Every organization–businesses, universities, and nonprofits–can benefit from competitive business insights. How you react to the competition is key to your success.
You need to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and objectives. One of the best ways to gain this understanding is to listen to the way they talk to their customers and target audience. Even more revealing: find out how their audience is reacting to the conversation. Here are ten business insights you’ll gain by watching your competitors and how they communicate with their audience:
1. Better understand competitors’ strategies and tactics.
Observing the type of content, how your competitors talk to their audience and where they’re doing it will tell you a lot about their strategy and tactics. Keep track of actions that seem to be working for them. Monitoring engagement will give you a sneak peek into changes you might want to make to your businesses tone and voice to optimize your engagement (without all the costly testing).
2. Truly identify your target audience.
Are your business adversaries capturing a portion of your customers? If so, why? What value are they creating that you’re not? You may be surprised to find that your target audience isn’t who you thought it was or maybe you’re not creating content concepts they find compelling. Find out how Perfect Bar discovered how to better target their ideal audience and increase consumer-generated posts with a little competitive research.
3. Determine relative benchmarks.
Analytics are great, but not if you don’t have any context to compare your data. Keeping tabs on your competitors allows you to compare apples to apples and see how well you’re doing compared to your competitors, not general benchmarks.
4. Ensure you’re not leaving money on the table.
By learning what products and/or services your rivals offer and how much they charge for them, you can see if you’re not charging enough for your product. If there’s a significant discrepancy between the price of your product/service and theirs, revisit the value question; What value are they creating that I’m not? (or vice versa) How much is that worth? Can you close the gap?
5. Identify strengths and weaknesses; including yours.
Sometimes, you may not recognize one of your strengths because it’s only a strength relative to your competitor. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses may open your eyes to advantages you didn’t even know you had.
6. Develop new strategies to acquire new customers.
With digital marketing tools like Rival IQ, identifying key opportunities is a snap and sets you up for a big return on your investment. Watching the moves of your competitors and organizations you’d like to emulate positions you to adopt best practices faster and acquire new customers first.
7. Identify potential key partnerships.
Partnerships with suppliers and companies that offer products and/or services that compliment yours can add significant value to your customers!
8. Gain critical insights.
Identify the types of content your audience finds the most engaging, how, when and where they like to communicate with your business.
9. Determine your competitive position in the market space.
Are you the leader in your market? Once you know where you stand in your market, you can set goals and begin planning for next steps.
10. Get more funding!
Need some more cash flow for growing your business? Great, you’re on the right track! An investor will most likely need to see a competitive analysis before funding you.
Want to dig deeper to discover more insights? Download your free copy of our whitepaper, “Conducting a Competitive Analysis“, a complete guide for content marketers to build meaningful benchmarks and improve your marketing performance.
The post 10 Business Insights You’ll Gain By Watching Your Competitors appeared first on Rival IQ.
