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10 Hidden Tips on Competitive Analysis

Running a competitive analysis is great for identifying your brand’s strengths and weaknesses—but is your business applying these key analysis principles?

These 10 tips will help take your competitive analysis to the next level and boost your advantage further in the market. Let’s begin.

1. Start With SEO

SEO is the bread and butter for brands with a successful digital presence. The better your SEO structure, the higher your pages rank and the more traffic you generate. For your next competitive analysis, consider assessing your competitors’ SEO performance to see what they’re doing right.

Several metrics to look out for in SEO include:

  • Page title and meta description
  • URL structure
  • Header tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3)
  • Keyword usage in content
  • Internal and external linking
  • Backlinks
  • SERP rankings

Understanding your competitors’ SEO strategy helps in creating strategies to get your ‘money’ pages ranked high. For example, if you notice a competing page has an uninteresting title, that’s a sure-fire signal for you to capture the keyword with your SEO-optimized pages.

2. Discover Their Top-Performing Content

Top-notch content will naturally generate backlinks from pages using it as a source. You want to publish improved versions of your competitors’ top content to get people to link to your page instead—also known as the skyscraper technique.

Start off by looking at your main keywords. Do your competitors have first page content for the keywords you’re targeting? If yes, analyze their content and compare it to your brand. You’ll be surprised by the number of things your competitors are doing that don’t exist in your content. 

Emulate the ideas you like and forget about the unsuccessful or uninspiring ones. Do these for every keyword and you’ll gain invaluable insights on improving your content marketing efforts. However, don’t plagiarize content as Google (and other search engines) won’t hesitate to blacklist low-effort posts.

3. Analyze How Your Competitors Are Promoting Content

No content will ever reach its intended audience without promotion, regardless of how impressive it is. If your competitors’ content is ranking well or being shared a lot, they must be promoting their content the right way which you can learn one or two things from.

We recommend using technology to analyze content promotion strategies. You can do it by hand but it will take too much time and effort. A social media listening tool like Lucidya automatically detects top-performing content in your industry and identifies how it’s promoted. For instance, is your competitor sharing content on social media or do they use paid ads?

4. Find Out Where Your Competitor’s Audiences Hang Out

You can learn from tracking where your competitors’ target audiences are hanging out. This allows you to shift your marketing strategies to target the right platforms, reducing costs and wasted ad budgets.

The easiest way is to identify the platform where your competitors’ are most active. If a rival B2B company is always posting on LinkedIn and receiving good engagement, that’s where you should promote your brand’s content.

5. Analyze Their Customer Care

Knowing how your competitors treat their customers will help you improve your own. You can even capture unhappy customers who are not satisfied with your competitors. These customers often have a high lifetime value (LTV) and are cheaper to acquire.

Again, technology is a huge help here. A tool like Lucidya analyzes customer sentiment to know how customers are feeling about your brand and your competitors. This insight will help improve your customer care to keep them loyal to your brand.

6. Talk to Your Competitors’ Customers

Following the point above, you can take customer research one step further by actively communicating with your competitors’ followers. This can in the form of likes, comments, or even retweets.

You can also Lucidya to see when your rival customers are most active to find out the best time to publish content. You won’t see instant results but sooner or later, unhappy rival customers will jump ship to your brand.

7. Try out Your Competitors’ Products and Services

The best way to understand your competitors is—surprise, surprise—trying out their products and services. Subscribe to their services, buy something from them, call them to enquire, visit their office—there’s a lot you can learn from just by engaging with your competitors’ offerings.

8. Identify ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ Opportunities

Every competitive analysis comes with lightbulb moments where you identify golden opportunities no one in the market has seen yet. These ‘low-hanging fruit’ opportunities can give your brand a serious boost in leads and traffic if your strategy is done right. For example, you may uncover a valuable niche keyword that no one has created good content for yet.

9. Keep up With Influencers in Your Industry

Monitor the top influencers in your industry. Influencer marketing is a billion-dollar industry because it’s effective and when it works, you will experience an almost endless flow of leads and new audiences. 

The size of influencer marketing in global markets (Image Source)

Use a social media listening tool like Lucidya to identify the most influential personalities in your industry. Also, just because a user has millions of followers doesn’t mean he or she will generate more value. Context matters and in most cases, you’ll see a bigger ROI when working with smaller influencers who own hardcore fanbases.

10. Don’t Stop Comparing

Competitive analysis is not something you’d do once a year. Ideally, you should benchmark your brand against competitors every month at the minimum. This gives you a good gauge of business performance while providing enough time and insights for your brand to react to unfavorable situations.

Why Lucidya Is a Must-Have Tool for Competitive Analysis

A complete competitive analysis takes time and effort, but the benefits you reap in the end are second to none. It helps you assess your influence among your target audience, how your competitors are performing, and spot hidden opportunities that can bring in warm leads and generate revenue.

Lucidya is an AI-powered social media listening tool that empowers companies operating in Arabic-speaking countries with in-depth, never-before-seen customer insights. With Lucidya, businesses can build profitable products, boost customer satisfaction, execute successful campaigns, and close more sales thanks to our extensive list of social media listening features.

 

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