The Importance of Competitor Analysis and Ways to Incorporate It Into Your Brand Monitoring Strategy

Brand monitoring has become an essential part of digital marketing and customer service in recent years. It is an extremely productive process that can be used to ensure that your brand’s image does not get tarnished. One of the expert tips on brand monitoring is to use intelligent keywords that can inform you about the social mention of your brand on the internet. But these keywords should not only get limited to your company’s name and the related keywords. You must include the competitor brands on the list as well.

So why is competitor analysis an essential part of brand monitoring? It is a type of strategic research that helps you to gather and analyze vital marketing and performance data. You can use the monitoring tools to foresee if your competitors pose any real-time threats to your business. It will also give you an idea of their marketing strategies and how they are using them to their advantage.

So how should you go about conducting competitor analysis? Here are a few steps to going about it.

Make a List of Your Top Competitors

This step may seem obvious to you, but there can be hundreds of competitors that sell the same kind of product or services as you do. Keeping track of each of those brand’s digital marketing activities might be a challenge. Therefore make a list of your top competitors that pose a real threat to your business. The choices should depend on the market place where you conduct your business. If it is a local business, you should consider the neighboring companies that sell the same products or services. If yours is a national or a global eCommerce business, you should look for competitors that have similar successful brands online. You can use analytics tools to gather information about business volumes, market positions, and social media followers to understand which companies must get added to the list.

Analyze Your Competitor’s Contents

After making the list of competitors, the next step is to find and analyze the content published by them. There can be various sources that you may have to scour. It might be impossible to find all the sources through conventional means. Brand monitoring tools can come in handy to identify those sources. There can be social media posts, blogs, videos, podcasts, or newsletters that contain your competitor’s brand names. Once you have identified the sources and gathered the content, you can analyze it for several types of information, such as:

• Frequency of publishing new content
• Any edits or updates to the existing content
• Topics of discussion
• Sources and evidence of their information

The next step would be to compare the data you have gathered with your content. Are your competitors doing something that you are not? If they are, are they getting the desired results through those methods? You can gather such analytical data to make changes to your digital and content marketing strategy.

Analyze Your Competitor’s SEO Strategies

If you feel that your competitors are using similar strategies as you are to market their brand online, take a closer look at their SEO methods. SEO techniques have become an integral part of digital content marketing. They have also evolved a lot over the past decade. Your competitors may be getting more traffic online because they are using a different set of SEO techniques. These days, most search engines put a lot of emphasis on natural language in any content. Gone are the days when stuffing your posts with keywords could rank your website higher. Search engines analyze the natural use of those keywords, with several other parameters to determine which websites will rank high on SERP. Your competitors could be using SEO algorithms that you are not aware of at the moment.

Analyze Their Social Media Engagement

Companies use social media for various purposes, including marketing campaigns, customer service, an increase of brand awareness, and several others. Social media monitoring for your competitors can help you understand how they are utilizing their pages for brand promotion and other objectives. Once again, you can compare these methods to yours and determine if theirs are achieving better results. Social media listening can also prove useful to engage with customers who are dissatisfied with your competitors. That way, you can draw them towards your brand and get the opportunity to earn their brand loyalty.So as you can see, competitor analysis is an ongoing process and must be a part of your brand monitoring and social listening strategies. It can help you understand how you can make your digital and social media marketing more effective, as well as help you foresee any business threats from your competitors.

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