When defining your web marketing plan, it is essential to start with a solid analysis of your competition. It alone can help you identify your own strengths and weaknesses, inspire you with the successes of your competitors and ultimately anticipate their development projects.
Without this competitive audit, you risk going blind to a dead end. But what is the procedure to follow to effectively monitor your competitors on the Internet? Which benchmarking tools should you prefer? And in the end, how to define your positioning? The point to succeed in 5 steps is the analysis of your competition.
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Whatever your industry, one thing is certain: when it comes to getting your message across to customers or prospects on the Internet, you are never alone and you need to stand out from your competitors. By studying their practices, you can position yourself in relation to them, draw inspiration from some of their strategies and attract your target Internet users.
The advantages of an analysis of your competition are numerous:
You carry out your competitive analysis upstream of your marketing plan, as a first step. Then you carry it out continuously, as and when updating your marketing actions. You can implement it internally, or by calling on external experts specializing in web marketing.
What is a competitive analysis?
Be careful not to fall into the trap of “copying and pasting” the actions of your competitors. “Analyze” does not mean “imitate.” Quite the contrary. Focus your efforts on your competitors’ best practices, but see this analysis as the first round of a creativity exercise. It’s important to come out of it with a vision of your own strengths and a new way to serve your customers in unique ways.
To launch your competitive analysis, the first step is to define the scope of your study, with at the same time:
To define the competitors to be analyzed, start from a proven method, such as that of the 3 levels of competition. You can find all the details in most reference marketing strategy books such as the Mercator. To list your competitors to study, remember the essential points:
Concretely, here is how to list your direct competitors:
To list your other types of competitors, keep the same mindset: put yourself in your customers’ shoes, but instead of looking for your products, research the needs your products meet. Thus, you get a list of substitute products that offer a different technology or a different distribution method, but that meet the same customer need.
By progressing in concentric circles, you will quickly get (too) many results, which you will have to filter to build your list of competitors to benchmark. Select:
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For each of the competitors listed, you must carry out an inventory of their position on the market. Simple to implement, the SWOT matrix will give you a good analysis grid to study the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each of your competitors (more details on the SWOT matrix in this explanatory video from the marketing research firm Xerfi).
To structure your analysis, proceed “funnel”, starting from a marketing inventory in general, then focusing more and more on the specific aspects related to digital communication in particular.
Of course, you need to do the same work for your own brand and fill out a SWOT matrix to take stock of your web marketing strategy:
The SWOT matrix has the advantage of harmonizing your analysis for all your competitors, and in the end, you have an excellent tool to visually compare the forces present in your competitors.
You have understood it: you can adapt your competitive study to the key elements you want, choosing those that best match the communication actions you are preparing.
To analyze the digital communication of the competition and set up an effective watch, the tools are numerous. But the main thing is to focus on one or two tools that are best suited to the type of information you’re looking for about your competitors.
In the field, the use of the SEMrush tool is one of the must-haves. You can get key elements on the positioning of your competitors, their target keywords, their semantic field, their netlinking strategy…
Google’s free tools (via Google Trends or Search Console for example) can also provide you with interesting information about the SEO of competing sites.
Regardless of the social networks on which you want to launch your campaigns, you can get a good overview of the popularity of your competitors with the Buzzsumo tool. You just need to enter the address of a competing site to retrieve data about what works for it on social networks. For example, you can identify its most successful content in terms of engagement or identify the influencers who have had the most impact on your priority themes.
A social communication tool like Swello also integrates specific features for the analysis of your competitors, with comparisons on the number of posts, followers or engagements with their respective communities.
No need to infiltrate your competitors’ digital marketing team to know everything (or almost) about their internal organization. Several services allow you to do this from your own computer, with ease. The data provided by SimilarWeb can be valuable to compare you to your competitors: number of unique visitors, bounce rate, origin of visits, advertising networks used, affiliate sites, most visited content…
Another essential tool to better understand the digital strategy of a competitor. From the address of a site, you get the list of all the marketing tools used (CMS, extensions, newsletter …) as well as technological information (host, tracking …) that will allow you to better understand how this competitor works.
Media monitoring tools allow you to automatically sort through the billions of pieces of information that are constantly circulating in your market. Over time, or occasionally on a specific topic, you can use free alert systems like Google Alerts. Directly linked to your Google account, it is easily usable and works from keywords you choose.
Mention’s services are much more sophisticated (and paid). They monitor the web and social networks in real time, looking for the alerts you have set up. This gives you information about what customers are saying about your competitors or about campaigns launched on different platforms.
You have collected all this information on the key points of your competitors’ digital strategy. Now you can move on to the next phase: assert the positioning of your offer. The goal is simple: in the minds of your customers, your product must be associated with a rewarding image, distinct from that of competing products. Since in your industry, the offer is overabundant, customers need to clearly perceive the difference they will be able to make from your products.
The USP (or Unique Selling Point) of your product is the unique advantage that will convince customers to choose you. You must make your offer an indisputable reference in the field you have chosen. To select this axis of differentiation that you will work, you must take into account:
To help you identify positioning opportunities in your market, positioning mapping is a simple and very effective tool. It represents the place occupied by your competitors in the minds of consumers, according to two axes that you choose.
To carry out your positioning mapping:
You get a visual representation of your competitors’ positions. In the middle (near the intersection of the two axes) are the offers that are not very differentiating, which respond in an “average” way to customer expectations. In extreme corners, on the other hand, you find divisive products, which have chosen to bet everything on a single positioning criterion.
Another advantage of positioning mapping: you can easily spot areas not covered by competitors. In this case, it is probably an opportunity to be studied to meet unmet customer needs.
At the end of this competition analysis work, you have all the cards in hand to decline the positioning you have chosen through your digital communication actions. It is important that they are consistent with the strategy decided, as well as the price, distribution or other variables of the marketing mix.
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