The digital advertising world is quite complex and it is even difficult to be up-to-date with everything it offers. Not to even mention choosing most appropriate and efficient actions which all together make up your online marketing strategy which impacts on be or not to be of your online business. No wonder then that sometimes choosing one is so time-consuming and troublesome.
Online businessmen fear of paying loads of money on marketing campaigns that actually won’t make a difference – so both the effort made and the capital spent will go down the drain. However, there is one method to get around this issue and implement effective marketing campaign straight away. And this way is just to find where competitors are advertising.
It does consist of some spying actions as you can see but quite innocent one. Undoubtedly it is far better than trying to guess what works and what doesn’t and spending on it big chunk of money. It saves you both money and time. And if you check what your competitors do and if it works for them fine, you can be almost sure it will work for your business as well.
Social media spying
In the era of social media madness usually no online business can do without them so it is the best way to start. Recently advertising on social media become more transparent and not everyone knows that it is possible to obtain some advertising insights by going into competitor’s business fan page. In the section „Page transparency” you are able to check out all the paid ads somebody is running or benchmark on which their advertisements were created.
Apparently you can do this all manually and entering the competitors’ fan pages site by site. However, it sounds time-consuming and repetitive task. And it is both indeed. Luckily there are some tools which have already gathered all this information for you and present all the social activities of your chosen competitor on a spreadsheet (like for example Social Blade). Using such tool you are able to very easily and quickly compare your efforts with theirs.
Competitor’s website analysis
Apart from social media you can get a lot of useful information on your competitor’s website and landing page. You can check how much traffic they get, where this traffic comes from, which channel works best for them, what content they create or what are their most frequently visited SEO pages or what their landing page looks like and what are the most convincing benefits of their solution. If you gather all this knowledge you are able to make up your own overall marketing strategy or improve the one you have already implemented.
Just to be clear – I am not forcing you to magically guess all of these. However, as with social media spying, there are already loads of tools to use in order to have all this information. For SEO analysis you can use SEMrush, Ubersuggest or Ahrefs which tell you how SEO strong specific websites are and what are the best keywords. Similarweb tool shows you all about traffic on their websites. For landing page analysis the best way is to go through some landing page case study and then do a similar one on your competitor’s landing page.
Email marketing spying
I know – this one seems to be like something really difficult and breaching. But it is not like you will be reading all the emails sent and go very deep. Actually – you will dispose of information regarding subject lines, length or email frequency. Therefore, there is no question of violating anyone’s privacy. And there are some tools to enable it to happen and facilitate you to improve your own email marketing strategy.
One of this tool is MailCharts which accumulate emails from competition’s campaign and simply try to push you in the right direction with your own email marketing strategy. Moreover, MailCharts has one additional feature – it can compare your own email marketing practices with an exemplary one and decide whether you implement the best ones when it comes to timing, length of subject line or frequency. This way you can rocket your email marketing strategy and be a step further than your competitors 😉