How To Learn From Your Competition In Marketing
How often do you check out the competition for your business? Once a day, month, year, or not that often? Your competition gives you a unique insight into what you should be doing. If they lower their prices, you should consider lowering your prices. If they have a weekend sale, you should consider it as well. Why? Because each consumer who sees your competitor do something will expect you to do something similar, otherwise why would they choose you over them? Quality does play a role in the consumers decision but for someone who has never heard of your business or shopped with you, it probably will not influence them enough to choose you over someone who is offering a better deal.
So, what can you do to not only follow your competitors but learn from them? A great place to start is Google. Look at their online presence and how they are setup including reviews, SEO efforts, PPC campaigns and other sites they are on. If they have a strong presence and you do not, it could be a big indicator on why you are struggling. The next place to look is social media. Are they posting, what kind of content are they posting, how often do they post, are they running ads and if so, what are they offering, what are they trying to get the user to do, what are they spending and what type of audience are they targeting?
If you can find answers to these things on your own, it makes putting together a strategy that much easier. But what else should you look at to see what the competition is doing when it comes to marketing? Try visiting their site. What comes up when you go there? Are they throwing information or sales content at you? Are they trying to get you to sign up or have a chat feature come up trying to engage you in a conversation? What about retargeting, are you seeing ads when you leave the site? These are all important questions that you have to ask yourself before you start looking that your competitors and the most important thing is to try and get this information based on the businesses at the top, because you want to figure out the secret to their success.