When a brand is set to take off, there are layers to break through to guarantee it’s top of mind for customers, near and far. And one of these layers is positioning a brand on the right trajectory to surpass the competition. But how?
With various degrees of market contenders, it may appear as a daunting task to understand each one and from there, how to benchmark against the information found to propel you forward.
This blog is set to help you unravel your competitor’s strategies and give additional insight into your journey ahead. These three clear steps will guide you and your teams into a detailed discovery that will impact website, digital tactics, communication and even sales materials.
The first step is to access where your competitors are digitally. Your prospects are using search engines to find solutions to ease their challenges – or to even boost their industry knowledge. And more than likely your competitors are appearing first.
To guarantee you’re in front of the right people at the right time, you’ll need to understand what your competitors are ranking for – and why. Keywords shed light on how the website is structured through content and then through engagement it’s receiving. There are some tools that will show you the volume of visitors based on each keyword to give you a more accurate idea of success.
Having keyword transparency can be used to compare your current web environment – and how you rank and why. Your business will get clarity on the direction you’d like to launch to via marketing and sales.
Questions to ask when you know what your competitors rank for are:
- Why are they ranking for those keywords?
- What pages are ranking for those keywords?
- Are we competing against those keywords on our site?
- What keywords are they ranking for that we want to prioritise?
Beyond keywords, another metric to access is the website authority score. According to MOZ, a credible SEO tool, ‘a domain authority score predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages’ against your competitors. It’s based on ‘a calculation using machine learning to predictively find a ‘best fit’ algorithm that most closely correlates with rankings across thousands of actual search results’. The score is from 1 – 100 and with a higher number the more likely search engines will favour the website over others. So this is a great number to also benchmark against your competitors.
Having a clear view of what’s under the hood of your competitor’s digital environment will only fuel yours forward. And the information obtained may seem marketing focused, but it’ll fuel your sales team pitch solutions and give a big boost to your content – which everyone can use.
The next step is to engage with the advocates you have on hand. This can feel uncomfortable but a little can go a long way. Speak to your customers and get sales team members to gauge current challenges, goals, needs and problems that are relevant within your industry. This can be done through your social media channels or in the form of a survey distributed via e-mail.
But what to do with this data? Once you have a clearer understanding of what’s causing a stir in the market, the next step is to see how your competitors are contextualising and communicating against these points. In other words:
- Are their USPs matched against the challenges?
- Does their website address the challenges?
- Does their content touch base on the goals or needs of prospects?
- How are they describing their solutions against the needs and challenges?
This perspective can spawn new ideas on what the future of your brand is to compete – and compete strongly. It’s also additional fuel for sales team members. With transparency of their competitors, it’ll give them an extra boost when pitching to prospects; knowing how to position the facts to get the win.
And another recommendation is to take advantage of social media. Social media is a free channel for you to see what your competitors are saying, what projects they are winning and who is engaging with their accounts. You can explore real-time conversations right from your competitors pages to understand what is performing well – and what isn’t.
And beyond your competitors pages, you can accelerate your knowledge on trending industry topics or enquiries – and see what your prospects are engaging with. By sussing out who your top accounts or prospects are, you can monitor their online behaviour using tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as an example. Here you’ll have a data control centre catered to what you need to be monitoring and seeing. From what content your prospects have engaged with, to job changes or to who they're connected with is available via the LinkedIn platform.
Having a collective and holistic view of your competitors is a guaranteed countdown to a successful sales trajectory. Just knowing how they’re angling their communication or what their target solutions are for the year, we’ll propel you to be ahead – and quickly.
If you’d like additional support in executing research or looking for training in the platforms listed above, reach out to our team of experts.
