5 Ways to Revamp Your Marketing With Competitor Insight

Two words that will change your marketing strategy for the better: competitor + insight.

An often undervalued and underestimated tactic, competitor research is actually what will put you way above the rest in terms of strategy, strategy performance, and strategy optimization making for… your best strategy yet.

It’s like Pablo Picasso once said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal” – and Similarweb has got what you need to steal your competitors’ strategies and make yours a work of art.

In this post, we go through 5 big ways to revamp your competitor research strategy (along with our project plans, current live activities, and upcoming activities) to further drive performance and win big.

And guess what? These tips come straight from the experts; three digital marketing experts and agency leaders that have discovered competitor research to be the secret weapon to success.

If you’re more of a watcher than a reader, here’s the webinar we got the tips from. But if you’re more of a reader than a watcher, we sum up the 5 key takeaways below.

Revamp your marketing with competitor insight: 5 key takeaways

1) Make it with multichannel marketing

A big tip for your digital marketing strategy as a whole is to make sure you’re using more than one marketing channel. Don’t just stick to one because you think it’s working well, because in reality, the more the merrier.

Collaboration and alignment is what gets you far.

With multichannel marketing you see benefits, including:

• Increasing your customer reach
• Expanding into new markets
• Encouraging segmentation for greater engagement
• Learning more about the customer journey
• Gaining more metrics and insights

All these things enhance your business growth. But what’s this got to do with your competitor research strategy? Well, looking into what your competitors are up to in each of their marketing channels gives you a better base than ground zero, where you have no idea where to start.

It helps you understand the feasibility of new marketing channels for your business.

With the right data, you can also understand how to use each channel efficiently. You can gain these insights through our website analysis tool, to spot where your competitors have the upper hand and to consider similar tactics for your own strategy.

Maybe you can see a lot of their website traffic comes through organic, and a significant amount through paid. This gives you an idea that they’re kinda nailing their keyword strategy. Oh, would you look at that – we’ve got tools for you to spy on that too.

On top of our new Daily Rank Tracker (which does what it says on the tin), we’ve got our Keyword Gap analysis tool, giving you insight into the keywords you and your competitors share, the ones you’re missing out on, and the ones they’re missing out on. In other words: your keyword threats and opportunities.

2) Add as much context as you can

To make sure your competitor research strategy is truly impactful to your business growth and success, you really need to get into the details and, ideally, the data.

Now, we’ve touched on this slightly but this could mean taking the keyword strategy you’ve discovered and the SERP ranking information you’ve found, and digging even deeper.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What pages are these search terms taking their audience to?
• Which of your competitors’ organic pages perform the best?
• What are they promoting or pushing in a big way?
• Where are they spending most of their money?
• Are they targeting any of your branded keywords?

Knowledge is power, and knowing as much as you can about what your competitors are up to is unbeatable.

And yes, we do have all the data you need to do that. With Similarweb, you’ll find tools and features, including:

• Website analysis: Get your hands on your competitors’
• Keyword Gap tool: Spot missed opportunities in your keyword and content strategy to gain more visibility on search.
• Keyword Generator: Avoid spending time and money on keywords that have a low search volume, or decrease in interest from your audience.
• Daily Rank Tracker: Monitor organic search results to see where you’re ranking, where your competitors are ranking, and where you could be ranking.
• The freshest keyword data on the market: Never miss a trend or new opportunity for your business to win on search.
• Organic Pages: See your competitors top performing pages, the keywords that are getting them there, as well as trending pages and traffic trends as they happen.
• SERP Snapshot: Get a glimpse into the SERPs for a full view of SERP features for specific keywords.
• Paid ad analytics: Gain full insight into your competitors’ paid ads (including spends, creatives and landing pages)
• Brand Protection alerts: Get notified when any of your competitors are making moves on your branded keywords, so you can take back what’s rightfully yours.

You know, just to make sure you’re covering all bases and getting all the data you need in one, easy-to-use platform.

But wait, you can go one step further in a matter of twenty seconds. How? By setting up a competitive tracker. With this, you’ll get monthly highlights of all the opps and drops, successes and fails, opportunities and threats going around your competitive space.

3) Track buyer and consumer journey metrics

Here’s another thing we aren’t scared to scream from the rooftops near wherever you live: you need to understand your audience before you start on your competitor research, or any part of your marketing strategy for that matter.

The only way to do this isn’t to guess or make assumptions, it’s to track the journeys of your target audience and ideal consumers with valuable metrics and insights. And the thing with your target audience is that your marketing might not be reaching them all just yet.

The truth is, they don’t see your brand or your marketing in the same way you do.

Nope, never do you hear a person within your key demographic saying they bought their new Doc Martens from a shopper ad after typing in ‘black boots’. And no, you don’t hear “I went for the more expensive boots that I found further down the SERPs because I preferred the other website’s marketing” much either.

That’s why understanding your audience is so important – you want to understand how they work and how they search to win their attention. Fresh data can help you spot these kind of winning opportunities, including:

• Getting insight into a market that your competitor is winning and you’re not, or realizing you’re both missing out on a key market and you want to get there fast.
• Finding out about a competitor you never even knew was a competitor before, or finding out a competitor you’ve been targeting isn’t actually much of a competitor at all.
• Spotting trending keywords that your target audience are searching for and beat your competitors to it.

☝️ This is just one reason we go on about keyword freshness benefits and trending keywords essentially (/most definitely) all the time: it changes every single day.

Anyway, to do these things and adapt your strategies accordingly, you need to UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE.

The opportunities you spot could be trending keywords relevant to your business that are suddenly getting an uptick in search volume. You want to beat your competitors to it, so you want the freshest keyword data on the block.

The things you need to look at include: impression share, keyword intent, the types of content that are performing well (eg. product pages versus category pages).

This will help you figure out what else you can do with all the information that some platforms (hello) offer you, to really fuel your marketing strategy going forward.

4) Adapt and optimize

As with any strategy, it’s not just done and dusted once you or your boss have signed it off.

These days especially, strategies need to be constantly looked at, tracked, adapted, optimized, and sometimes, sacked off completely. They need a regular audit to make sure your knowledge is up to scratch. You want to know that you’re focusing on the right things, and spending money where you should be spending money – not throwing it away on keywords with low or declining search volume, for example.

Don’t be complacent.

You never know which trending keywords are going to arise, you never know which newcomers are making their way into your territory, and you never know what Google’s going to do next with those damn algorithm updates.

By keeping in touch with what’s going on around you and making sure your strategy plays ball, you have – at least more – assurance in knowing there’s not something you’re missing out on.

5) Remember it’s an unpredictable world out there

We know, we know – we don’t have to tell you twice that the digital marketing landscape is a complicated and competitive market.

But it’s true, it’s a complex ecosystem with too many marketing tools to choose from, too many businesses saying their the best solution, too many cross-team integrations for one company to handle, along with a world that’s constantly chopping and changing in every way you can imagine.

In short: there are a lot of moving parts in digital marketing, but only one SERP and one winner taking the #1 spot.

It would be ideal if we could each grab a crystal ball and take a look into the future to see what’s right, what’s coming, and who the winner will be, but alas – that’s kinda impossible and not something we can help you with.

What we can help you with is giving you the insights you need to beat the rest and come out on top. Our competitor analysis tools help you truly understand what you’re up against – you can understand how your competitors behave and pick their strategies apart so you know what to expect, and you know how to overcome them.

Think of it like boxing. If you know the person and the strategy and techniques you are coming up against, you strengthen your own strategy to combat theirs, and next thing you know: the medal is yours. Onto the next fight.

Ding ding ding.

Similarweb: Know your competitors, then beat your competitors

There we have it – five key takeaways from our recent webinar with three agency leaders in the digital space.

Each point touches on the importance of accurate data to fuel your competitor research strategy, and the rest of your digital marketing strategy too.

Without the data, it’s just guesswork – and guesswork can leave you in a bit of a mess when it comes to planning, reporting, and the big boss’ expectations.

At Similarweb, we are proud to offer the knowledge and insights needed for companies to take their marketing efforts to the next level – and by next level, we mean shooting above your competitors, getting seen by the audience you want to be seen by, and increasing your ROI.

If having all the data you need to crush your competitors and win BIG sounds up your street (we think it might), book a free demo or speak to one of our experts today.

FAQs

What are the benefits of staying on top of your competitors?

Staying on top of your competitors can help you identify their strengths and weaknesses, find new opportunities to reach your target audience, stay ahead of the curve on industry trends, identify potential threats to your business, and gain insights into your customers’ needs and wants.

What are the benefits of having accurate data to understand your competitor’s strategy?

Accurate data can help you identify your competitors’ target audience, understand their content marketing strategy, analyze their social media strategy, track their paid advertising campaigns, and evaluate their overall marketing performance.

How does data help predict an unpredictable world?

Data can help businesses to make better predictions about the future by identifying trends and patterns that can help them to forecast demand, identify new opportunities, and mitigate risks.

by Leah Messenger

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Leah is a Senior Content Marketing Manager with a passion for turning complex topics into engaging, educational content.