By Lauren Wilkison

Finding out your competitors’ marketing activities can give you a glimpse into new opportunities your business could leverage for better results. There are a variety of business tools that will allow you to take a look at exactly what your competitors are doing online so that you can decide if any of those activities would suit your business.

Identify Your Top Competitors

The first thing that you should do is make a quick list of your top competitors. If you don’t know which competitors would be considered your top competitors, there are a few ways that you can narrow down your list. A quick and easy way to find out which competitors have a strong digital presence is to Google keywords that are particularly relevant to your business and jot down all of the competitors that come up for those terms on the first page of the search engines. You can also take a look at the information about their business that is coming up on Google about their business to see how they are marketing themselves and what may be attracting customers to click their listing.

Analyze their Owned Media

Once you have your list of competitors, take a look at their websites and social media profiles. Is their website new? Is it user friendly? What are the most important aspects of their business that they are featuring on their website? How does the user experience (UX) compare to that of your website?

When evaluating social media profiles, try to find the ones that are linked from their website first. If you can’t find any social media profiles on their website, you can search the main social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. for the business name or Google the business name with the name of the social media site, e.g., “Tom’s Auto Shop Facebook.” Once you have identified which social profiles they have, look into how often they are posting, what they are posting, how engaged their audience is, and whether your social media profiles are comparable to theirs.

Review their Earned Media

Earned media refers to mentions online that the business did not pay for or promote themselves, e.g., customer reviews, press mentions, etc. If your business sells products on Amazon, take a look at your competitors reviews. How are the customers reacting to their products and customer service? How does that experience align with the experience that you have with your customers?

Drawing Conclusions

In addition to hand searching your competitors and evaluating for yourself, there are also some digital tools such as SEMRush and MOZ that you can use to get an even more detailed look into what your competitors are doing. Use these tools to help provide more depth to your analysis as you draw your conclusions about which marketing activities are working for your competitors and to decide if there are any that you should employ in the future.

Retail businesses, travel/tourism businesses, sports or news organizations, as well as many others can benefit from a professional social media presence. If you are curious as to whether social media should be part of your overall digital marketing plan, schedule a consultation with experts at Organically today.