5 Ways To Stalk Your Competitors
The environment is constantly changing and as the ones responsible for our respective brands, keeping up the pace is of utmost importance. It is critical for us to learn (quickly) from our successes and failures and apply those lessons in real-time.
So, instead of always looking to reinvent ourselves, why don’t we just emulate what someone else is doing well and improve on it. The best place to start is by looking at your competitors.
Here are our pro tips to stalk your competitors to improve your marketing performance:
- Start With Ads
This step is probably the easiest to find and the best way to gauge what you’re up against. Knowing your target audience’s preference is crucial to your success and referring to your competitors’ ads is a good place to start getting ideas and tricks to the trade.
Some questions to ask yourself – how are they capturing attention? what keywords are they using for optimization? What kind of language and imagery do they appear to be using?
One sure fire, budget-friendly way to get a glimpse at how your competition do marketing is by turning your ad blocker off, visiting your competitors’ website, and see how they retarget you. Genius!
- Next – Landing Pages
Another way to master the stalk is by looking at your competitor’s landing pages. The purpose here to measure every element on their site for your own benefit.
See how their landing pages are laid out, what its purpose is, content type and structure and messaging, to name a few.
Pro tip: Make a list of key competitors you want to beat, determine their ranking and regularly stalk their sites to be updated on their offers, content and a general style of doing things.
- Take Notes On Offers
It is always a good idea to make note of how your competitor caters to the different stages of the buyer journey on their websites. The type of content a competitor spends time creating, directly reflects on how they would like to position themselves to prospects.
It is also a great indicator for potential opportunities to capitalize or even possible pain points that consumers go through during their buyer journey that you might have missed.
Look for what downloadable content your competition offers, the stages at which they offer content, the mediums through which they deliver content, how does it compare to what you are currently offering, to name a few.
- Stalk Their Social Media
Social media is probably the best place to stalk and learn from your competition. Not to long ago, social media was a tool that businesses adopted as a maybe, with only 20% claiming to participate. Today, that percentage has risen to an astounding 90%. So, now is probably the best time to know how to use and use it well.
Analyze each platform your competitors are on, determine their following and the type and cadence of their content. By doing this, you’ll know where you stand and how far you need to go. You also get creative inspiration for your own social media strategy.
Revisit the metrics gathered during your analysis and compare it to your own down the line. Use it as inspiration to improve every month and savour the feeling of beating your competitors at their own game. Ah, sweet victory!
- Take A Trip Down Their Lead Nurturing Process
Finally, it is good to also understand your competition’s lead nurturing process i.e. how they follow up on their leads. So how exactly can you do this?
Pro tip: visit your competitor’s website using incognito or private browsing and download their content and keep your eyes peeled. This is great way to see how your competition caters to the needs of their target segments.
