Creating a digital marketing strategy is more than just a breakdown of what you want to achieve. A huge part of creating your strategy is checking out what the competition is doing and whether they are succeeding online.
Before you create a digital marketing strategy you need to do your research and ask yourself what social networks your customers hang out on, and what type of content you should be posting. This is where looking at what your competitors are doing, will help you build your own digital marketing strategy.
What do you need to look for when researching your Competitors?
1. Audience Size & Demographic
Firstly, you need to look at what social networks your competitors are using to calculate their audience size by finding their social profiles and adding up their followers/fans.
Once you have done this, you need to see which networks are performing the best. You may notice that your competitors Facebook and Twitter accounts receive a high level of engagement however their Pinterest page is content poor. This gives you an opportunity to make Pinterest a priority of yours with the goal of reaching a new group of customers without much competition.
2. Online Engagement
Audience size will tell you a lot about how active your competitors are online however it won’t tell you everything you need to know. Just because one of your industry competitors has a great following online, it doesn’t mean their online engagement is just as great. To help you with your digital marketing strategy, you need to see not only how your competitors engage online but also what consumers are saying to them.
If you want to measure your competitors’ engagement, Simply Measured offer free reports which you can see here.
3. Profile Content
Once you have assessed your competitions audience size and online engagement, you’ll need to review your competitions social profile set up. By this I mean looking at whether they are consistent across social media and how they have positioned their business. You will need to look at your competitions Cover Photo’s, Descriptions and Links.
Never copy, but take inspiration from your competitors if what they are doing is working and even more importantly learn from the ones who have fallen behind.
4. Consumers Opinion
Finally, and in my opinion most importantly is consumer opinion. There are a lot of free tools out there, one in particular called Mention which will allow you to see what people are saying about a brand online. This will allow you to see how your biggest competitors are thought about by consumers. If you see a lot of complaints, let YOUR business help them!
We are now in a digital age where the consumer is all that matters and if they aren’t happy with a product and they share that online, it gives your business a negative sentiment.
With the above information you need to create your digital marketing strategy perfect for your business based on what you have found out about your competitors online activity.