Excellent digital marketing strategies build on strong messaging. Aligning what people are looking for, what motivates them to action, and what a company says across all media is essential. Competitive analysis helps calibrate SEO, content marketing, and social media activities through consistent, powerful messaging.
Why is competitive analysis a logical starting point in developing marketing strategy? It’s the fastest way to get in a competitive game, take the lead, and stay ahead. Very few of us are blessed with a non-competitive niche where we’re the only one found when looking. Any market worth competing in either has competitors or draws them in quickly.
Most startup founders, in-house marketing teams, and agencies understand keyword research but shy away from more powerful competitive analysis. One concern is full competitive analysis may look like a massive, expensive project with limited value. Perhaps there is also fear analysis uncovers a company, product, or service is behind on some measures. Let’s face it: no company dominates on every variable in every situation. When in the lead, messaging reinforces a strong position. When behind, messaging provides talking points for teams trying to sway the conversation.
A quick-look competitive analysis maps the landscape by tackling three questions:
Who’s out there around us?
First, discover who a company’s online competitors really are. We make the online distinction recognizing nearby brick-and-mortar competition may have a lousy search posture. In a digital-first world, the competitor roster is all about who shows up in non-branded search. (Branded search means someone already knows the name of a firm, maybe as a customer, from packaging or word-of-mouth references, or from out-of-home advertising. Ranking on branded search is usually easy if the name is even slightly fanciful.)
Competitive analysis can quickly find who ranks on seed search terms. Use the seed list for mining additional terms and more competitors. Often, the competitor roster produced isn’t what one would expect based on real-world factors such as quality, reputation, and location. A competitor may not have a great product/service story but may gain impressions through effective SEO and content strategy or use of paid media tactics. It’s important to understand who makes the list and what they do that gets them noticed.
How are people finding them?
Once establishing seed search terms and a competitor roster, dig in to see how people are really searching. SEO tools produce a broader set of digital marketing keywords, picking up additional organic and paid terms. They also indicate search volume against those keywords and the potential difficulty in using them.
Some terms may be easy to take; uniquely spelled or long tail search terms have less volume but are easily planted in organic copy, titles, and metadata. Other terms may be hyper competitive and very expensive to attempt on paid media. There’s usually a middle ground where paid media can accelerate results for some terms while optimization and organic rankings are catching up.
What are the value drivers?
Finally, explore the visitor journey through competitor sites starting from their social media posts and home page. How people search for ideas or react to social media content reveals value drivers. These are the ideas that resonate with prospects, ones they would cite if asked why they chose to do business with a company. Decision points along the visitor journey match value drivers to search and social intent.
Now comes a strategy choice: embrace competitive value drivers head on or create some new ones where the competition is at a disadvantage. We like to see a mix between the two and offer two cautions. First, visitors are filling in a mental checklist – if several points competitors talk about are missing, it’s a red flag. Second, although there’s strong marketing theory around “creating a category”, being too creative with language takes you off the search map. Use new value drivers sparingly where they highlight differentiation.
Rolling up competitive analysis
In our Messaging Architecture, we roll up vision and mission statements, positioning, and value drivers with key messages and tone guidelines. These are the beginning of the story, not the end. Campaigns and web copy might begin with these key messages to build awareness and interest. One of the most powerful SEO tactics is rewriting web copy using analytics data combined with messaging insight from competitive analysis.
Motivating visitor action against specific products/services may need more detailed analysis. We’ve done some amazing product-killer projects as part of product marketing strategy efforts. These analyses often move into sales guides, which help direct and channel sales teams emphasize strengths and cope with weaknesses of products. Nuggets gleaned from competitive analysis can also drive product roadmap efforts for addressing deficiencies.
Proper attention to competitive analysis sets up messaging – and we’re your resource with experience to do it right. We’d like to hear your story and explore how competitive analysis can help your company or agency clients.