How Small Business Marketing Consultants Study Your Competitors
You may have heard the recent news on how Amazon goes to great lengths to gather information on competitors and why they sought to execute such an elaborate approach in researching other brands. The benefits of regular competitive analysis are huge regardless of your business size.
When you understand more about your competitors, you equip your business with better tools to navigate and dominate your market landscape. By studying how your rivals market their businesses, you’ll gain more insights into what works, what doesn’t, and how their marketing strategies affect your business.
Some of the questions we often get as small business marketing consultants are on how to effectively assess the competition and what to do with those key learnings to craft winning marketing strategies.
While we certainly don’t recommend wading into murky ethical and legal territory as with the Amazon example, we strongly advise studying your competitors on at least a quarterly basis and keeping notes on how their marketing strategy might change over time. There are many publicly available free or low cost ways to get on top of what your competitors are doing and how they are serving customers in your shared target market, including:
- Visit their websites often
- Sign up for their email newsletters
- Follow them on social media
- Set up a Google Alert for competitor brand names or major product names
- Read their customer reviews
- If they are publicly traded, listen to their earnings calls or view their published financial statements
Lastly, go be a paying customer. Visit your competitors’ stores or websites as a regular buyer would do. Purchase their products or services and carefully evaluate each step of the experience from the lens of a typical customer.
As you shop your competitors’ products and services, ask yourself these 12 questions to gain a deeper understanding of what they are doing better or worse than you expected:
- What stood out to me about the experience of being their customer? What was positive and negative about the experience?
- What was the first thing that happened when I went to their store/called their company/visited their website?
- What attracted my attention about their marketing materials? What did I notice first? What was my first impression?
- How did I feel being a prospective customer throughout the entire sales process?
- How did this competitor move me from consideration to purchase (e.g. abandon cart emails, helpful and attentive associates, confirmation of what will happen next at the end of a phone call)?
- How was the service delivery experience? For products, how did the item arrive and how was it packaged? Did I feel the level of satisfaction and confidence in the brand after the sale as I expected?
- What was their post-sale follow up? Was there any communication from the brand after the sale? If so, was it personalized and useful?
- How did the overall experience match up with my initial expectations and with the brand’s initial promise to me as a customer?
- Where did this competitor impress me the most in their sales process?
- Where did this competitor fail in their sales process?
- If this competitor was my company, how would I fix the failures?
- If this competitor was my company, how would I market my strengths (and how well are they marketing those strengths)?
Take this collection of data and think about your own company as marketing consultants for small businesses would do. What aspects of your marketing strategy have room for improvement? What are the gaps in your competitors’ marketing plans? What do you do that makes your company unique and different from competitors?
Top Questions to Ask When Assessing Your Competitors’ Marketing Campaigns:
Here are some key areas a small business owner should investigate when assessing competitor marketing:
Who is my competitor’s main target audience? The more you understand about the ideal customer base, the more insights you can pull from their marketing approach to help shape your own marketing efforts. Is your competitor targeting the same audience as you? Are they going after a niche audience? Are there other niche audiences that your business is not targeting that would make great opportunities to gain new customers?- What messaging is my competitor using in their marketing? Take a look at the style and tone of the main message they communicate to their audience. What emotions or actions are they trying to evoke? How is their messaging clear and consistent (or not) across their website, social media, email, and other marketing channels?
- How does their website look and how well does it work? Make a list of what stands out to you, both positive and negative, about the user experience and overall design.
- What type of marketing content do they use across their social media, advertising, email, and website? Do they focus on informative articles, favor video content, use infographics or a lot of images? What perspective do they use in their content?
- How do they mix digital marketing and traditional marketing? Evaluate how their marketing plan incorporates social media posts or ads, website content, search engine optimization, PPC ads, email marketing, print marketing, direct mail, and any other types of marketing materials you can find.
- What are the strengths and weaknesses in their marketing plan? Try to uncover areas where they have gaps in their marketing strategy as well as how they represent opportunities for your business. How can your business communicate a more impactful and engaging message to your audience? What does your business offer to prospects in the sales experience that your competitors can’t match?
- What do their customer reviews consistently say about them? Similar to how you assessed their marketing plan strengths and weaknesses, now gauge how their marketing efforts resonate with their target audience by reading their reviews. What themes are present over the years of their Google or Facebook reviews? You may discover new ideas for your business’s competitive positioning.
- What do you think their marketing budget is likely to be? Don’t try to calculate an exact number, but do total up the scale of their marketing efforts to get an idea of their budget range and how they allocate it across their marketing plan.
Who is my competitor’s main target audience?
By understanding your competitors' marketing strategies, you can develop a more effective plan for your own business. Remember, the goal of analyzing your competitors isn't to copy them, but to learn from them and find ways to differentiate yourself. Your marketing communications and plan should always reflect your brand’s authentic voice and values.
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