A successful marketing plan is built on competitive research. If you can’t spot your competitors and their marketing strategies, you’ll find it difficult to set yourself and your product apart, and instead of identifying you will wonder who are my competitors. But how do marketers figure out who their main competitors are and what their plans are? Before we tell you this, let us first tell you
How to find competitors in your niche
The first stage in identifying your online competition is to determine whether they are direct or indirect competitors.
Direct Competition
Companies or publications that sell or advertise the same items as your company are referred to be direct competitors. Before making a purchase choice or converting, your clients will frequently evaluate both you and your direct competition.
Indirect Competition
Indirect competition refers to firms or publishers that do not sell or market the same products as your company but compete with it digitally. They might write similar material to you and compete for the same keywords. In other words, they are vying for the attention of your clients.
Here’s a six-step process for Identify Your Online Competition
Gather Keywords
The first step is to determine the keywords that consumers use when looking for businesses like yours or problems that you solve. You probably already have a list of keywords you want to target for SEO, but if you don’t, think about what your clients might search for to find your company.
Google’s and Bing’s first pages of results
Doing a Google search for your term is probably the simplest way to find out who your local rivals are. Most of your consumers will find you by searching for “service you provide> + city name,” so you may start by searching “painters in Atlanta” or “Atlanta painters.”
Make a list of the top ten businesses that appear in your searches, including those that appear in the advertisement section at the top of the page and in the map part for each of your keywords.
Competitor analysis in the Real World
Of course, you can’t overlook your town’s direct competitors. These are the ones you’ll want to pay extra attention to. Examine their websites to see how they conduct business. Take a look at their feedback. You can even conduct real-world research by visiting their locations.
Research into the market to identify competitors
Some businesses hire market researchers and conduct surveys to compile a list of their clients’ competitors and understand how they fit into the ecosystem. You may conduct your own market research by conducting searches, reading trade journals, and so on, but if you have a lot of competitors, it may be more efficient to leave it to the professionals.
Solicit feedback from customers to Identify Your Online Competition
Your customers, once again, are the key to defeating your immediate competitors. After they’ve decided on your company and product, you might inquire about the other companies and goods they were considering. Customers frequently uncover competitors who were previously unknown to you.
Your sales team might question potential consumers which businesses they are considering during the sales process. If customers haven’t settled on your product yet, knowing which businesses or goods they are contemplating will help your team better understand their needs.
Take a look at the data that has been paid for
Go to AdWords and search for the keywords that are relevant to your company. Does any of those keywords have a lot of competition? Check to see whether businesses or websites are buying advertisements for those keywords if there are any. Websites that pay for sponsored space on the search engine results page for a term are competing for space on Google with your content. As you dig deeper into the paid data, you might discover that the websites buying ads are new competitors you weren’t aware of before.
It is critical to approach competitive analysis strategically when it comes to marketing and competitiveness. You have every analysis tools you need to gain a complete competitor analysis of your direct and indirect competitors, as well as to construct a more effective marketing strategy based on that knowledge.