What is competitor analysis and competitor strategy?
Competitor analysis is basically analyzing your competitor’s business methodology, products, and the pattern they use when it comes to organic social media postings.
Each of your competitors follows a particular pattern of posting, using which they create engagement, connect with their customers and eventually build long-term trust.
You as a business need to keep an eye out for your competitors to maintain pace with them and you can also use similar tactics to thwart them and gain access to their followers and customers.
A competitor strategy is basically divided into 2 main halves:
- Organic strategy
- Paid strategy
As you know, regular social media posting is the method to gain organic reach, which includes connecting with your customers on an emotional and intellectual level and eventually building long-term trust with them.
What is an organic strategy?
The organic strategy involves everything that your competitor is posting. You simply have to dive a bit deeper when you go through their social media handles.
Observe the content pattern, the concepts they post, the sequence of postings, any particular design they’re sticking to, the hashtags they use, the captions, everything.
An Organic strategy involves a lot that usually only a trained eye can detect.
The initial stages of any organic strategy involve self-identification, or in simple terms, creating one’s identity, online.
This involves creating and spreading awareness of your brand among the millions that are online, scrolling, and tapping through social media.
Here the motto is to generate awareness and make sure that you create your identity online. This is a phase that will need one to post about their services/product and also everything about their brand, it can be your inspirational story, how you came up with the product, what your product can provide, what your brand can provide, etc.
This is done to make sure that you gain a certain following by influencing the viewers. Here you generate value for your brand.
The main advantage of an organic strategy is that its boon is long-lasting and that your identity, once created, will remain in the minds of your followers.
The second phase is connecting with your customers on an emotional and intellectual basis. Here you show your customers that you understand their problems and troubles. The motive here is to get to them emotionally.
You can post creatives that emphasize their trouble points and can show them how your brand understands their problems and that your products are specially made to help them in these areas.
A very common example would say a unique fashion clothing brand.
You can pinpoint problems that people face fashionwise. A very common example can be dry-fit sportswear. The material helps soak all your sweat and also keeps you cool.
This happens to be the solution to the one main problem sports persons face, i.e. facing trouble in movement with clothes hindering movements. The brand here can highlight the selling points of their product and trigger them emotionally by highlighting games lost simply due to moments that led to lower performance.
Triggering their emotional side will again enhance your influence on them. You show them that you know their pain points. This instills a connection between you and your customers and will also result in more followers because, at this stage, electronic word of mouth also starts doing its thing, social media has a lot of influence on this area of marketing.
The last stage here is building a long-lasting bond of trust. At this point, you will have a customer base and a good following. Here you can run strong marketing campaigns that your customers can share among the people they know, thus building trust.
Paid Strategy
This is the part that houses your competitor’s trump card. This area involves the heaviest marketing campaigns that are run using paid ad services provided by Facebook and Google.
Your competitor runs his golden ads here. These are the real deal and much more important than the organic strategy. Not important per se but this is the real lead generating source.
The proper analysis here can actually give you quite a jump start when it comes to grabbing on to their followers.
This strategy involves paid ads, influencer marketing content, brand-sponsored content, and display ads, and these, in particular, can be easily spotted by the “sponsored” or “promoted” tag at the bottom of the post.
The only problem here is that these won’t be posted on their social media handles. But there’s a catch here too.
As you know, Facebook and Instagram are merged as one, and there is one place where you can view all these paid marketing campaigns that your competitors boost.
Ever heard of the Facebook ad library?
The Facebook ad library is a place where you can get access all these ads that are run on every medium, be it gram, Facebook, Google, everywhere!
You simply have to select “all ads” in the first category selection slot.
You can then add your competitors’ names in the 2nd category slot. This will reflect every ad they are running on every social handle.
This can give you a sneak peek at their paid strategy.
The Best Solution
Keeping a check on your competitors might seem like a tedious task, as this is something that needs constant checks.
By far, the best solution that any digital marketer can come up with is tying up with Dreamsdesign!
We put our best team on the field to keep constant surveillance on your competitors and come up with breakneck concepts and patterns that can help you overtake each one of them.
We maintain your best SEO ranking simply to show the world, the importance of your brand’s product and/or services!
Tying up with an agency like ours can help you outsource this key feature. Outsourcing this can provide you with ample time to work on your services and come up with new products because once you’re a brand, upwards is the only direction you’d grow!