Do you want to be Pepsi or do you wish to be Coca-Cola in the Cola war? Ofcourse, Coca-Cola, who wants to be on the losing side anyway?
Competition is there in every business, and none of us want to settle for anything less than a clear win. One of the many reasons you need to keep an eye on your competitors, all the time!
So, in this post, let me tell you six most efficient ways of doing so:
Keep an eye on the latest giveaways by monitoring your Competitor’s Landing Pages with Stillio
If you want to spy on the digital efforts of your competitors, you should be already looking at their landing pages. An optimized sales and landing page can transform a visitor to a customer, the reason why it will the best reflection of your competitors’ efforts. I know it can be a strenuous task to keep an eye on their landing pages 24*7 especially when you want to analyze their perspective.
This is when Stillio comes into play. It is an automated tool that helps you generate website screenshots at regular intervals. You just need to feed the URL of your competitor’s website with the time at which you want the tool to take screenshots. It will do the necessary and save it to your desired location for you to compare and analyze. Take detailed notes of every determinant – the headlines, subheads, offers, CTAs or the structure of the page. The tool works as a great Wayback Machine alternative.
Spy into your competitor’s sales funnel posing as a customer
Well, do you know what was the major cause that led to the downfall of The Titanic? 90% of the iceberg that was below the water!
Every business offers and conducts a list of backend activities that remains hidden from a viewer or a customer still on the first tier of the funnel. To closely analyze their below-the-surface customer offerings, you have to dive in closer posing as a customer. Once you find your way through, you can analyze their process of converting subscribers into customers, observe their physical product’s attributes like packaging, read their follow-up emails and newsletters. You can also be a part of live chats with their executives to find out their strategy to capture the market, that positions them ahead of you.
Spy on the tech employed by your competitors’
Sometimes it becomes almost impossible to recognize your competitors’ USP. You have better staff, better products, better marketing but still, at the end of the day, they seal the deal. This is when you need to creep into their IT processes to spy on the technology employed. In the age of digitization, technology plays such a big hand, that it can immediately put your competitors in a better position. And as I said, technology can do wonders in today’s gen – there are certain tools that can help you identify the kind of tech employed by your competitors. Do your research and get going!
Spy on the keywords that your competitors are targeting
Keywords play such a vital role in the SERP rankings, that every business out there is ready to spend a fortune for it. Identify the keywords your competitors are targeting and not-targeting and how they are achieving the targets. Is it similar to yours? If not, you can even consider them. There is a list of tools that can render you help in the process, like Buzzumo, Social Crawlytics each with its own set of benefits to offer.
Spy on your competitors’ backlinks to leverage the opportunities
Checking your competition’s backlinks and discovering the websites linking to their content pieces is a great way to know a glimpse of their marketing strategy. Again, doing so would not be a difficult job; there are many tools to facilitate this feature for you.
Spy on their social media strategy
Social media presence has become so impactful, that if your competitors are employing better activities than you are. They can be the next ‘golden egg’ and you certainly can’t afford that. Follow them on all mediums, see what they are posting, how they are posting, who are their brand ambassadors, and everything else. Find out what’s missing in your strategy and do the necessary amendments.
Your competition can save you the trouble of starting from scratch, but it is too easy to get consumed in the research alone. Don’t get sucked into this and start incorporating it into your own business operations.
