Category: competition

How To Do A Competitor Analysis In 2021

How To Do A Competitor Analysis In 2021

Unless you are running a monopoly, your business is highly likely to operate in a competitive market. An effective competitor monitoring strategy is an integral part of running a business. It helps a business to adapt to changes and developments in the business environment it operates in.

  • Monitor Emerging Threats
  • Stay Informed About Their Content Strategy
  • Learn From Their Mistakes
  • Adapt To Market Needs
Competitor Analysis in 2021

Competitor analysis involves the evaluation of the marketing strategies adopted by the companies that operate in the same market as your business. You might be wondering if monitoring your competitors is worth the effort and resources.

Why Do Competitor Analysis?

Monitor Emerging Threats

A shift in market dynamics may or may not work in your favor, which makes monitoring the market an essential task for you.

The entry of a new competitor or a merger between two competitors can have major consequences in shaping market trends. Such consequences may not always involve the number of players in the market. The introduction of new products by competitors that can affect the need for your product or service can pose a significant threat.

Staying uninformed of major shifts in the market puts you on the verge of losing your market share. Analyzing your competitors allows you to stay informed about these abrupt shifts in the market. If you notice an abrupt change in the market early, it gives you enough time to adjust your strategies and countermeasures.

Stay Informed About Their Content Strategy

Competitor analysis is particularly important in crafting your content marketing strategy. You might have to wait for a quarter or more to understand how you compare with a competitor in terms of revenue. But monitoring content strategy requires real-time updates.

To get an overall picture of their content marketing plan, you need to monitor the specifics first. This includes monitoring the topics, frequency, length, and tone of their content. You also need to monitor the mediums they are using to distribute their content and how they are engaging with their audience in these mediums. This can help you gain the perspective of your competitors on how they want to engage with their customers.

Moreover, this allows you to identify gaps in their strategies and leverage these gaps to gain an upper hand over your competitors.

Learn From Their Mistakes

Monitoring your competitors allows you to turn their failures into your pillar of success. Analyzing competitors also involves analyzing their customers. This means you can stay updated on how customers are reacting to their strategies or how prospects and customers are discussing their product or service online.

Analyzing customer feedback provides you an opportunity to redirect unhappy customers of your competitor to your brand. This simple tactic can prove to be very effective and directly lead to sales.

You can also focus on the aspects of the product or service that your competitor’s customers prioritize over others. This can be especially helpful if you are planning for a product extension or launching an entirely new product category.

Competitor monitoring is also essential when you are setting a performance benchmark for your product or service. Proper benchmarking gives you an accurate picture of your position in the market concerning your competitors.

Adapt To Market Needs

A competitive market witnesses frequent changes and shifts in market dynamics. The ultimate goal of any business in such a market is maximizing profit by performing better than its competitors. To gain this advantage, businesses need to be flexible and adapt to these changes in a way that suits them the most.

Adapting to market disruptions and changes in demand requires an efficient competitor monitoring strategy. It is essential to monitor how your competitors are reacting to the changes in the market before proceeding with your strategy.

Therefore, to improve the responsiveness of your business strategy, first, monitor what others are doing, then adjust your strategy to adapt to changes better than them.

How To Monitor Your Competitors

Now that you have understood the importance of doing competitor analysis, let’s guide you through the process.

1. Pick The Right Competitors.

To get an accurate picture, you need to identify who your competitors are. There may be brands that are similar to you but don’t cater to your target customer group.

Competitors can be broadly divided into two groups: direct and indirect. Direct competitors operate in the same geographical region as you do and offer products or services that can directly serve as an alternative to the one you are offering. While an indirect competitor offers a product or service that is not of the same type as yours but solves the same problem of the customers that your product or service does. It is important to understand the difference between these two types of competitors for crafting an optimum competitor monitoring strategy.

Your primary focus your monitoring strategy should be your direct competitors. Because they are the easiest alternatives that your customers have if they are dissatisfied with your product for any reason.

This doesn’t imply that you should ignore the indirect competitors. In a flexible business environment, your indirect competitors can adopt a new product development strategy and choose to enter the market that you are directly competing in. This is why you need to stay updated on the latest trends among your competitors and adjust your marketing and product strategies accordingly.

2. Choose What Strategies To Monitor.

Ad Campaigns

Monitoring the ads of your competitors lets you identify what offers or messages they are using to reach the audience.

Analyze what is working for them and what is not. This will give you a head start before launching your ad campaign.

Besides, you can also identify the keywords they are using in their ad campaigns, which can play a big role in their search engine marketing strategy. After you have gathered enough insights, you can then craft your ad campaign using Google Ads and/or Facebook Ads depending on your preferred channel.

Tracking competitor ads manually is a daunting task. Which is why you need an efficient tool to do the work for you. Competitors app lets you discover and monitor the Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns of your competitors. You can also see on your timeline when a competitor runs Facebook ads.

Keyword Ranking

It is essential to have a higher keyword ranking than your competitors. You need to identify the ranking of your competitors for competitive keywords and try to analyze what keywords they are aiming to rank for.

If you are looking to rank for a less competitive keyword yourself, the first step is to monitor how many of your competitors are doing the same. Competitors app lets you monitor the keyword rankings of your competitors at all times. With insights about the ranking of your competitors at your disposal, you can make the most out of your SEO strategy.

Website Changes And SEO

Monitoring your competitors’ website can keep you informed about your competitors’ strategy and allow you to set yourself apart from your competition.

You can also identify the changes in the website design or tone in their messages that are getting a positive response from the audience, and incorporate these features on your website, if suitable for your brand. Besides website changes can include significant factors such as pricing changes, which is crucial to be aware of in a competitive market.

While tracking website changes, notice the keywords that your competitors are targeting and the backlinks they are generating.

Due to the fast-changing nature of SEO, it is essential to have the latest updates about your competition. Competitors app sends you notifications every time a change is made on a competitor’s website and makes sure you are aware of your competitors’ actions in real-time. This includes changes to Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons, pricing, new features/integrations, sales offers, etc.

Social Media

Tracking the social media activity of your competitors allows you to understand how they are engaging with the customers and what content is gaining traction among the audience.

Besides, social media is also a trending platform for brands to employ unique promotional strategies that suit specific social media handles. For example, the Instagram “Stories” and Facebook “Day” are essentially the same feature, but promotional content works better on Instagram stories because of a relatively younger audience.

You can also monitor hashtags relevant to your brand, and track how they are performing. Identify what hashtags are trending and which ones are your competitors using to reach a wider audience.

Competitors App lets you monitor the social media handles of your competitors on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It will provide you reports on the latest data on your competitors’ social media reach and engagement. You can set a custom alert frequency and receive alerts on the social media activity of competitors.

Blog Content

One way to assess the strength of your competitors’ content strategy is by analyzing their best performing content. This can be particularly useful while monitoring your direct competitors.

Monitoring blog content can also be combined with social media activity tracking, as brands tend to integrate both mediums to generate maximum engagement. Track how each blog content shared on social media handles performs in terms of reach and engagement.

If you are looking for a tool that will keep you updated in real-time, Competitors app can be the perfect fit. You will receive notifications every time a competitor posts new blog content and/or shares a blog post on social media handles.

Newsletters and Email Marketing

Subscribing to the newsletters of your competitors keeps you informed about what customers are receiving from other players in the market. It will also allow you to understand their email marketing strategy and how it drives conversion for your competitors.

You can identify what strategies they are adopting to stand out among the huge number of emails an average user receives. Like any other promotional channel, compare your email marketing strategies with that of your competitors and look for loopholes. This is an essential step in gaining a competitive advantage.

But tracking every email of your competitors is no easy task. Especially when you have your email campaigns to work with. With Competitors App you will receive a notification each time a competitor sends an email to their customers. You can analyze each of the emails and track their email marketing strategies.

3. Use The Insight To Gain An Advantage Over Your Competitors.

You identified your competitors, monitored their strategies, actions, customer engagement, and obtained enough information to work with. But your job is far from over. After you have collected enough information, it is essential to turn the information into insights.

Raw information about your competitors will not give you the upper hand over your competitors, insights will.

Use the insights to identify market opportunities that arise from the gaps in your competitor’s strategies. Identify the market trends that you are aware of, but your competitors are not, and take full advantage of your knowledge.

If you plan to expand your product or service line, take notes from the success and failure of your competitors and the unfulfilled needs of their customers.

Conclusion on how to do a competitive analysis

Competitor analysis is an ongoing process for your business. Not only does it help you stay aware of your business environment, but also lets you avoid making mistakes by learning from your competitors.

Monitoring your competitors will help you refine your strategies in marketing, sales, product development, and public relations. Tracking all of your competitor information at once can be hectic. Competitors app lets you track your competitors’ marketing strategies on different channels by committing as little as 5 minutes a week! You will receive daily and weekly reports on the activity of your competitors which keeps you updated on the latest changes occurring in the market.

Sign up for Competitors app now by creating a free trial account!

3 Reasons to Monitor Your Competitors’ Ads

The Google Search results page is a highly competitive marketplace, and spying on your competitors’ Google Ads helps you to see precisely how they craft their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and understand what they’re up to. Those insights are helpful when you build a campaign and are also useful as your campaign continues to run.

Plus, there’s nothing wrong with doing a little investigation of your competitors’ actions on different channels – in fact, it’s a “to-do” step on your plan before starting to create your business’ strategies.

Why is it important to monitor competitors?

When it comes to Google Ads, monitoring your competitors allows you to know when your direct competitors are launching a new Google Ads search campaign, so you’ll plan your further steps and respond to keep your ad and brand visible. Plus, by knowing how and when competitors plan and launch their Ads, you can gather valuable insights that will help you to build effective campaigns for your brand so that you can compete against rival businesses.

Spying on competitors’ Ads shouldn’t be a challenge or a time-consuming task. You can always use monitoring tools that automatically track competitors’ Ads for you so you can easily spot when competitors’ are launching new campaigns on Google when they are using new keywords or what their Ads’ message. Also, by tracking competitors’ Ads, you find out whether competitors are sending potential users/customers to a tailored landing page focusing on specific keywords.

But let’s dive deeper into the topic and see the top four reasons to monitor competitors’ Ads:

Reason 1: Monitoring competitors’ Ads helps you find new keywords

If you’re using the right keywords for your business, then your PPC campaigns will be successful. In fact, keywords are the solid foundation of each PPC campaign – so you need to make sure you’re using the good ones for your domain.

When building a new campaign from scratch, it can be a challenge to find an initial keyword list for your business, right? Automatically tracking competitors’ Ads gives you insights on their keywords, as well as details on their Google Ranking positions, so you’ll know exactly how to craft your campaign taking into account comparable data and having in mind what is your actual position on Google and what efforts can be done to overcome competitor’s positions and strategies.

Also, even if you have a list of keywords that you’re regularly using, you might be missing out on new keywords that did not come up into your mind the moment when you build your campaign – keywords that your competitors use at the moment. So you can get inspired by your competitor’s keywords that are relevant to your campaign and add them for your strategies.

Let’s take Asana’s Ads, for example. The brand is very active on Google Ads, with more than 20 Ads launched over the last week. Automatically tracking competitors’ activity on Google Ads gives you an insight into each competitor’s Ad – so you can discover the ad copy, the campaign’s keyword, and the current position on Google.

Reason 2: Monitoring competitors’ Ads helps you to write better ads

Keeping an eye on your competitors’ PPC campaigns helps you to write better Google Ads. We all know that a great ad copy can drive tons of traffic, so if the ads stand out and get clicked, then the campaign’s results will improve. Overall, a powerful ad copy will boost your ad click rates and conversion rates – that’s why you need to master your writing. One way to improve your copy performance is to spy on your competitor’s ad copies and see what works for them and how they write their ad copies.

Analyze all competitors’ Ads gathered on your timeline and answer a couple of questions to understand your business rivals tactics: Are your competitors using numbers? Are they offering discounts? Do they focus on the customer’s needs? Do they make things personal? Are the ad copies super specific?

For example, if a competitor mentions a lower price in their ad or a special offer, as seen below, then you may want to advertise a better offer to overcome his deal and to convince people to click through.

Also, you can discover if your competitors are using catchy words like “Free”; “Now” or if they use power words like “you” to enhance ad performance?

Regardless of the answer, you need to know what ad copy your competitors are using to write ad copy that stands out from the competition and convinces people to click on your ads. You can see what works for your competitors and get inspired by their ad copies and writing tactics.

Reason 3: Monitoring competitors’ Ads helps you to improve your landing pages

The third reason to automatically track your competitors’ Ads is to improve your conversion funnel. Spying on your competitors’ landing pages allows you to discover how they’re converting traffic, which in turn can help you improve your conversion funnel and effectively promote your business.

Also, you might want to know if your competitors are creating tailored landing pages for their leads, focusing on specific keywords. You can get inspired by your competitors’ efforts and see what could work for your case, so you can apply the same receipt for your strategy.

For example, a competitor can send directly to a product/service, after catching the customer’s attention with a powerful ad copy, underling the discounted price. Once the lead lands on the landing page directly from the Ads, there’s a high chance that he’ll make a purchase decision – so you need to understand where your competitors are directing their Ads.

 

In conclusion, it’s important to focus on your competitors’ Ads while researching your competitors. It’s useful to discover which relevant keywords they are using, how often they are launching new Ads and how they are crafting their ad copy, what information do they share, or what call to action that could trigger a lead’s interest.

 


SIGN-UP for a trial period to start tracking for free all competitors’ Ads and improve your PPC campaigns.

 

Competitive Intelligence Apps To Try in 2020

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Building and maintaining a competitive advantage is a challenge, especially in today’s fast-moving business world and in such a highly competitive landscape. To succeed in the digital market, you have to bring value, stay relevant, and have 360 degrees-vision around you to capture every move that can influence the trajectory of your business. That means you have to keep an eye on your competitors’ actions and to know what they are up to.

You also need to figure out how to be one step ahead of them and what are the steps to be done to overcome them – so you might want to use competitive intelligence apps to get to know what your competitors do online without wasting precious hours of manual research behind their website or Social Media channels.

Why use competitive intelligence apps

Competitive intelligence apps help you to screenshot your competition’s actions on different channels, as website, Social Media, Ads., and give you an idea of their digital marketing strategies. By tracking your competitors’ moves, you’ll get to know important details as to how they execute SEO, what they post on Social Media, how often and on which particular channels, when they launch Ads, what’s their email marketing strategy and much more.  By analyzing all competitors’ data, you’ll figure out how to build a strong competitive advantage for your business. In short, you’ll learn how to maintain your service/product on the top of the heap.

In case you’re still wondering if you should or not use competitive intelligence apps to get to know what are your competitors doing online, here are the :

Top 3 reasons why you NEED to use competitive intelligence apps:

  1. Competitive intelligence apps help businesses to capture – analyze – take action in different fields and departments, including marketing, sales, content, product development. Marketing can gather valuable data about their competitors’ marketing strategy, including Social Media strategy, Email Marketing strategy, Advertising tactics, and more. Sales can use competitive intelligence monitoring apps to track competitors’ website changes, as price changes, use cases, and more. Also, competitive intelligence apps are useful for product teams because they can provide information on product features, add-ons, etc.

  2. Competitive intelligence apps help you to anticipate competitors’ actions in the future. Collecting and analyzing your competitors’ strategies consistently during a period allows you to understand their strategy and tactics better and makes you aware of their future steps. For example, using competitor monitoring apps allows you to track competitors’ emails and newsletters so that you can learn about their future launches, new features releases, and more.

  3. Competitive intelligence apps help you to uncover new opportunities for your business – strategies, and tactics that you didn’t even think of yet. By using competitor monitoring apps, you can identify new keywords for your PPC campaigns, and you can improve your content strategy based on their example, case-studies, etc. In short, you can see what your competitors are doing better, so you can get inspired by their success.

Without a doubt, competitive intelligence tools will help you conduct advanced market research – so it’s essential to find the ones that are useful for your business so you can start gathering valuable insights into competition’s strategies. Using competitor monitoring apps helps you to identify and analyze the competitive landscape of your industry, so you understand better the specifications of the market and your business’ position. Capturing those valuable insights is essential for your company’s growth. 

With so many competitive intelligence apps on the market, let’s see a top of Competitive Intelligence App to try in 2020. These competitors monitoring apps that help you to track competitors’ actions automatically and to build a strong competitive advantage in 2020.

 

  1. Competitors App

    Competitors App is a competitor monitoring app for tracking competitors’ marketing strategies on different channels. The app track competitor website changes as price changes, SEO changes, but also monitors emails, newsletters, blog posts, social media posts, keywords, & ads. Users receive daily and weekly reports with competitors’ activity, so keeping up with competition’s moves takes less than 5 minutes/week.

    Pricing: $9,90/competitor/month for the Flexible Plan (single user account) and $14,90/competitor/month for the Agency Plan (multiple users’ account; white-label feature for direct reporting; export data; reviews and more).

    SIGN UP FOR THE 15-DAYS TRIAL PERIOD

  2. App Follow

    This competitor monitoring app allows you to gather and manage apps and game data, increase app conversion rate, app store rankings, and app user loyalty. The tool monitors critical app metrics all in one place — reviews, ratings, keywords, downloads, and revenue.

    Pricing: From $55 /month to $191 /month.

    SIGN UP FOR THE 15-DAYS TRIAL PERIOD

  3. Brandwatch Audiences

    With Brandwatch Audiences, you can analyze and get some great insight by looking at the people who follow your competitors on social.  The tool provides consumer insights and market trends by analyzing conversations across multiple platforms.

    Pricing: Contact vendor for pricing details.

    Brandwatch does not offer a free trial.

  4. PricefyiThe competitor monitoring app tracks competitor prices and available stock automatically and reports this in a web dashboard or email alert. This means you no longer have to check your competitor’s websites continuously manually.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgdm47oyfs0Pricing: from $49/month.SIGN UP FOR THE TRIAL PERIOD
  5. Alexa

    Alexa also provides metrics such as daily page views per visitor, bounce rate, time spent on site, and demographics.

    Pricing: starts at $79/month.

    SIGN UP FOR THE TRIAL PERIOD

In conclusion, these competitive intelligence apps will get you started collecting competitors valuable information on their online moves on their website, Social Media, and more. Each of these tools will help you to make an idea of your current position on the market, compared to your competitors’ position. At the same time, using a competitive monitoring tool helps you to identify opportunities to grow and to plan your next steps.

Please keep in mind that collecting competitors’ information is not enough to overcome them. After gathering all competitive data, you need to analyze and share that information within your team so you can make better-informed decisions for each of your business sectors.

Trello vs. Asana Marketing Strategies

There’s a big chance to come across Trello and Asana while haunting for the best-fit project management tool for your tasks, isn’t it? Choosing the right project management software for your business can be a challenge, especially in such a competitive market.

Still, today’s goal is not diving deeper into the importance of keeping your team connected and productive with online collaboration tools as Trello and Asana, but to analyze the digital marketing strategies of these two main brands that are competing on the digital stage.

We’ll get a close look into Trello and Asana marketing activities on their websites and Social Media channels to figure out each content marketing strategy, type of posts, and frequency. Also, we will be uncovering Trello and Asana newsletters to see exactly what users are receiving from each brand, and what’s each brand’s focus on Newsletters. At the same time, we’ll get to know how often are Trello and Asana advertising on Google and Social Media and more.

Let’s start to discover and analyze the gathered data!

Trello vs. Asana Website Strategies

Monitoring a website doesn’t have to be a challenge or a time-consuming task – nowadays, with automatic online software, the process of tracking sites and spying on competitors’ changes made on their websites is easier than ever.

When it comes to Trello and Asana’s websites, we analyzed the primary type of website changes that impact the customer experience and bring value to the brand. Those website changes are key updates that can be easily applied to any other website to boost conversion, build brand trust, offer a smooth onboarding process, and more.

Asana focuses on brand trust

Brand trust is a big deal for marketers, especially in 2020, and companies bring on first-line what customers say online about their product or service. According to reports, 91% of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation – so Asana is focusing on gathering happy (and very well-known) customer’s comments on a dedicated page, “Who uses Asana”, underlining the advantages of using the tool.

Trello keeps it simple

While analyzing Trello’s website, the main updates are related to text and changes in SEO elements. It’s clear to notice that the brand wants to “keep everything simple” by delivering their message fast and precise, in as few words as possible.

Crafting a concise but comprehensive way of describing a product/service will help the possible customer to get a quicker idea of what your product/service does.

Also, when it comes to creating the right message for an audience, focusing on your user/customer and underling its main advantage to using your tool will help him to make a final decision and to figure out that actually, your product will satisfy his needs.

As you can see in the example below, “Trello Your Way” – where the focus was more on the brand/tool to was changed to “See What Trello Can Do For You”, focusing 100% on the user’s possible benefits of using the software.

Another insight detail gathered while monitoring a website, in this particular case, spotted on Trello’s website, allowed us to keep updated with the changes regarding the process of logging in on their website. Those kinds of changes are essential in every competitive research – it’s crucial to understand how your competitors are structuring their “Login” process, so you’ll spot the possible changes that you might be missing out to facilitate the onboarding of your possible future users/customers.

 

As mentioned before, monitoring a website, especially a competitors’ website, can be a source of information for your further steps. Getting to know competition most recently added features, but also pricing changes allow marketers to act quickly to fill an existing gap between the company and its competitors and to build a strong competitive advantage.

In the example below, Trello added new features focused on creating personalized onboarding and priority customer support – features that might not impact the product/service itself. Still, for sure, it has a significant impact on users and future customers.

Trello vs. Asana Social Media Strategies

Analyzing Trello and Asana Social Media activity on different channels gives a better insight into their type of posts, frequency, and detail engagement. As we can notice from the below graphic, over the last four weeks, Twitter is the Trello and Asana’s number one favorite Social Media channel, followed by Facebook and Instagram.

Twitters – most used Social Media channel

When it comes to analyzing the engagement details, Instagram has the most engagement for Trello and Asana, followed by LinkedIn in Asana’s case, and Twitter in Trello’s case.

Let take a closer look and see precisely what Trello and Asana are posting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

With more than +83 Twitter posts over the last four weeks, Asana makes its followers part of their journey by sharing the team’s activities. Building a “familiarity feeling” by getting to know trough Social Media pictures the members of a team, in our case Asana’s team, helps to make a connection between the brand and the user/customer, but also builds trust.

Speaking about building a connection with their followers and users – on Twitter, Asana is actively engaging with the audience by replying to feedback, comments, and often offering support.

When it comes to Trello, with an average of 22 Twitter posts per week, the brand “keeps it simple”, concise and funny. Overall, Trello has a clear brand image – and when people already know what your service does, then you can “play” on Social Media as you wish, without the constant need to focus on your product specifications or to remember your public what’s your brand’s goal.

As in Asana’s case, Trello uses Twitter to direct its users to set up their profiles, personalize notifications. Plus, Trello always uses GIFs and emojis to express their messages visually – which makes communication effective, modern, and catchy.

On Instagram, Trello has the most engagement, with an average of seven posts per month – compared with Asana’s activity on Instagram, 21 posts during the last month. The post below was the most viral Instagram Trello’s posts over the previous four weeks. With more 450 likes and 12 comments, Trello succeeds in engaging with its audience by focusing on general situations and contexts applying to a broad public, not only Trello’s users.

The success’s receipt in the post below? A famous quote by a famous philosopher, a general truth with whom many people can “click,”; a question, and a picture that looks like a cozy break in the middle of the week.

Also, on Instagram, Trello shares the team’s moments, but in a quite different way, as seen for Asana’s case. If Asana’s team is more “open” when it comes to publishing pictures of the team’s members, Trello is keeping things more private, by choosing suggestive ways to build a connection with the audience.

Trello vs. Asana Ad Strategies

Uncovering a business’ Ads. is not an impossible task – moreover, digital marketers should use automatic tools to discover each time when competitors are launching new campaigns on different channels, as Facebook, Instagram or Google, so they know exactly how to overcome competitors or how to take advantage of their gaps by planning better PPC campaigns.

Trello’s Ads. on Facebook are short, catchy, and don’t make you think about Trello as a tool to use only for professional purposes, but also for … let’s say more enthusiastic goals as a “trip of a lifetime”. By addressing a general and vast context, there are high chances that a higher public will connect with the Ad. and the end with the tool.

On the other hand, Asana focuses on Facebook Ads. with a personal and familiar touch, by underlining the advantage of using their software.

Tracking competitors’ Ads. allow marketers to discover competitors’ keywords and ranking for each Ad. Having a closer look at Asana’s Google Ads. uncovers the brand’s efforts to rank a higher position for certain keywords, as “best project management platforms” or “easy project management tools”.

In Trello’s case, with only two Google Ads over the last month, the brand succeeds to assure the first position on Google with keywords as “Trello”, but still, trying to touch the first Google position with keywords as “live chat software”.

Trello vs. Asana Email Marketing Strategies

Uncovering competitor email marketing strategies help marketers to know accurately what users/customers receive in their inbox – from discounts, guides, updates news, and more. Asana, for example, sends newsletters regarding the state of tasks, a daily and friendly “Update” to keep you focused on your performance of duties.

Asana sends a daily update of tasks

Trello focuses on onboarding and features

When it comes to Trello’s newsletters, the brand’s email marketing strategies are quite different from Asana’s actions on email. Trello focuses on getting users onboard quickly by providing resources to make sure the new user doesn’t miss a thing of the tool. At the same time, Trello’s newsletters have an educative role, proving tips and tricks on productivity and more.

In conclusion, Trello and Asana are focusing on providing value and building brand trust. There are many techniques to earn your targeted public attention, and all the strategies should be adapted to your own brand identity. Even if your competitors are not using the same path to reach their goals, monitoring their online actions it’s a must –  it helps you to seize the opportunities, fill the gaps and build a strong competitive advantage.

Uncover your competition actions and get to know what you could do better for your digital plans, so you’ll reach your goals before your competitors’ will arrive at the top. SIGN NOW FOR A 15 FREE DAYS TRIAL

 

Intercom vs Drift vs Zendesk Marketing Strategies

Intercom is huge, Drift is revolutionary, and Zendesk is powerful. Surely, you’ve heard about these tools that worth millions of dollars, and for sure, you’ve probably interacted with at least one of them, or you took them into account while deciding which one will be the best fit for your business.

Without any doubts, Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk have a significant impact on the technology industry, but let’s not forget that, besides their strong position, these three brands are competing on the digital stage.

Let’s break down Intercom, Drift, and Zendesks’ marketing strategies and see examples of how they build their online presence. Also, we’ll analyze, which are the marketing moves that transform these software tools in successful brands, and how they manage to personalize their messages to differentiate their brands from the competition.

We’ll look into their website, Social Media posts, Newsletters to get insights on how Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk craft their content marketing strategies? How active are they on Social Media? Which type of content are they delivering? How do they engage with the audience? In brief, what Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk do to solidify their positioning on the market, and how do they differentiate from competitors?

Intercom, Drift and Zendesk Strategies On Website

Gathering website data of brands or competitors can be a challenge, especially when done it manually. Finding an easy and automatic way of monitoring and capturing websites’ info in a single place can bring valuable insights into brands’ marketing strategies and spot essential changes in pricing, CTA buttons, new language support – key details that can change the path of a business.

Zendesk Events & Meet Ups Agenda

Analyzing the three websites in a single place, I’ve noticed that Zendesk has an Event Agenda on its website, taking the marketing strategies offline by creating meetups and events around the world. On the other site, Drift has created a whole section of reviews called “What Customers Love About Drift,” in which they imported customers’ opinions mainly written on Twitter.

Also, on the review dedicated page, Drift has changed the background of the button “Get a demo”, making it more easy to notice.

Drift Customers Reviews Page

When it comes to a website, there are many ways to increase visibility and gain attention from around the web. Drift dedicated a page with Marketing Case Studies of companies that used them successfully.

Takeaway: Listing on your website reviews from happy and satisfied users/customers will bring value to your product or service and build brand trust among readers and future customers. Don’t forget that customer reviews are one of the most powerful tools available to online businesses – they help eliminate doubts and can dramatically boost conversions.

Intercom focuses on its free trial offer

Another website detail that caught my attention was from Intercoms’ website. The company changed the item’s order on the pricing page, focusing on the “Try for free” CTA button, instead of the price, as it used to be before the change.

Keeping an eye on certain brands’ or competitors’ websites and gathering data can provide you with valuable insights on their current focus, but also future steps. Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk focus on users, and customer experience, underlining the value of each service and allowing the possible customer to figure out the value of the product before transforming it into a customer.

After seeing some top examples of how Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk differentiate their websites, let’s focus on their Social Media channels and have a look at their content.

Intercom vs. Drift vs. Zendesk on Social Media

There’s not a secret anymore – competitors’ content marketing strategies can give you hints or directions on what/when/where you should post. If you are continually gathering competitors’ data and analyzing it, more than 70% of your content marketing strategies can be done by simply watching what your competitors are doing or not on their marketing channels.

What content is publishing Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk on Social Media?

Having an inside look at Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk’s content marketing strategies allows us to make an idea of how those companies consolidate the relationship with their targeted audience, existing, and possible users.

Being customer-focused, creating value, and educate the audience are the main characteristics when it comes to Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk content. Also, they succeed in building a familiar and personal feeling around their messages, wrapping the content simply and straightforwardly way.

Let’s dive deeper and see some examples.

Facebook

For sure, on a daily bases, you see on your Facebook feed, on average, more 50 posts from friends, brands, and more. It’s hard to notice each one of them and harder to reminder at least two after a couple of hours.
Intercom, in the examples above, is introducing its announcement in a general and broader context by underlining statements with which people can relate immediately. They emphasize that creating content for Social Media is not about continually “selling” or “pitching” for your product or service but creating value around it, creating the idea that your product or service it’s the solution for a specific problem, and helping others to succeed.

Plus, being authentic and creating a recognizable visual identity will always help – Intercom visual content is always colorful, playful, meaningful, and easy to spot.

We all know that Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk are regularly organizing webinars, podcasts, and educational content for the audience, right? When it comes to delivering the message, the brands are choosing quite different ways of announcing the events of Social Media, especially from a visual point of view.

Those differences are characteristics of each brand’s identity on social media. For example, Zendesk, as seen above, has a “raw” way of delivering content using in the majority of the time unedited pictures with team members, creating some personal connection with the viewers.

On the other hand, as already mentioned above, Intercom has created an authentic visual image around the brand, a graphic, and a colorful way of showing the story of each post.

Instagram

Taking about showing the “raw” image of the brand, Drift, and Zendesk have a more personal approach when it comes to content on Facebook and Instagram. Drift shares pictures of the team’s members in their spare time, but also team members’ babies, in this way building a sense of community and a personal connection – like sharing something with a family member, or a friend, or a neighbor – I’m sure you got it.

Also, Drift gives a personal touch of each writing, especially on Facebook. The majority of posts are signed by “Jackie”. Moreover, analyzing all Facebook posts gathered automatically on the Competitors App’s timeline, I’ve noticed that Drift is using the most emojis and hashtags.

As personal as Drift, Zendesk shares team member’s pets, anniversary posts, and cakes, and Halloween masks, and cookies again, and … almost everything that deserves attention.

Of course, each brand has a different approach according to the used channel. On Facebook and Instagram, the brands are delivering more relaxed and personal posts, as on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, a more informal type of content.

LinkedIn

Also, when it comes to Twitter, this seems to be the most used channel to connect directly with users/clients. Zendesk it’s quite active on Twitter, answering user’s questions through re-tweets and making sure everybody using their service is happy.

Twitter

Now that we’ve made an idea of what type of content is Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk posting on different Social Media channels, let’s analyze the gathered data and see some numbers.

As noticed from the graphic, the most-used channel for Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk is Twitter. With more than 3000 Twitter posts during one year, Zendesk is the most active brand on this particular channel. On the other side, Intercom has a more significant number of Facebook posts than his competitors, Zendesk, and Drift.

Let’s take a closer look into engagement details and see on which Social Media channel has Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk reached a higher engagement.

As seen above, Zendesk had reached higher engagement during the last year. The company’s engagement on Facebook is 20 times bigger than Intercom engagement, and 76 bigger than Drift’s Facebook engagement. Of course, to have a realistic perspective over those graphics, we should not forget to take into account Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk’s estimated Social media followers from those channels.

It’s clear to notice that Zendesk has a bigger number of social followers on Facebook and Twitter and bigger changes to get more appreciation from its audience than Drift, for example. To understand how Zendesk is getting its engagement numbers, let’s dive deeper into the most popular two posts from the last 12 months.

This top is automatically generated, taking into account Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk engagement data during the last year. As noticed, Zendesk has pretty much-earned everything in terms of viral posts. The most popular post has, for sure, a hard to beat engagement score.

Zendesk boosted their engagement from a 30-50 rate to 15K by posting candid pictures with Zendesk’s team members’ babies during a “Bring Your Kid to Work Day”. More than 32 shares, over 30 comments with “Sweet”; “Nice” and more than 300 “Love” reactions to the album.

The second most viral post it’s a picture from a Zendesk event hosted in Melbourne. The post has 3000 online appreciations and a powerful catchphrase that resumes entire articles – quite simple, right?

Takeaway: Use images to tell stories quickly and powerfully and get more exposure in the news feed. Plus, children, happy faces, dynamic images look good all the time and are always a safe bet for your Social Media image posts.

Intercom vs. Drift vs. Zendesk on Emails

What Newsletters are sending Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk?

Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk newsletter highlights trending topics in customer support, product management, and startups.

Analyzing closer Drift and Intercom emails sent last month, I’ve spotted one particular email that sparked my interest. Let’s have a closer look at it.

Did you spot Intercom mention in Drift’s newsletter? The newsletter, send by Drift to its users, it features a conversation between a Drift member and a recent customer that has chosen to use Drift because Intercom did not satisfy her expectations. Smart move? Excellent marketing strategy – definitely, a reason to keep an eye on your competitors’ newsletters to spot these kinds of situations that put you in a bad light in front of a big community.

When it comes to Intercom newsletters, the team focuses on creating and delivering pieces of content to educate their customers, help them to succeed and develop on their professional path. With each weekly newsletter, Intercom is launching an issue from business and life context and comes up with the solution, gathered in an article/video/guide. Intercom emails are, without doubts, a source of knowledge, inspiration, and a trusted source of information.

With an average of four emails per month, Drift has a different approach, in a more conversational way, asking for users’ feedback in a, not at all pretentious vocabulary.

When it comes to Zendesk’s Newsletters, the team sends links to webinars and delivers content to help users better use their product and gain knowledge from people from the industry.

At the same time, Zendesk keeps its main characteristic when it comes to crafting messages: being natural, friendly, and developing a personal connexion.

As we could see, Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk’s messaging and style are quite different in terms of tone, approach, and visual content. With a significant impact on the market’s industry, each of those three brands has created a strong and unique image in front of the audience and its’ customers, and they tailored their approach based on their targeted public, business objectives, and brand image.

Keeping an eye on competitors’ actions on different channels will allow marketers/CEOs/business owners to make the right decisions to differentiate their brand and to build an authentic online identity, easy to recognize. Also, watching close competitors’ marketing activities will underline how could you improve your strategies, based on competitors’ data and results.

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How to do competitor analysis effectively?(Q&A)

What’s competitive analysis and its purpose?

When it comes to business, there are some essential steps to be done to start building from the beginning a solid foundation for your brand. Learning as much as possible and as soon as possible about your competitors and your industry, in general, gives you the right “weapons” to anticipate and face challenges. 

One important step is to conduct a useful competitive analysis to evaluate your competitors’ brands. This analysis will give you a better overview of your company’s current state on the market, and it will underline the main differences between your business and competitors’ businesses. The main goal of this analysis is to give you a clear perspective on who is your competition, which are your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, which are your competitors’ strategies on the market and, the most important question, how can you use those competitors’ insights to improve and further develop your business?

Conducting a competitive analysis should be an essential part of a company’s marketing plan, and it should be done at least one time per year. Still, many marketers are running away from this particular “task” because it takes time and resources, especially when the research is done manually. Luckily, nowadays, there are online tools that monitor competitors’ activities automatically and deliver the gather data to the user so he can be aware of all competitors’ moves without effort and with very little time investment. 

Keeping an eye on your competitors, understanding how they execute tactics like marketing, pricing, sales, and trying to guess their future steps will give your company an advantage. 

To start evaluating each of your competitors’ actions in different sectors as business, sales, and marketing, you should start by writing down a couple of questions. After finding the proper answers, you’ll gather the right information for a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats) of your competitors.

How to do a competitive analysis?

Here are the Top 10 questions to start taking into account when planning to conduct a competitive analysis:

  1. Who are my direct competitors?
  2. How my competitors are seen on the market? (Brand image; Brand awareness)
  3. What is the main strength of my competitors? (Products/Services; Unique Selling Proposition; Pricing Structure; Social Media activity; Content strategies; Outstanding Customer Service; Impressive website etc.)
  4. What’s the weakest area of my competitor? (What are the things that people don’t like about them?)
  5. What could my competitors do better than my brand does? 
  6. Which are the leading market opportunities that my competitors have identified so far? 
  7. Which seems to be the direction of my competitors on the market?
  8. In which areas are my competitors a threat to my brand? (Advertising strategies, Content, Engagement, Google Rankings, etc.)
  9. What is my main advantage over my competitors?
  10. What could I do better than them?

It’s essential to focus on the right questions regarding your brand and your competitors’ brands when doing a competitive analysis. In this way, you’ll be able to see the right details that will help you to compare their strategies with your owns, so you can better position your company on the market, noticing which are your main gaps and what you have to do to improve.  

What are the significant steps in conducting a competitor analysis? (Q&A)

1. Identify your main competitors

Why is it important to identify competitors?

To conduct a competitive analysis, it’s necessary to identify your company’s’ (at least) top five direct competitors. Even if you’re a local, national, or international business, it’s important to have a realistic view of your brand and position and to identify those leading companies you’re competing with.

If, until this moment, you don’t have any clue who your competition is, Google is a great resource and can help you. Just search on Google for the service/product your company offers, and start writing down the results. Inevitably, a few of your top competitors will show up after the Google search.

All you have to do is to be realistic about the results and about who your actual competitors are. 

For example, if you’re a small local brand that sells handmade and organic cosmetics, your competitor is not a massive cosmetics retail store located just around the corner, even if they do sell cosmetics. Your competition you should focus on would be another handmade and organic cosmetics shop in the area that is selling the same products as you do. 

Another way to discover your direct competitors is by using online tools. 

On Competitors App, you can search for your competitors based on the keywords provided. Also, based on your brands’ keywords, we automatically detect new competitors and inform you through email every time a new competitor pops up on the market, so no need to do your research manually. 

New Cometitor Detection

Once you have identified your top direct competitors, it’s time to go deeper into the analysis and gather information about what differentiates your competitors from your brand and vice-versa. Here’s where the competitive analysis starts.

2. Start “spying on” your competitors.”

“Spying on” your competitors often means conducting competitive research (known as competitive intelligence (CI)) to find out what they are doing or not doing, when, how, but also learning what their position on the market is and what kind of threat do they present to your business. 

Why must you do competitive research?

Competitive research refers to collecting and analyzing the information available in the public domain about your competitors as a way to grow and further develop your brand. It should be a priority for each business to continuously identify competitors and keep an eye on their activities, as mentioned before.

Once you’ve discovered who your direct competitors are, you can start to get insights about them and their activities! This process of gathering details on your competitors’ business and activities requires time, especially when you do the research manually. 

Don’t forget that your competitors’ data is valuable for your future business strategies, so make sure you access the right sources, or you find the ones who can help you to monitor your competitors’ moves automatically.

3. Get an analysis of competitors’ business

Get an overview of their current state on the market, notice if their market share has been increasing or declining. Also, get a glimpse of their products/services offering, sales format (online or physical location), and their sales volume. Maybe one of your competitors is barely surviving on the market or another one just attracted investments, and you have no idea about it.

Focusing on your competitors’ business details will give you an insight into their trajectory on the market and their current position so you can compare competitors’ brands with yours in terms of business in the present but also the long run. 

You can make an idea about how your competitors are perceived on the market by monitoring their reviews on review sites, so you will understand what the audience thinks about their product/service/brand image.

For example, if a competitor has a bad reputation, you could take advantage of their bad management crisis to attract the audience towards your brand.

4. Get an analysis of competitors’ website

How to analyze a competitors’ website?

Pay attention to your competitors’ website. Analyze their front page and try to figure out which are the main “attractions” for the audience. Also, try to analyze a users’ experience on your competitors’ websites, CTA (Call to Action) buttons, and how your competitors are “catching” user’s attention on their website until they become subscribers/customers. 

Take a look at the feature page, discover the pricing strategies on the pricing page, and try to put yourself in a users’ shoes. Be objective and try to understand why a user could prefer/purchase your competitors’ product/service instead of choosing yours. Also, keep yourself up to date with your competitors’ website changes.

Being aware of their actions in real-time will give you the possibility to make fast decisions for your advantage. 

Website Change

5.  Do a  Social Media Competitive Analysis 

What type of content do your competitors focus on? Are they blogging? How often? Which topics are discussing? Do they have Social Media activity? On which channels? What type of content do they post? How frequently they post? Do they engage with the audience? How does the audience respond to their posts? 

Get a better understanding of what type of content are your competitors’ publishing by analyzing their content. This information can help you to improve your content strategies, to learn from their failures, and why not, to get inspiration from their posts.

Once you know which type of content are your competitors delivering to the audience, the quality, and accuracy of it, you can have a better idea of where you need to invest more effort or resources to start improving your current content strategies. 

How do you do a social media competitive analysis?

Track all their Social Media activities, and get notifications every time a competitor posts a new article on the blog, writes something on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Those insights will give you an overview of their Social Media strategies and will help you to re-plan yours.

For example, if your competitors tend to post on Social Media six times per week compared to your one post per week, it will be beneficial for your business to start being more active on Social Media. The same goes for the blog – if your competitor blogs four times per week and get lots of traffic, you should start generating more traffic to your blog by blogging more frequently about relevant topics.

Monitor, analyze results, take notes, and apply competitors’ “receipt” – simple, right?!

An important detail is to analyze what kind of content are your competitors posting? Are they more focused on directing people to homepages, resulting in new leads? Or are they posting visual content to promote engagement and brand awareness? How much of this content is original? Do they post more videos or images? Do they share content from external sources? What is the overall tone of the content? 

For example, monitoring your competitors’ social media channels will allow you to see their trajectory over time and to spot the moments when their posts become virals. If a competitor posts candid photos with children/pets/nature and gets engagement, then you should follow his path. Of course, each brand has a different image, and you shouldn’t copy-paste what you see that it’s work for your competitor – try to adapt it to your vision and perspective.

6. Get a competitor analysis of competitors’ content engagement rate

Is the competitors’ content going viral? How many shares, comments, and retweets do their posts get? Should you try to post what you’ve noticed that works for your competitor?

When it comes to marketing, social media presence and engagement rates are the salt and pepper. Analyzing your competitors’ activities on different social media channels and how their targeted audience responds to what they’re posting will underline which platform is worth your time. 

For example, if your competitor is very active on Facebook, and you notice that his posts have big engagement, then you’ll not consider investing time and resources to post on Instagram. Your competitor has already “tested” for you, and you should take advantage of this information.

Also, checking the average number of comments, shares, and likes on your competitor’s content will give you hints on which topics resonate better than others and in which cases the audience engages with the content. 

7. Track competitors’ number of followers/followers growth

Take note of the quantitative items from each platform, as followers count, followers’ growth, and try to make a connection between their social media activities, campaigns.

8. Conduct competitor analysis for email monitoring 

Go to your competitors’ websites and subscribe to their newsletters – it will give you direct access to their marketing messages, and you’ll get insights on their email marketing strategy, content, and frequency. Also, you’ll get to discover how your competitors’ are attracting their customers or which are the loyalty programs that they send to subscribers on email. Monitor your competition newsletters and email account and get to know when your competitors are sending e-mail bonuses and updates – even before their subscribers and customers.

What emails competitors send

 

 

All this data will help you to better structure your email marketing campaigns to be one step ahead of your competitors.

 

 

9. Ads Competitors Analysis

How to research your Competitors’ Ads?

Are your competitors running Ads on Google? Or Facebook? On which keyword? What’s their copy like? Discover their most used keywords, monitor all of your competitors’ PPC campaigns, and gather all the insights you need to create better Google Ad campaigns.

 

10. SEO Competitors Analysis

How to do an SEO competitive analysis?

If your company has a blog, then you know how vital your SEO structure is. An essential step in conducting a competitive analysis of your competitors’ content is to check out the SEO structure of that content and also what types of keywords are they using.

Also, having a better keyword ranking than your competitors is crucial. Monitor your competitors’ keyword ranking continuously and get to understand their keyword activities. Those insights will help you to focus your SEO and backlink building efforts on where you need the most. + by looking at your competitors’ keywords, you can generate a list of additional keywords that you can start to target.

Keywords Ranking

Conducting competitor analysis: gathering results and plan improvements

After conducting a competitive analysis, you should have a better perspective and understanding of what your competitors are doing and a more unobstructed view of your brand position on the market. The last significant step after performing competitive research is to compare your business with your competitors’ brands, based on the data you gathered following the steps mentioned before.

The best way to this comparison is by performing a SWOT analysis for each of your competitors. This will help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, and in turn, identify your future opportunities and threats. Once you complete this last step, you’ll have a clear picture of your next moves on how to improve your business and how you can overcome your competitors. You will be able to identify key areas that need improvement regards to your content creation, SEO, and social media engagement. Still, you can also help establish your company’s presence with potential subscribers, blog readers, users. 

Why is a competitor analysis important?

In conclusion, competitor analysis is extremely important because it helps you to identify your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and industry trends.  Also, it shows an insight into your competitors’ marketing campaigns and strategies. It gives you a clear perspective of the things that your potential audience prefers so you can plan your strategy accordingly. 

Competitors App helps you to monitor your competitors’ activities automatically, so you can save time and resources while gathering competition insights. Sign in for a 15 days free trial period, and take advantage of all features to learn how your competitors’ are crafting their strategies. 

 

5 Unique ways to recapture competitor’s customers

Have you ever thought about how, no matter how hard you tried to make a better product or service, people are still not able to find out about you?

The market is overwhelming, and competition is enormous.

You spend your budget on commercials, but conversions are still not happening.

And, while you’re trying your best, everyone is talking about your competitors.

Fortunately, there are ways to make your business a “well-oiled machine” for recapturing competitor’s customers.

If you think that such a thing is not a ”fair fight”, do not worry. With these five solutions we have chosen for you, the competition with competitors remains within fair-play.

Continue reading this article, and it will become much clearer to you how to do that.

 

1. Create a high-converting landing page with competitor comparisons

 

Creating a landing page on which you can compare your brand with a competitive one might bring you much higher conversions.

But, you should be completely objective and insist on fair-play.

Before you begin making a landing page, keep in mind the following:

  1. Never try to add negative attributes to competitors that do not exist, just because you want to stand out in comparison to them.
  2. Don’t promise what you can’t do, because, after that, disappointment by the visitors of your landing page arises. If their expectations are not fulfilled, they are doubtful to return to your website.

After understanding these items, start creating the page.

Find the competitor that is more popular than you, but the one from whom, in reality, you can offer a better solution for your target group.

It’s up to you to take advantage of their popularity to get more customers and, what’s more important, your competitors’ customers.

Why is it essential that the competitor you compare yourself with has to be more popular than you or at least someone who’s your equal?

Because when people search, e.g., Trello, there will also be both those who have mentioned him on their websites and his alternatives.

In this way, someone who is not completely satisfied with the service that Trello provides will be able to choose one of its competitors who offer him with better user experience. Someone who suits his needs more.

To make it clearer, look at the following example that monday.com did with Trello.

First of all, as soon as you enter their landing page, you will see what the primary purpose of the monday.com tool is.

They then point out why they are a better option than Trello:

Then their features come to the visitor’s attention, and only at the end, when the visitor goes through all this information, the key proof is waiting for him.

It’s a comparison report that shows them black-and-white results, that is, why they should choose them and not their biggest competitor.

When you create your landing page to recapture competitor’s customers, you do not have to follow this example blindly.

Use it as an idea in which order should the information go when you decide to write your comparison. 

First, introduce people into your mission and purpose, and then point out key differences and evidence.

In the end, do not forget to set up a CTA button so people could be able to try out your product or service as soon as possible if they wanted to.

2. Write a catchy and objective article

 

Competitive analysis is another great way to recapture competitors’ customers.

The catchy and objective article will attract the attention of your competitors.

If they are not satisfied with a particular segment of your service or want to try something else, this is an excellent opportunity for you to introduce yourself to them.

Choose a few competitors and compare their offers and features with yours.

Don’t forget to write a realistic comparison. Do not present your competitors in a negative way only. 

Look how lemtalk wrote an article about Intercom alternatives

  • lemtalk
  • HelpCrunch
  • Drift
  • Zendesk

Lemtalk gave feedbacks about each of the four mentioned alternatives, including themselves. 

Every feedback is objective and explains why they wrote this comparison in the first place. 

Intercom was not the best solution for them, and the market has a lot of simpler and more affordable tools that are great for small team communication.

They compare each alternative with Intercom individually, tell you what the differences are, and what their experience with each of them is like.

Each tool is rated according to the following criteria:

  • Easy to setup
  • Easy to use
  • Customization options
  • Value for money
  • Customer Support effectiveness
  • Features Score

These metrics help the target group to summarize what lemtalk team thinks about other platforms.

Keep in mind that you should be careful when writing articles about competitive analysis

If your target audience has already used one of the tools, it will know whether you are objective or you want to make money on your competition’s account. So make sure you describe the real picture and your real experience. 

Also, do not try to make your offer seem much better than it is, because people will notice everything. 

Once they become disappointed in you, you will lose their trust and help your competition out.

So keep it real.

Another good example to look at is Userpilot’s article about 5 Appcues alternatives.

 

3. Outreach to the competitor’s customers

 

First of all, you will have to find the competitor’s customers.

Do your research (if you have not already) and find out on which sales channels are your competitors promoting themselves.

For example, in the case of social networks, check who their followers are. You can also look for them in the comment or review section.

Many companies now also build online communities through Facebook groups that are often closed and serve to maintain communication between the brand and its users. Join them, and you will acquire one more option to see who their followers are.

But you should know that these are often the most trusted buyers, so do not get too promotional once you get in touch with them.

Do this with all the promotional channels of your competition.

After you find their customers, make the first step.

Be polite and professional. Do not be too intrusive.

You can contact them directly through the platform on which you have found them, or you can send them an email if you’re able to reach them.

Emails are the best option because building quality mailing lists today can be of crucial importance to your business.

When you contact them, try to offer some deal (for example, a free demo or a free trial of your product) or explain why your product is better than the competitors.

Provide them with all the necessary information if you want to get them interested and convert them into your buyers.


4. Point out competitor’s weak spots

 

We can learn a lot in business only from doing research.

And the better and more thorough the research, the more information you will get that can be of great importance to you to improve your business and increase the number of customers.

Feedbacks, reviews, and comments can tell you a lot (but really, A LOT) about your competitors.

People like to express their opinions, whether they be positive or negative.

And especially, they like to share their experiences.

This is a gold mine of information when it comes to recapturing competitor’s customers.

Reviews on websites such as Capterra are a great source of opinion, interest, needs, and desires of your target group.

When you read what your target group wrote about your competition, you will find out what are they doing well and what not so.

It’s more than an excellent guideline to find out how to make a better product than theirs.

You will be able to offer potential customers exactly what they want and what they need.

For example, when you see a review where someone has complained about a particular matter concerning your competition or has given a proposal for improvement, it’s the right time to adopt that and provide them with your offer.

Then contact them, and let them know that maybe you can be the one to give them what they need and what they expect to resolve their pain points.

You can even have the interviews with competitors’ customers about their needs and problems, or offer them to fill out a survey.

Shortcomings of your competition can quickly become your strengths.

 

5. Monitor competitor’s online campaigns

 

Creating an online campaign requires a lot of time. Usually, it takes several months. But also, while you’re creating it, you can see errors and decide to correct them right away, which means this process can take even longer.

To create effective campaigns, monitoring your competitor’s online campaigns should be on your priority list.

By observing their campaigns and the changes that they are implementing, you will see what they have been doing wrong but also what your frequent target audience best responds to.

You should monitor the following:

If you analyze their strategies and moves, you will find out what are the best practices in your niche.

When you implement them, the results will include recaptured competitors’ customers and an extended customer base!

Remember that when it comes to the world of business, everything should be automated.

To automate the process of monitoring, your competition can use tools such as Competitors.app.

You can choose features and who you want to monitor.

It’s effortless to use, and it will collect all of your important data in weekly reports.

 


The bottom line

 

As you can see, most of these methods for recapturing competitor’s customers are quite simple.

But, if you want to be successful, you need to make some effort and invest time in it.

Monitoring competitors’ online campaigns indeed take most of the time, as there are many items to be followed.

And the damage caused by wasted time is irreparable.

The amount of time required increases significantly when we understand how much the competitors need to be explored.

However, if you want to save a considerable amount of your time and focus on other important tasks, you can leave this part of the job in the care of the Competitors.app.

You will get your reports ready for analysis, and after that, you only have to apply what the app shows as the best results.

It has different packages so you can choose which one is most suitable for you.

Now, with all this information, we think that you are ready to obtain a bigger base of potential customers.

It’s time to start using it.

Good luck!

 

How to win more customers with competitor comparisons landing page

I bet you’ve already spent many hours crafting an ingenious landing page to make it convert like there is no tomorrow. And chances are this hard-won page still doesn’t show results you seek to. We’ve all been here, am I right?

 

However, it’s not over yet. No matter how crowded your market is and how powerful your competition is. The more rivals, the better. You can benefit from your competitors’ name and traffic to increase your own conversions. Just go head to head with them on a landing page specifically designed to put front and center how you are better than the competition. 

 

The truth is prospects adore doing comparisons to competing products or services. Check Q&A sites, Google Keyword Planner or even Google search: the internet is full of discussions on how Product X is different from Product Y. Fortunately, this provides us a brilliant opportunity to take advantage of this comparison process and create a high-conversion landing page. The numbers say that this tactic increases a buyer’s intent to purchase a service or product by 22 percent.

 

In this article, you’ll find a step-by-step guide on how to go head-to-head with your rivals using a comparison landing page. Let’s dive right in!

 

Start from researching your competition organic traffic

If your business rivals are big and mature enough, they already win industry-related keywords and own the organic search results. The key here is to optimize your landing page for the specific phrases like ‘Your Product vs Their Product’ and ‘Their Product alternative’. You can discover the exact terms your prospects are searching for with the tool like Google Keyword Planner. Then, be strategic crafting your copy to help them find your business.

 

It’s not about ‘stealing’ traffic. It’s about introducing yourself to people already looking for an alternative. Ultimately, a comparison of landing pages helps prospects find the company that better suits their needs. And if you are not on top of your game, be sure — the competitors will politely introduce themselves to your dissatisfied customers.

 

Avoid the risk of being sued 

Crafting your comparative landing page, don’t forget to pay attention to trademark laws. We have put together a shortlist of common rules that are worth to follow.

 

First, don’t distort your competitor’s trademark or logo in any way. There is no need to mention that creating a parody of your competitor’s trademark is a poor idea as well. At the end of the day, healthy competition and respect are everything. Also, use the ® symbol in the case it is a registered trademark and put a standard disclaimer as ‘All trademarks belong to their owners, etc.’ 

 

Second, your every claim placed on the comparative landing page must be true. We don’t want to mislead our prospects, do we? It’s a great idea here to refer to some kind of third-party credible studies that confirm your words. 

 

And last but not least, mention the date you have made the comparison. Why? The reason is quite obvious: if something changes, you don’t turn into an unwitting lier. The good idea here is to monitor your competitors’ business moves with the tool like competitors.app.

You come, you differentiate, you conquer 

 

So, down to business. You have already know your what competitor you will be compared to on your future comparison landing page. Now the question is how to set your products apart. 

 

Here comes the need for upgrading your competitive intelligence skills, or simply put, an ability to collect actionable information on your business’ environment. The more thorough your competitor research is, the more prepared you are for crafting a high-conversion landing page. Due to that, you’ll get insights on how to differentiate your product: by robust features, good-value price or brilliant benefits. 

 

Whichever way you go, there are a few crucial questions you should answer on your page. Why should a potential customer choose your service vs the market leader? What pain points does your product solve vs your competitor’s product? I think you have got the idea.

 

Prepare a great copy

There is an ocean of comparison page elements that skyrocket conversions, but nothing can beat an inarguably great text. Meticulously researched copy that accurately points out the differences between competitors, sells your product better than sophisticated web design. 

 

So, become addicted to details and facts. For instance, if you market a SaaS, perform competitor analysis by downloading your competitor’s app and examine it’s every nook and cranny. Yes, it takes a lot of time and efforts. And yes, you will be paid off with the killing content that is cut out for generating leads.

 

And remember that some of your potential clients may not be familiar with any of the products. Therefore, a blog post is a good place to spell out the difference between you and your business rivals as lemtalk – Intercom alternative live chat and helpdesk software for Slack did:

 

or as Chanty, a simple AI-powered app chat, did:

Inject a dose of trust marks

Trust marks are crucial when it comes to conversion rate. They are especially important when a potential client has never come across your company before. You should make them believe that your product is able to solve their issue better in comparison with a well-known competitor. 

 

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Display customer testimonials or their company logos, awards, mentions incredible media, case studies–anything that builds social trust and encourages prospective clients to convert. 

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Want some brilliant tips? You can even show opt-ins, sales or other recent conversions as well as your current visitor number with the help of social proof tools. These tools help you stay clean when it comes to claiming that others have opted for your product. 

Don’t hesitate to address many competitors at once

General competitor comparison pages describe your benefits over an entire competitive niche in one fell swoop. In a too crowded market, sometimes there are too many competitors to address individually. SharpSpring has walked down a different path. Having many similar features, this company brings up five competitors at once to rise above the fray with the message like ‘If we are almost the same, why pay more?’ 

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Don’t promote your business rivals

Creating competitive comparison pages is, in a way, some kind of advertising for the brands you want to beat. So, it’s a good idea to exclude their branding from your comparison landing pages. Below, you can see that Campaign Monitor has removed the MailChimp logo from their comparison page and simply listed the company name:

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Spice it up with compelling visuals

People always want to see and feel how exactly you differ from the competition and what they pay for. Researches show that 65 percent of all people are visual learners. What’s more, visual memory places in the same part of the brain where emotions are processed. In other words, visual memory and feelings are tied together physiologically.

 

Therefore, comparison of landing pages should not be boring. Persuasive and compelling images are crucial for creating an emotional connection and fostering the buying process. With the help of a simple graphic, Microsoft convinces the material benefit of their services. And that resonates better than words:

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Become a storyteller

Everyone and their moms know that a good website copy should provide your prospective clients with the key insights about your product and their ability to solve their challenges. A good marketing story should evoke empathy and build a deeper emotional connection that leads to prospects’ proactive steps, for instance, purchases. 

 

BigCommerce, in addition to having compelling landing page design, shows people that Shopify, their main competitor, is the outdated and unfavorable option for unprofitable businesses. In fact, BigCommerce sets up a conflict that resonates with every prospect who strives for success and growth. That gives BigCommerce a better chance of holding prospects’ attention and influencing their decision to make a purchase:

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Make the product switch as quick and easy as possible

Seamless and no-brainer product switch pulls prospective clients to your company. 

That needs to be top of mind when executing comparative marketing as a whole and crafting a comparative page particularly. For instance, Zendesk defeats the power of inertia offering a handy guide on quick migration:

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Be as transparent and honest as you can

Establishing trust and building customer confidence in your content take a lot of time. And oddly enough, even when revealing where your product is weaker, you contribute to the future loyalty to your brand. Don’t go from one extreme to another: it’s not necessary to highlight areas where your business rivals beat you. Just share a balanced view.

Build a bold call-to-action

Define the desired next step page visitors should take? Register for a free trial? Schedule a demo or consultation? Attend a webinar? Make a direct purchase? When you figure it out, make sure that your call-to-action appears multiple times throughout the landing page: on the top, bottom and in every important section. 

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Wrapping up

To sum up, a competitor comparisons landing page is not Vanity Fair. Instead, it is the right way to challenge your business rivals. In addition to fostering healthy competition, this type of content provides your prospective clients with the needed information on the road to solving their issues. 

 

And more importantly, competitor comparisons pages, if executed properly, help you convert more visitors and boost your sales. Test out the above-mentioned tips to turn your comparison page into a lead generation machine.

 

But before you even start creating your competitor comparisons landing pages, you will need to know too much about your competitors, right? Luckily you can create your account for free at Competitors App – online competition monitoring software.

 

 

Note: This article is the Guest Blog post by:

Carsten Schäfer is the founder and CEO of crowdy.ai, the first Clients-Convert-Clients Marketing platform. Inspired by principles and mechanisms of social proof, Carsten is currently on his way to help businesses become trustworthy and thrive in the digital landscape.

 

How to evaluate, analyse and beat the business competition

Competition is everywhere, and if you’re not aware of it, you should. Competitors are our best friends and enemies at the same time. Knowing how to beat the business competition is of crucial importance.

You probably heard a lot of confident people saying: “We don’t have important competitors!”. That isn’t true.

Although confidence is an essential factor when it comes to business, the competition, whether we wanted to admit it or not, really exists. We must keep up with what is happening in their business plan.

Whatever you do, there is an excellent chance that someone else does it also.

The focus should always be on your business, that’s the fact.

Nevertheless, it’s also important to be aware that the existence of business competition is inevitable.

If you ignore the performance of your competitors, you are likely working against yourself. Not paying attention to them, you can create a huge disadvantage for your business.

If your goal is to prevent a regression in your business, the solution is to make a comprehensive competitive analysis.

Competitive analysis or competitive research is a field centered on strategic research that specializes in the collection and review of information about rival firms. It’s an essential tactic for finding out what your competitors are doing and what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being.

Competitive analysis will help you to:

  1. evaluate
  2. analyze 
  3. beat your business competition!

Why is it important to monitor business competition?

Observing the steps that your competitors are taking can bring you great benefits.

Even before, when online businesses were not so developed, one of the most important segments when it comes to business plans was market research, which necessarily includes business competition.

 

You must know where your position is in comparison to the competitors. Not only when it comes to the results in Internet browsers, but also what are they exactly doing, what are they excellent at, and what are they doing wrong.

You can always use their mistakes or omissions as a benefit for you and take the win regarding the business competition.

Let’s give you one example to make it clearer.

Finding out which keywords are used by your competitors, it can help you realize which are the low competition keywords that people search, which keywords is competition not using, and which keywords are relevant to your field.

Jackpot!

Now you know which keywords you need to focus on and to, in that way, get more visits to your blog, website, or online store.

Given that the business competition is a complex topic, we will take you to step by step through this article and explain how the research of your competitors should look like.

 

1. Who are your competitors?

 

Of course, first, you need to find out who represents your business competition.

Make a list of your competitors.

Probably, the main competitors in your niche will pop into your mind first. If that’s not the case, do your research using Google, which will surely be an excellent source for you.

 

You do not have to take absolutely every brand or company into consideration, but, for example, start with the ten major and the most successful competitors.

You will easily be able to expand this list later on.

For now, it’s important to make the base – the starting point from where your business competition analysis will start.

 

2. Different sales channels, content and the tone of communication

 

In addition to websites that are the basis of online presence, social networks play a huge role in brand awareness.

It’s time for you to find out which sales channels your business competition is available on.

 

Today, there are many social networks that you can use for your promotion. Some of the most popular ones are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Get started and check which channels are your competitors promoting themselves on.

Tip: Do not follow each step of your business competition, blindly. If you are dealing with a job that is not suitable to be advertised on, for example, Instagram, and one of your competitors is doing just that, do not follow in their footsteps. If you are not sure which channels you need to focus on, look at what the majority is doing and try their method or consult with an expert who will be able to lead you to the right path.

Once you’ve learned where others from your niche are promoting their business, it’s time to pay attention to the type of content that they post on different channels.

Some of the content types are:

  • visual content: photos and videos
  • blog posts
  • eBooks
  • webinars
  • newsletters
  • podcasts
  • FAQs
  • demos

Identifying the type of content that your business competition publishes can help you to plan your strategy on different channels.

The important items to pay attention to when it comes to the content are quality and regularity.

When you consider the tone of communication, look at the way your competitors communicate with their users.

Be sure to pay attention if they have a section with the left reviews.

In addition to seeing how they respond to their visitors, you also have insights into feedbacks. See what their users are praising and what they would rather change.

Take advantage of the competitors’ feedbacks to change in your business, everything that they weren’t doing right, and implement what is highlighted as their benefit. You are a few steps closer to beat the business competition!

 

3. Customer support


Your users want to know that they are important to you.

So take good care of them!

If you want to find out where your customer support stands in comparison to a competitive one, get down to the research.

Do not just watch what your business competition is doing; get in touch with them.

Most websites offer the option of live chat where you can start communicating with chatbots or with real people and ask them whatever you want.

 

Of course, if we talk about social networks, do not use the company profile because there is an excellent chance that you will be left without answers.

This can also be a good opportunity to find out some things you couldn’t possibly understand by merely browsing the site.

For example, you’ve noticed that one of your competitors has a particular feature, but you do not know which principle that feature works by. Send a simple message (via live chat, email, inbox) and kindly request more information about the function and the work method of this feature.

 

Thanks to this, you will find out:

  1. information about the feature (or any segment that interests you)
  2. how much time do they need to respond to your message
  3. what is their style of addressing visitors

Do this with different competitors so you could conclude.

One more time: do not blindly follow everything that your business competition does. If they need a lot of time to respond to your message, say 24h, that is certainly not a good way to keep your potential customers interested. Try to be as up-to-date as possible and to provide information in real-time.

 

4. Find out your USP!

 

The USP is an abbreviation for a unique selling proposition.

The most simple definition of the USP is The factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason one product or service is different from or better than that of the competition.

The USP is extremely important for you to stand out in comparison to the other competitors.

This should be your main characteristic that will be connected by others to your product or service, and which will make it easier for them to remember you by.

 

 

Find out what stands out as the main advantage of your business competition. Let this information serve you as an inspiration for your USP if you do not already have a clear idea of what is separating you from the others.

Let’s see some great examples of USPs:

M&Ms: The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

M&M’s USP is imaginative and easy to remember. Be honest, do you know anyone who has not heard of M&Ms?

Domino’s Pizza: You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.

There is a pizzeria on every corner, and therefore, the business competition is enormous. But Domino’s Pizza has come up with the simplest USP that works. Why is that? When you think of eating a pizza, you want it fresh, hot and to arrive as soon as possible. That’s precisely what Domino’s Pizza offers, and because of that, the very next association on your mind will be related to this pizzeria in particular.

Make sure to present your USP to the audience in an ethical and/or creative way, and let this become one of the main strengths in beating the business competition.

Tip: When developing your USP, you must keep in mind your ideal buyer persona. The USP should attract your target audience, so pay attention to the following:

  • what motivates them
  • what are their interests
  • what are their wishes
  • gender
  • age range
  • where do they live

 

5. Search engine optimization

 

We have reached the last but not the least important step when it comes to evaluating and analyzing the competition.

By knowing the search engine optimization strategies of your competitors, you can give them the final blow and finally beat the business competition!

Every brand wants to find itself in the highest position when observing the search results in Internet browsers – people focus mostly on the first page of the results.

How Impact says: 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.

It is a big deal.

Every successful SEO strategy must include business competition research.

The investigation of competitive procedures is an absolute fair-play. Besides, be sure that your business competition is already observing the steps that your company makes, so why would you then allow them to be in the lead?

Today, many tools can help you monitor your competitors’ performance, and the conclusions you make based on the results will help you to improve your SEO rankings.

Some of these tools are:

By using some of these tools, you will save yourself valuable time which you can use for some other tasks.

While monitoring your business competition, you can find out:

  • which keywords do they use
  • what types of backlinks do they post
  • what kind of content do they publish
  • how do they rank

Keywords are an essential part of a good SEO strategy. This should be your starting point when you start planning your SEO strategy, but also when you monitor the strategies of your competitors.

  1. By analyzing the keywords used by your business competition, you can see which are the words that are best quoted in your niche.
  2. You will see which words, some that you maybe haven’t used previously, have a high number of searches and therefore you will get new suggestions.
  3. You will be able to see which are low competition keywords that your competition does not use, and you can target them.

A backlink is a great option to provide yourself with more significant traffic. You will find it easier to get a higher ranking by using backlinks on your website or blog. Your business competition is probably already using backlinks of the sites that might be important to you.

  1. By tracing backlinks to the websites of your competitors, you will find out which are the popular sites that can bring you more visits.
  2. You will find websites that are related to your niche that you can contact for outreach and link building more efficiently.

Content analysis will show you which type of content the people best respond to. Consequently, you will know which type of content you need to showcase on your sales channels.

All these items will help you find out the SEO metrics of your business competition.

Why is this important?

It’s important to know where you are in comparison to the competition. The results of these analyses will help you to evaluate the positions of the business competition.

You will find out what are you doing better and what are you doing worse than the others in your niche.

Learn their strengths and weaknesses.

When you get the results in front of you, you will know in which direction you need to go to improve your business and to beat the competition.

 

The bottom line 

 

If you decide to follow these steps, you will have a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of your business competition, and you will know in which direction you need to go.

If you have felt stuck a couple of times, the number of visits has dropped, the sales have stopped, or you do not know what else you could improve, this is a great way to see the real situation.

Analyzing and evaluating competitive brands will surely broaden your perspective.

Keep up with the innovations.

Most companies that fail or go bust are those that do not keep in step with the times and changes. Do not let yourself get too comfortable even when you have the most conversions.

Don’t forget to do competitive analyses regularly.

It is not enough to do the research only once. We live in a time when things change at lightning speed, and one trend gets inherited by others.

For example, you can do it four times a year.

Maintain your audience’s interest.

Follow these tips, and the progress will be unavoidable.

After gathering all this information, it’s time for your strategy.

Be ready to beat the business competition!

 

Improve User Onboarding by Monitoring your Competitors [Actionable Guide]

Improve User Onboarding by Monitoring your Competitors [Actionable Guide]

Competition Monitoring has plenty of use cases. Indeed, it can help you to improve user onboarding and attract more customers.

Do you know that competitors’ are the core of every business? And that carefully conducting your competitors’ research is going to save your business from doom?

Me neither, until I failed when I started my first startup. The reason why we failed is that we didn’t pay too much attention to our competitors. We just thought:

“Okay, we have this feature, this feature and this feature. All of them are amazing! The customers would love them!”

The truth is: nope. They didn’t love them. They didn’t even use our product. Why?

Our competitors were some 20-year old companies from the IT sector. Their websites were awful. But still, they managed to provide enough value to their users.

We have just overwhelmed existing and useful products. It turned out that our potential customers liked simplicity.

We didn’t realize that our competitors’ are big gamers in our industry. We have just thought: “Nah, they have a crappy website. They are useless.”

That thinking cost us our time and money.

My dear friends, that’s the reason why I have decided to show you what I have learned afterward, what were my mistakes, and how can you implement some of the tactics.

In this article, we will cover everything from doing great competitive research, over recapturing competitors’ users to successfully onboarding them, and creating in-app experiences suitable for them.

Let’s dive in!

Easiest, Fastest and Most Efficient way to Conduct your Competitors’ Research

We all hate conducting competitive research.

Yea, I will admit it – I hate it too!

But the point is – we need to do this in the best way we can if we want to build a profitable and enduring business.

So, here is how to do it in several steps (Yea, it will still cost you some time, but in the worst, you will invest no more than 5 hours for this – instead of 10+ like we all used before):

1. Write down several most relevant keywords for your business, product, service or feature (10 minutes)

2. Type all of them in Google and write down the first eight links on the page for every particular keyword. (20 minutes)

3. Filter those links to find out who is your competitor and who isn’t. (20 minutes)

4. Create an insightful and detailed spreadsheet, where you can put as much information as you can. Here is some necessary information you should look for:

– Name of the company

– Headquarters, Address, State

– Founders

– Resources (Team size, investments, founders previous experience, etc.) Everything which can help you to determine their power and ability to create and make changes faster.

– Product features

– Unique Value Propositions

– Distribution and User Acquisition channels (Social Networks, Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.)

– Unique Buying Persona and Target Audience

– Technical information (Languages used to build the product, Website information – Traffic, Domain Authority, Trust Factor, Citation Flow, Spam Score, etc.)

(20 minutes)

5. Find this data (30 minutes to 1 hour per competitor).

And that’s it! You will have a perfect Competitive Research in a few hours!

Now it’s time to see what can we do with this data. We can’t just put it in some forgotten or hidden folder. Right?

How to use your Competitive Research Data in your Advantage?

So, how can great competitive research help us to improve and expand our business?

From all the information you found above, you can see a lot of useful things about some of your competitors you can use in crafting and executing significant competitive advantages and to improve user onboarding:

  • Knowing your competitor’s available resources (time size, investment, etc.) will help you to determine what are their strengths and how fast they can implement changes, new trends, and pivoting.
  • Having clear insights into their Unique Value propositions and key features will help you to understand their offerings and what’s their trigger when acquiring new customers
  • Their founders must become your best friends – following their founders on all possible social media and rewatching or re-reading their old interviews will help you to see through what challenges they passed and how they solved some particular problems.
  • Have clear insights into their marketing channels – understanding this will help you to find out and determine their best acquisition and distribution channels. Understanding how are they onboarding their new customers is crucial if you want to beat them.

Now when we saw how can some particular data from Competitive Research help us, it’s time to see how can we create converting onboarding tactics.

Customers are bosses

There is no business that will live without its’ customers. It’s the same for your competitors and the same for you too. Whether you are in a big or small market, sometimes it’s not just enough to fight for, let’s say, 2% market share.

Sometimes we need to acquire a much more significant share if we want to build an enduring business and create a monopoly.

Having a clear mindset here is crucial, so ask yourself this:

“What would happen if I recapture some of my competitors’ customers?”

Yea, you read it right.

When you succeed in recapturing some of your competitors’ customers, in the long run, you will not recover just a few of them. You will recapture much more.

The key thing here is to offer some new key features, value propositions, or even to personalize your onboarding experience.

The best way to test your product, features and unique value proposition is actually to talk to your competitors’ customers! 🙂

Create some little surveys or even conduct some 15-minute call or video interviews. Because they are charming people (who else would give you 15 minute of their time in this busy world. right?), you can offer them some extended trial, discount, or your exclusive learning material.

The goal of your competitors’ customer development is to:

  • Understand their most significant pain about problems that you and your competitors are solving.
  • Realizing what’s important for them.
  • Creating better competitive advantages and onboarding methodologies based on your competitors’ customer development.

Education is the key

There is no better way to improve user onboarding than educating your competitors’ customers better.

Find the gaps in your competitors’ products and onboarding method, and improve them! Let’s take the following example:

There is a lot of Project Management tools right there. We have Asana, Trello, Atlassian, and many more of them, and almost all of them are complicated. The best software out there is the one that provides the best education and onboarding methodologies for its customers.

When some customer is changing one tool and going to another one, the biggest problem he has is the transformation itself.

Use the data from your researches and make sure that your product, onboarding strategies, and educational material are filling the gaps.

Create unique explaining videos. For example, you, as a CEO, can speak and explain your potential customers how can they use the tool or what are the benefits of using your tool instead of your competitors’ tools.

Pro Tip: put your face whenever you can – it will help you to establish better relationships with your customers and improve your personal and company brand.

Track Competitors’ Transactional Emails

Transactional (or drip) emails are triggered and behavioral-based emails.

According to Experian, transactional emails receive eight times bigger open rates than any other type of marketing emails.

Sending transactional emails will undoubtedly help you to improve user onboarding.

What are some transactional email examples?

– Welcome emails – emails that are sent whenever someone creates an account

– Triggered transactional emails – your user just activated your most important feature? Send him the tips and tricks about that particular feature through email!

– Activity-based transactional emails – Your user isn’t seen for a while? Remind them of the benefits of using your product

– The trial is ending – Whenever your user’s trial is about to end, remind them through transactional email.

There are countless examples of using transactional emails to improve user onboarding.

Here are some examples of how we at Competitors App use transactional emails to improve the activation rate.

improve user onboarding with transactional emails

Whenever we see that someone didn’t add it’s domain, we trigger them this email.

This particular email generated over 50% open rate, and more than 30% of those who opened this email added their domain.

improve user onboarding with transactional emails

Here, we’re offering our trial customers dedicating help and support by asking them to schedule 1 on one meeting with us.

This particular email generated more than 43% open rates and more than 25% of people who opened it scheduled the meeting.

Do you see the power of transactional emails?

Now, how can you get the most out of your competitors’ transactional emails?

Your competitors invested a lot of time and money to craft amazing transactional email campaigns or copies. They probably know better than you what’s working and what’s not.

So, why do you need to reinvent the wheel?

When you’re adding new competitors in your Competitors.app account, you will see the following notification at the bottom:

improve user onboarding - monitor transactional emails

If you want to track and keep an eye on your competitors’ transactional emails, create a trial account with the [email protected] email address.

For example, if you want to monitor HubSpot, it may look like this:

improve user onboarding - monitor transactional emails

Afterward, you can check your competitors’ transactional emails in your Competitors App dashboard.

Now you’re ready for skyrocketing your transactional email open rates!

Improve user onboarding with better in-app experiences

Is your goal to make better user onboarding? Right?

By now, you know your competitors very well; you know their strengths, weaknesses, unique features, and user activation events. You know what their customer’s pain points are, and how are they activating their trial users through transactional emails.

There are two last steps you need to conduct if you want to improve user onboarding flow, improve your retention, reduce churn, and activate more users:

  • Check their in-app user onboarding
  • Improve user onboarding

The best way to check your competitors’ in-app user onboarding is actually to try their product.

Signup to them, and see what are they doing.

How does their user onboarding flow look like? Do they use checklists, product tours, or progress bars? What are their tooltips?

Check whatever you can and write it down.

If you’re “lucky” and your competitors are well-established businesses, try to search for their user onboarding teardowns on the web.

Like this one, for example:

improve user onboarding - dropbox

The next step is to improve user onboarding flows and make them better than your competitors have.

You can always use your dev resources or open libraries to create amazing in-app experiences, UX, and UI elements.

But, you can also use user onboarding software to accomplish that.

For example, User pilot is one of the Walkme and Appcues alternatives. It helps you to build triggered and behavioral-based user onboarding elements and in-app experiences.

The Bottom Line

As far as we have seen, you can achieve great results with constant competition monitoring. There are various use cases, and how to improve user onboarding based on your competitors’ research and competition monitoring is undoubtedly one of them.

If you want to know more about how Competitors’ App can help you to create competitive advantages, you can check our features or signup for free!

Read other competitive articles for your business

  • Competitive Intelligence Business – Competitive intelligence (CI) is a term you may have come across before. Like many industry buzzwords, it isn’t immediately apparent what CI is and how it can be useful to your business. But don’t worry, because we’re going to explain the ins, outs, pros, and cons of CI.

BEST COMPETITORS GUIDES

Monitor competitor website changes
You can get alerted when your competitors are making changes to their website.

Find competitor keywords
Finding your competitors’ keywords is essential for your business. It means that you focus your entire website on targeting high volume, quality keywords.

Track Social Media Pages
Social media competitive analysis is the constant monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.

Competitor Email Monitoring
Tracking your competitors’ emails takes some time, but it’s well worth it!

How to do competitor analysis
One important step is to conduct an effective competitive analysis to evaluate your competitors’ brands.

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