How does your brand compete against other entities in your industry? Performing a competitor analysis of your top competition can provide insights into your digital presence and encourage the growth of your marketing strategy. Taking a deep dive into your competitor's social media presence, SEO strategies and digital advertising efforts can help you understand what actions your brand will need to take to get or stay on top. Keep reading to find out more.

Analyze the Competitor’s Social Media Presence

As many businesses rely on social media to promote their brand to their target audience, it is essential to evaluate your competitor's strategies to determine where you stand next to the competition. By taking a look at the content, frequency and creativity of their posts, you can gain insight into their social media strategy. An understanding of their engagement rate and types of engagement can better help you understand consumer behavior giving you an advantage in the digital space. When observing your competitor's social media, try to envision it from the consumer side. What do you like about their feed? What catches your attention first? What platforms are they using to promote their brand? How can you implement this into your strategy? The answers to these questions will not only help you identify the positives you see in their strategy, it will also help you discover the negatives. This is an important step when differentiating your brand from competitors in order to stand out.

Analyze Competitor’s SEO Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of applying techniques in the digital space to increase traffic to your website. The goal is to increase your search ranking in the geographic area and consumer type you are aiming to reach. Improving the visibility of your site, the quality and quantity of visitors, and increasing the generation of quality leads are the results of an effective SEO strategy.

By evaluating and comparing your SEO strategy to your competitor’s, you can adjust your efforts to outcompete them on the search engine results pages. By first analyzing their website's ranking and keywords, you can optimize your website, campaigns and content to target the right keywords. As you sift through these keywords, note any potential gaps that you can exploit to quickly increase your rating. Once gaps are identified, you can adjust your efforts to outcompete them on the search engine results page.

One way to analyze your competitor’s SEO strategy is to review their position compared to yours and determine key terms that you want to influence in order to increase your ranking. Google offers many free tools such as Google Trends and the Keyword Planner to aid you in your analysis. Another opportunity to improve your ranking is to review blogs and services on your competitor’s websites to understand the key terms they use in their SEO strategy. By performing this in-depth analysis of their website's ranking and keywords, you can optimize your website, campaigns and content to target the right keywords.

Analyze Your Competitor’s Online Advertising

Online advertising has become an essential part of a successful marketing strategy. With platforms such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many more offering advertising on their platforms, many businesses have taken this opportunity to broaden their reach to generate awareness and capture leads.

Facebook offers an Ad Library available to anyone with a Facebook business account. This library allows users to search their competitors and determine if they are running ads and see what those ads look like in the news feed. Brands can also search main keywords into Google's search engine and determine if any of their competitors are advertising against those keywords.

By analyzing the online advertising investments of your brand's competitors, you will get a peek into their overall online marketing strategy, target audience definitions and potential successes.

Implement Your Findings

After collecting all of the relevant information and understanding how your competitors perform in the digital space, it is time to put what you learned into action. Here are some ideas on how to implement your new findings:

• Compare your digital strategy and results to that of your competitors

• Share your learnings with your team and other stakeholders who may be interested in your findings

• Make changes to your website and/or campaigns to counteract the efforts of your competitors

• Use this competitor baseline to set your brand apart (get on offense!)

• Reevaluate your standards and performance metrics based on your brand's objectives

• Set up a template to review your competitors semi-annually

At nContext we see value in performing these competitive analyses to help our clients find ways to improve their original strategies. Producing a competitor analysis provides insight into competitors' digital strategy and can help determine long- and short-term goals in the digital space. If you would like to learn more about our Digital Marketing offering head to our services page or email info@ncontext.com.