Conducting Competitive Research Like the Pros

Every business should do competitive research regularly. 

Peeking into your competitors’ tactics and operations provides the direction that businesses need to ensure that they’re not only keeping up with the industry, but also setting themselves apart. Analyzing what your competitors are doing provides ideas for how to improve your own offerings and processes. It also helps identify market positioning and uncover industry trends as they’re emerging. 

That doesn’t mean being nefarious or inappropriate. It just means paying attention to the public information available about how your competitors are attracting traffic, nurturing leads, and maintaining customers. 

Companies of all sizes invest time and money into competitive research, but big businesses typically have the capacity to do it more frequently and more thoroughly than small businesses. Take a lesson from their playbooks and use these 8 tips to research your competitors:

• Search Online
The first step in doing competitive research is searching for competitors online. Simply finding your competitors’ organic listings is a great place to start uncovering their value propositions, keywords, and other important information. Searching among related keyword phrases will give you an idea of which terms your biggest competitors rank highly for, and which ones have potential to make big advancements in visibility. 

While searching, pay close attention to which competitors are running online ads and maintaining shopping listings. Utilizing paid search (PPC) ads and Product Listing Ads (PLAs) indicates that your competitors are more heavily invested in their online presence. Take note of which types of information they include in their PPC ad text and which products they have optimized for shopping feeds. These will showcase their best-selling products and top competitive advantages.

Use this information to inspire your own efforts – not to copy. You want to uncover what your competitors are doing so that you can devise a way for your brand to stand out, not blend in among competitors. 

Items to Analyze:
 Organic listing content
 High ranking search terms
 Online ads 
 Shopping listings

• Click on Ads
Clicking on your competitors’ ads costs them money, which means that doing this too often can waste their ad spend budget (that is, until the search engines catch on and stop charging them for your “fraudulent clicks”). So, out of common decency and respect, don’t do this more than a couple of times. Repeat: don’t be villainous with your clicking!

However, clicking on your competitors’ ads every so often gives you a chance to view their advertising landing pages. Larger companies, or those using marketing agencies, will often use specialized landing pages for each of their online advertising campaigns. These pages are meant to drive certain actions and direct traffic back to the main website, which means that without clicking on ads, there’s no way to view these hidden pages. (You may want to take a screenshot so that you can review it later as well.)
Pay attention to the calls-to-action (CTAs) being used and offers being made to understand the goals of each landing page. Study the content on each landing page to discern which types of content are being used. Look at where images are used and what kind of language is being utilized. Take note of how content is balanced and where whitespace is used to get ideas for your own landing pages. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Landing pages
 Calls-to-action (CTAs)
 Value propositions

• Visit Website
Make a point to visit your competitors’ websites regularly to stay abreast of changes and updates that are being made. Start with the homepage and systematically click through to main sections and product pages. Look at the layout of the pages and pay attention to the overall UX as you go to jot down points about where your competitors’ websites exceed (as well as fall short of) expectations. 

Imagine yourself as a first-time visitor shopping for a specific item and follow that journey across the website to see what you uncover along the way. Take note of any awards, guarantees, or warranties, that your competitors boast to reassure shoppers. Test product-related functionality like side-by-side comparison, image zoom, stock information and envision how these special features can shape the purchase journey. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Homepage
 Website layout
 Overall UX
 Product special features (compare, zoom, stock quantities, etc.)

• Sign Up for Emails
Sign up for emails or newsletters from your competitors to understand how they communicate with subscribers. (Use a personal email address, not your business email to avoid annoying your competitors.) Take note of how often your competitors send emails and what kind of content they contain. Discern whether their emails are primarily promotional in nature, or if they strike a balance between promotions and informational content. Pay attention to whether emails come from a specific employee or the company in general and listen to the tone. Decide what works well and what falls flat from the subject line and text preview to the internal content and buttons. Collect data points across competitors to determine what’s expected in your industry and where you can stand out with your own unique content. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Frequency of emails
 Personalization
 Promotional offers
 Types of content
 Use of images

• Follow on Social Media
Follow your competitors’ social media pages to see how often they post and what they post about. Monitor the exclusive promotions and discounts that they offer on each social platform and try to understand how they keep each separate. Look at how they engage with other followers and what kinds of concessions they make to appease people who have issues or concerns. Take pointers from times when they move complaints offline and aim to mimic this pro strategy with your own efforts. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Post types
 Frequency of posts
 Engagements with followers
 Promotional offers and sales content

• Submit an Inquiry
You can learn a lot by simply talking to your competitors. Submitting a question or suggestion is a great way to find out how a business deals with consumer feedback. Obviously, you don’t want help your competitors by giving them great ideas, so asking a question is the best way to get a glimpse into their customer service. 

After you submit an inquiry, pay attention to how long it takes to get a response and what that response looks like. Focus on the tone they use and types of resources they provide as well as how they follow-up afterwards. Afterwards, analyze how the sum of these interactions affects their brand value. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Speed of response
 Tone
 Follow-up

• Buy Something
It may sound counterintuitive to patronize your competitors, but becoming a customer is a great way to conduct research. Keep transactional emails like the order confirmation and any shipping notifications you receive to compare to your own versions. 

Study how quickly the product arrives, what it looks like when it arrives, and what else is inside the box. Some companies choose to add hand-written thank you notes or an unexpected small gift or sample while others make packaging fun and special. Determine how your competitors are differentiating their offerings and demonstrating their appreciation to customers. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping notification, etc.)
 Speed of delivery
 Product packaging
 Specialized features (thank you note, gift, etc.)

• Search Careers
Most people overlook job listings on the careers section of their competitors’ sites, but this is great place to identify where your competitors are growing and what kinds of skills/experience they value. Take note of areas where your competitors seem to be hiring quickly and major positions that they’re opening up to make room for future growth. 

Areas to Analyze:
 Segments of growth
 Experience that is valued

​Need help mimicking the success your competitors are having online? Find out how our digital marketing services can help your business surpass the competition! We offer affordable online advertising as well as SEO and copywriting services to suit small business and local businesses alike. We work with companies in West Michigan and across the nation. Contact us today to find out more and get a free, no-obligation quote!

Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!