Your competition’s performance can play a huge role in your own business’ success. With many brands vying for the attention of the same target audience (and, consumers already being spoilt for choices to begin with), it is critical to know what your competition has been up to and what they’re going to do next. Doing so enables you to –

• Counter their activities
• Learn from their failures
• Draw inspiration from their best practices
• Figure out how to out-do them

In order to gain an edge over your competitors, it is important to monitor what they are up to on the digital marketing front. Here are 4 major elements to keep tabs on every month –

1. Uncover What’s Newsworthy

Find out what your competition is in the news for with Google Alerts. In particular, monitoring which platforms are covering your competition will help you identify newsworthy angles for your own press releases, as well as names of specific journalists who are interested in your industry.

2. Learn Best Social Media Practices 

Pay close attention to what sort of content your competitors are churning out on their social media handles – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. Doing so will help you understand how different types of content brackets are performing, including contests and special promos. This information will help you shape your own editorial calendar in a more well-informed manner (why invest in creating content you’ve already observed isn’t performing well for your competition?). For added help, you can even consider using handy tools like Social Mention to monitor when your competition is mentioned on different platforms and what the general perception about them is amongst your target audience pool. If there is negative buzz surrounding any of them, you can find out why and avoid those mistakes!

We recommend documenting the following –

• Number of posts by category
• Number of followers
• Number of likes
• Number of shares
• Number of comments
• Contest participation

Do keep in mind that engagement context is important, too – for example, Competitor A might be posting 100 times per month, but hardly receive 2-3 likes / shares / comments, while competitor B might only be posting 5 times a month and receive 50+ shares / comments each time – pay attention to what the engagement rate really is for different competitors.

Pro Tip – Facebook has a handy “Pages To Watch” option that allows you to rank your competitors’ pages based on the number of page likes, number of posts and engagement.

3. Discover Key Messaging

Subscribe to your competition’s blog posts and emailers to find out the sort of brand positioning they are maintaining, as well as offers they are luring customers with. This will prevent you from reinventing the wheel, and instead be more innovative with your marketing offers and campaigns, so you can attract more customers.

4. Monitor Growth & Stats

Besides monitoring news portals covering your competition, key messaging in their blogs / emailers and the response their social media outreach is receiving, document additional stats about your competitors’ digital growth and investment each month so you can see how you stack up in comparison. Here are some key data categories to record in a running Excel sheet along with all the elements listed above –

• Website Traffic & Rankings – Track your performance against local/international competition using Alexa
• Keywords – Monitor which keywords your competitors have a good hold on to tweak your own list using SpyFU. You can make the most of keywords that haven’t be oversaturated.
• Linking – Through tools like Majestic or Alexa, find out which sites are linking to your competition to create a list of ones to reach out to.
• Detailed SEO Data – A handy tool like Woorank allows you to monitor SEO performance of competition to track if you have the lead or need to step up your game. Note down a) how many unique new users your competition is receiving each month to track popularity, b) the number of page views + session durations (who has a more engaging site) and c) bounce rates (who has better site design)
• Paid Campaigns – Newspapers, magazines, B2B trade publications, blogs, social media, radio, TV, Out-of-home (OOH) advertising – Pay close attention to where your competitors are running paid ads. Doing so will help you identify how aggressively your competition is investing in different platforms and where they are getting the best ROI / traction. You can plan your own advertising calendar effectively, in response. If you don’t have the budget to advertise as aggressively, you can look into stepping up your PR and/or social media outreach much more substantially, instead.

Rather than guesstimating how your competition is performing and what your market share is like, or waiting for industry reports to give you an unpleasant wake up call, be proactive in monitoring all of the above points month-by-month so you have your finger on the exact pulse of your changing market landscape. Doing so will help you address pain-points efficiently in real-time, stay on top of best practices, quickly gauge audience behavior and emerging trends, improve brand positioning and, of course, attract more customers wisely.

Need help putting together a bespoke social media plan? Contact our team right here.