If you want to stay on top of the competition, you have to know where your competition is currently at. As unforgiving as it may sound, staying in business is about being better than other businesses in all aspects. However, as we all know, being better is something easier said than done. Being better is not as straightforward as it previously was, in the modern age. In the past, better products or services make better sales. The present doesn’t follow this simple formula. With the abundance of choices, present-day businesses rely heavily on visibility. In the era of the internet, this visibility relies heavily on digital marketing.
What Is Digital Marketing?
In essence, digital marketing is a catch-all term that describes all marketing efforts done electronically through the internet. There are different channels for digital marketing including search engines, social media networks, emails, websites, and online advertisements. Similar to traditional marketing strategies, the primary goal of digital marketing is to connect a business with prospective clients. The more customers you connect with, the better your chances are at upstaging the competition.
What Makes Digital Marketing So Important?
Digital marketing is the future of all marketing efforts. Whether you like it or not, the world is online and life “on the web” will continue to expand. Acknowledging the importance of an online presence, most businesses are now online. Thus, if you want to beat the competition, you have to make sure that you are working on the same playing field. As a business, it is important for you to understand digital marketing and how it impacts the current business landscape.
Digital marketing can be targeted.
One of the major reasons why digital marketing is now widely utilized compared to traditional marketing strategies is because of how digital marketing can be targeted to individuals who are interested in your products or service. Just take a couple of years back to when the traditional marketing strategy was still dominant and you should know exactly what this means. Billboards, televisions, magazines, and posters – what do these have in common? You never really get to choose your audience. You can’t dictate the demographic who pass by your billboard or poster, watch through your TV commercial, or even flip through the pages of your magazine. While you can do some sort of filtering, it is never extensive. Out of the several people reached by your marketing, it is likely that only a small percentage of these people may actually be interested in your product.
This is the limitation of traditional marketing that digital marketing does better. Through digital marketing, you can direct your advertising to specific audiences. This creates better chances that the audiences reached actually seek out your products or services. There are many ways you can target your digital marketing strategy to the right audiences. For example, social media allows you to identify people according to their age, gender, location, and interests. Filtering individuals according to this information allows you to serve specific ads targeting these people. If you’ve tried going through Facebook, for example, you might have noticed that you often encounter advertisements of products and services you recently searched for and showed interest in. This is one of the clear examples of targeted digital marketing.
Digital marketing makes competition more achievable.
Before, competing with corporations is quite difficult for smaller businesses. Massive budgets are needed to create successful marketing campaigns. Throughout history, there are different examples of the unachievable budgets set by massive companies for their marketing gimmicks. Looking back to the late 1990s, one of the largest marketing campaigns was Pepsi’s rebranding that aimed to distinguish the brand from its largest competitor, Coca-Cola. To get people talking about their rebranding, Pepsi splurged a massive budget on repainting a Concorde Supersonic Airplane to electric blue and getting a lot of big-name endorsers. “Project Blue” was one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns of that time, costing over 500 million dollars. Unfortunately, these traditional campaigns are extremely high-risk. With the various challenges encountered throughout the campaign, it was not able to achieve its goals of becoming more popular than Coca-Cola. To this day, Coca-Cola remains to be the market leader of the global beverage industry.
With digital marketing, campaigns now cost less and are more forgiving. Most importantly, it does not greatly disadvantage smaller businesses that can’t afford to splurge a large budget. Digital marketing does not have to be expensive to be successful. It’s more about knowing your market and knowing what kind of content would click. In the global social platform, campaigns can spread easier without having to cost much. For example, Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streaming platforms, has created a yearly campaign that everyone wants to be a part of. “Spotify Wrapped” gives people a compilation of their streaming data which they can proudly share to their social media accounts. It’s something that people can look forward to every year. It’s simple but it’s a marketing campaign that pretty much markets itself. Without spending much, this Spotify campaign has massive returns of investment. Through the Spotify Wrapped campaign, Spotify separates the in-group of Spotify users from regular music lovers. People don’t want to be left out of the trend. This fear of missing out is what Spotify leverages its campaign on, giving them an edge over its competition.
Digital marketing is easy to monitor.
With traditional marketing strategies, it is quite difficult to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns. It can take a long time before your campaign starts seeing results. That said, you really can’t tell for certain if your measures are helping you reach your marketing goals. There’s really no way for you to identify how many individuals decided to purchase your products or avail of your services as a result of your campaigns. When you don’t even know if you’re doing the right thing, how can you assure that you are surpassing the competition? This is one of the issues that digital marketing aims to solve.
From start to finish, the progress of your digital marketing campaign is always visible. You always have access to the metrics that matter to your company. Social media platforms, for example, show you all the interactions of your company page. It shows which posts are doing well and which are not getting people interested. The number of shares, views, and clicks all give you data that may be useful for your marketing campaign. Traditional marketing tends to use a trial and error approach, with every error being a considerable loss for the company. But through marketing, you can better analyze the campaigns that will appeal to your market through impressions. Not every marketing campaign has to be a huge risk.
Monitoring Your Competition’s Digital Marketing Strategy
Now that the importance of digital marketing has been established, another focus would be to create a better strategy that sets your business apart from competitors. Because of the tools that digital marketing provides, it becomes easier for you to monitor the progress of your competitor’s strategy. Use this to your advantage. Be sure to look out for your competition to keep your business on top. Here are the different things you need to know about your competitors’ digital marketing strategies:
Monitor Their Social Media Activity
One of the most basic ways to monitor your competition is by checking their social media activity. Their social media is a public channel that you can openly visit to review their customer interactions. It gives you an idea of what, how, and how often they communicate with their customers. Other than that, it gives you an idea if their marketing strategy is going well. Visible indicators such as likes, shares, comments, retweets, and favorites give you an idea if customers are responsive to your marketing strategy or not. Among the most common social media profiles set up by businesses are their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles. You can also visit different hashtags that are relevant to your business to review any related posts. To stay updated, create a private profile and follow these channels or tags. This way, you know when there are new posts and promotions and you can match these strategies. You can then take inspiration from strong points of their marketing strategies to improve your own.
Read Their Content
One way to develop relevant content for your own social media pages is by reviewing the different kinds of articles published by your competitors. Take note of the topics that your competition tries to cover. Based on the topics they post, you can improve on your content to ensure that you release better articles compared to other businesses. Be mindful of their posting schedules as well and try to match or overtake their social media activity. You can even subscribe to their newsletters so that you can always get updates regarding their company postings. Based on the information you gather from competitors, create your own social media calendar. List the different topics you should cover in your content and the posting schedule. This is one way to make sure that you have a competitive digital marketing strategy.
Check Your Competitors’ Targeted Keywords
One of the ways to overtake your competition is by understanding the keywords they are targeting. There are different digital marketing applications that can help you determine which keywords your competitors are paying for to improve their search result rankings. By utilizing this information, you can optimize your social media strategy to target the same keywords. By doing this, you can ensure that your company always appears in search results alongside your top competitors. Take a step further and also focus on the different keywords that your competitors are missing.
Analyze the Effectiveness of Your Competitors’ SEO
By knowing your competitors’ target keywords, you can use this information to analyze the effectiveness of their search engine optimization. There are various SEO tools that can help you determine the progress of your competitors’ strategies against yours. If you see that your competitors are doing better than you in terms of SEO, review their website. Discover the different ways they have improved their ranking and do what you can to outperform their digital marketing strategy.
Watch Out for New Links
New links improve the ranking of your competition’s SEO ranking. That said, you need to identify when your competitor gains new links. When they gain new links, figure out which of the content they’ve posted performed well and gained them external linking. Try to match these kinds of content by creating your own blogs that relate to the topic.
There are many more ways to track your competitor’s digital marketing strategy. While we’ve listed a few, this does not encapsulate the entire work that goes into developing a digital marketing strategy that can overtake your competitors. To ensure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, you need the help of our experts.
How Can Proweaver Help?
While tracking your competitors may seem easy, developing a digital marketing strategy involves a lot of expertise, hard work, and research. As an all-around provider of web solutions, Proweaver can help you establish your online platform to grow your reach. We have experts that know the ins and outs of digital marketing. This makes us the perfect partner to help you grow your business.
We can help you outperform your competition through the following services:
In the age of digital marketing, even small businesses can compete with massive corporations. Don’t let this even playing field go to waste. Seek the help of competent professionals so that you can stay on top of the competition. This is the future of business, and we at Proweaver will take your business to the future. Call us today at +1 (866) 777-8315. Our representatives will be in touch with you!
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