline presence is at par with their online popularity. Taking the company’s website as the benchmark, start designing your campaign with similar strategies.
2. Hidden Seasonal Trends
It is essential to update yourself with the seasonal trends (if any) of your industry. Sometimes you would see that there is an extra marketing budget that you would have to spend this quarter, so the standard practice for a marketer, in this case, is going for paid traffic.
In this case, it is essential to check the traffic metrics of your competitor over a given period. Find their peak months by looking at the number of traffic arriving at their website at a given time. You can compare this data with the overall industry and your other competitors. Also, keep on tracking the data till the decline period.
Once you fully understand how your competitor’s campaigns work, even in low season, you will be able to apply them to your campaign and attract more traffic.
3. Hitting The Same Target Audience
The main thing that you should look for is not whom your competitors target but whom they actually hit. You can take the help of traffic analytics to study the overlap of audience between your competitors.
Knowing the percentage of unique audience vs. shared audience can help you to become the next market leader. You can compare brand positioning and marketing strategies and reveal the media preferences, which will help you align the campaign accordingly.
4. Communication With The Target Audience
Apart from analyzing the number of traffic visiting your competitor’s website, you should also check the traffic duration and bounce rate.
A great campaign might attract a lot of traffic, but without proper engagement, the audience will not want to stay there for a long time. See how your competitors interact with their traffic and how they engage them.
If their duration is low and bounce rate is high, refrain from using the engagement strategies as that is surely not working. But in case it’s the opposite, then study a bit more and apply those tactics for your website to improve the engagement rate.
5. Driving Target Users To Top Products
It is now the time to discover your competitors’ top products and find the marketing channels working out as the best drivers. With Traffic analytics, you will be able to find out both.
6. Estimated Conversion
This one is for e-commerce sites and online-based companies only. You should find out the average number of converted traffic, and they bought something from a given web page. With a traffic analytics tool, you can check the top pages related to payment.
You will get a complete list of conversions by filtering out the words related to purchasing for a general understanding. You can also find the number of people who signed up or took any action on the given online platform.
These competitive researches will help you to reach your goal.
