How to be Better at Marketing Than Your Competitors

Business competition can be fierce, especially when businesses are competing to acquire the same customers. When you understand your competitors, you can come up with strategies to make your products or services stand out more. It’s all about being better at marketing than your competitors. Here are ways to pull ahead of the competition.

Know Your Competition

If you want to outperform your competitors, you should study them. Know what they’re doing. Learn how your competitors connect with your audience. Then, create or refine your strategy accordingly.

What Should You Look For in Your Competition?

You should know how they are interacting with their customers. Look at their customer support and sources of advertising. Then, capitalize on their strengths and weakness. Also, take a look to see how your competitors position themselves. Do they appeal to a particular gender, age group or niche market? Another area of interest is how they do their pricing. This information will help you know what’s working and what’s not.

Competitors on Social Media

No matter the kind of business you have, you cannot underestimate the power of social media. It’s estimated that more than 2.41 billion people use Facebook every month. If you want your business to succeed, you need to get an edge over your competition.

But just knowing who they are is not enough. If using social media is appropriate for you, then you should come up with a strategy that will engage with your social media followers. To increase your odds of success, figure out the type of content that works for your competitors.

What kind of material are they sharing? Check whether they are using images and videos on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Use this information to determine whether you should focus on writing blog posts or visual content. And don’t just see the type of content they share. Look even further to see which types of content are being engaged with by their audience. Are they publishing videos that have high engagement? Great! Consider doing the same. Are they publishing memes that get virtually no engagement? If so, you may not want to use memes.

Related Blog Posts:

• Increase Engagement on Social Media
• How to Nurture Your Audience on Social Media
• 10 Free and Low(ish)-Cost Social Media Automation Tools

Track Your Competitors’ Hashtags

Another strategy for beating your competitors’ social media marketing is tracking their hashtags. The idea is to know their activity. If you’re in an industry with low barriers to entry, then competition will be high. Also, if none of your local competitors are very involved on social media, you may not be able to find any hashtags they are using. However, you can look for similar businesses in large markets. They may not be your “competition” but they are targeting the same type of people you want to target. So, use their types of content and hashtags as inspiration.

Of course, you should make a point to know who’s is mentioning you online. If you want to build a brand following, it’s a good idea to set up alerts and notifications.

Know Your Customers

Knowing your customers and your target audience is one of the most important aspects of being a business owner. Customer’s expectations and desires are constantly changing, and it is vital to know what matters to them. This can be done by looking at their primary communication methods on social media or even researching the latest trends. Not meeting the expectations of your customers will lead to losing them in the future.

Keyword Research

If you’re not sure what the most relevant keywords are in your niche, analyze your competitors’ websites. This information will give you an idea of the keywords people search for in your niche. You don’t have to focus all your energy on your competition, but you want to stay current with the keywords.

The main goal of SEO is to rank at the top of search engines, to reap the rewards of free search engine traffic. If you’re running a website but you’re not sure how it’s performing on sites like Google, you should look at your competition. Your top SEO competitors are the businesses that rank on the first page of Google for your target keyword phrases.

You may have multiple competitors, even outside your niche, to contend with. For example, we provide “search engine optimization services.” Depending on your location, and how to phrase the keyword, you might find a local auto repair shop. Although our services are completely unrelated to auto repair, the keyword is somewhat similar, and this can cause extra competition for us.

The easiest way to boost your SEO is choosing the right keywords. Other ways include mobile-friendliness, social signals, links, page speed, etc. Concentrate on on-page and off-page SEO. When your website appears at the top of Google, it will get more clicks. See what your competitors are doing with their SEO. Figure out what’s working well for them, and what you can do to outperform them.

Differentiate Yourself From Competitors

Make sure when you’re marketing, you are making yourself unique. Develop a unique selling point to make your business stand out from the competitors and lets your customers know what’s special about you. This difference should be clear and obvious—without having customers wonder what makes you different than the others.

Target New Markets

Tailoring your offer to different market segments can increase your customer base and gain customer acquisition. Think if there are other markets that are similar to your current ones, and how can you reach them in a way they would be interested. There are many ways to alter your message to reach other crowds, without changing the meaning and purpose of the message.

Think of the Future