A comprehensive guide to analysis competitors in digital marketing

Analyzing competitors in digital marketing

Studying your competitors can be considered as part of the market study in general, and as a key factor in the success or failure of your project. Just studying the details of your product and the customers you go to, is no longer enough.

Analyzing competitors in digital marketing

Always be aware of what competitors are doing, as they enable you to:

Learn what social media channels they use and how they benefit from them.
Compare your results with theirs, so you can identify your weaknesses.
Know the threats they face and may face your activity and thus adjust your plans.

Always be prepared to exploit the loopholes

Monitoring customer reactions on your competitors' pages will enable you to avoid mistakes and thus provide a more efficient and distinguished service.

You can also take advantage of the loopholes to implement completely different campaigns that focus on what the competitor missed.

You will also know your position in the field of social media

You will not be able to know the extent of your actual activity on social media without comparing yourself to others.

This comparison will only be done by analyzing the activity of your competitors, identifying their strengths, the size of their audience and their interaction, then analyzing all that information and using it to improve your communications.

How do you analyze the activity of your competitors on social media?

Your study of the activity of your competitors on social networking sites and the interaction of the public with them is an integral part of your understanding of the market, and here are the practical steps for that:

Make a list of your main competitors

In this step, divide your competitors into two parts:

Competitors who offer the same product or service as you (direct competitors).

and competitors that provide part of your product or service (indirect competitors).

Website Competitor Analysis Tools

Use google ads

Of course, you know the keywords that you use in marketing your product, and it's time to use those words to identify your competitors, and here's how:

Log in to google ads .
Start typing the keywords you are targeting.
A list of similar keywords will appear, copy them.
Start by searching for those words in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing .
Make a list of the first 8 results (competitors) you'll see.. These are often your competitors.

You can also use kwfinder and you will find direct links to competitors' websites when you give the keyword.

Simply on your competitor's website, you will find enough information about their social media pages, often in the Contact Us section or at the bottom of the home page.

Free social media competitor analysis

This step enables you to identify your most prominent competitors on social media, and you do it through Facebook as follows:

Through Facebook audience insights , you can access the Pages section.
After writing the name of the page in the people connected to section, you can choose page likes.
A list of the pages that your audience follows will appear to you, often through which you will be able to make a list of the names of your competitors in your field.

On Twitter , you can get to know the competitors' pages by entering the Twitter analytics section and then the Top followers list.

Then you start browsing through the profiles of your top followers to see which pages they follow or the tweets and replies they made.

And of course, you'll come up with a list of your top competitors that your audience follows.

Select your top 5 or 10 competitors

After you do the previous process, you will get a huge list of a large number of competitors, and your task here is to select the most prominent 5 or 10 competitors to monitor.

And thus ends your journey to reach your most prominent competitors.. Take a deep breath and let's start the second step.

How to identify your competitors

After you have prepared your list of your most prominent competitors, the process of gathering information about them comes, and here is a list of the most important things you need to know about them:

What social media are they on?
How many followers do they have?
Who are the most popular followers?
What is the degree of regularity in publishing and the amount of content on their pages per week/month/year?
What is the degree of interaction on their pages?
What hashtags do they use and how many?

To succeed in this process, you have to be careful and patient.

You may also like: free competitor website traffic analysis.

SWOT analysis model

We've collected a lot of information, and now it's time to use it.

The analysis by following the SWOT strategy is considered one of the most important and prominent methods of analyzing competitors, which is carried out in the following form:

The S: an abbreviation for Strengths, in which it determines the strengths of the competitor’s social media, such as (their regularity in publishing - the diversity of content - the quality of the content provided - the reactions of their audience).
The W: Short for Weaknesses, it identifies weaknesses in a competitor's social media strategy.
The O: Short for Opportunities, here you define the opportunities available to your competitor, which may be considered threats to you.
The T: Short for Threats, here you identify the threats that your competitor may face, and here you can take advantage of them as opportunities for you.

The secret to the success of this move is to constantly update the data you collect about your competitors.

Free online competitor analysis tools

It does not stop at Swot analysis, there are a wide range of technical tools that help you analyze your competitors more effectively and with less effort, as follows:

Quicksprout : Helps you identify the content published by your competitors.
Fanpage Karma : Helps you find out the strength of the company's presence on social media, compare the performance of content of all kinds, learn about the number of followers and other advantages.
Likealyzer : It helps you to collect complete information about your competitors’ Facebook pages as well as your page, while providing a number of tips to improve your performance.
Audiense and Twitter Counter : to analyze the performance of competitors and their audience on Twitter .
Buzzsumo : Through it, you can find out what content your competitor publishes, and thus you can take advantage of opportunities such as producing a different type of content than what it offers.
Hootsuiete streams : You can track the keywords and hashtags your competitor uses on all social media channels.
Brandwatch : The site offers a unique and very important service, where you can see how many people are talking about your brand or your competitors; Thus, you know your position in the market.

Finally, analyzing the social media of your competitors, is not a tedious process that you may put off, as there are many tools and strategies that you can follow to do the job perfectly.

Do not neglect to study your competitors, track their activity and monitor the interaction of their fans with their product or brand, and in any case do not forget that your competitors will also analyze and monitor you!