Spy on Your Competitors: Adopting Winning Strategies

Our growth hacker wrote the thorough and extensive guide “How to Spy on Your Competitors .” In it, he describes the manual way one could go about putting together a competitive analysis. Audienti automates this entire process, delivering you up-to-date intel on what your competitors are doing.

But now what?

Having a competitive analysis means not just knowing what your competitors are doing, but also how to weaponize your data against them. While some competitive analysis tools provide you with a snapshot of your competitor’s social media performance, they don’t connect the dots between their winning strategies and digital evangelists.

Here are the best ways to make use of your competitive intelligence:

 

1. Determine which pieces of content your competitors created that are performing the best

If your content marketing strategy isn’t working, simply pumping out more blog posts won’t get you better results. Competitive intelligence should tell you what kinds of content–blogs, videos, infographics, or photos, for example–your competitors are using, and what kind works best for them.

For example, last Friday you saw them post a viral cat video that garnered 500 likes. But you can’t just post curated cat videos forever. There’s a good chance a cat video will perform better on a Friday than, say, a Tuesday. Take a look at how many backlinks your competitor’s blog post from earlier that week earned, and compare it against your own. If your Monday infographics aren’t getting the traction you expected, take a peek at when your competitors are getting engagement with theirs. Maybe your audience doesn’t consume content the way (and when) you thought they did. That’s the beauty of data: it’s doesn’t guess.

Free Bonus: Download our free spreadsheet template to guide you through the process. Get it here.

 

2. See who is supporting your competitor the most, and determine if that influencer should become a target

Does your competitor have a major blogger or journalist in their pocket? Does seeing them get backlinks on Forbes or Huffington Post frustrate the heck out of you? Audienti’s competitive intelligence can pinpoint who the most influential people are in your industry. From there, you can target that influencer with content or information about your product, or provide updated information about your industry if the journalist’s post is out-of-date. You can also reach out for product reviews, ask for feedback, or make a connection to be considered for future media pieces. Leveraging your competitor’s outreach strategy and optimizing it for your service or product takes the guesswork out of who and how you should pitch.

 

3. Find out what keywords get online users to their website

A competitor is any website that takes traffic away from your own. Competitive intelligence should tell you a few things about how people reach your competitors online. What keywords are users entering to find them? That’s the first step, but there’s a lot more to unearth about the entire keyword strategy. How competitive is the keyword? Are there even enough people searching this keyword (or phrase) to craft a content strategy around it? You need a tool that can tell you exactly how customers are finding you, and your competitors, online.

Ready to get started? Use our handy “Spy On Competitors” worksheet to get the most out of your competitive intelligence.

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