Competitor research

When developing a promotion strategy, it is important to know your competitors well. Where do they attract traffic from, how do they create popular content, and what do customers think of them – all this will be told to you by competitive analysis.

Why do we need competitor analysis?

When developing a brand promotion strategy in social networks, it is important to go through three stages:

-Explore the target audience

-Explore competitors

-Take into account when developing strategies analysis of competitors, audience and market. This will influence the choice of content, posting time, etc.

Competitor analysis is necessary for competently building a promotion strategy in SMM. The strategy helps us even before the start of activities reasonably understand the goals, timing and scope of work.

This slide presents the SOSTAC planning system model. Situation Analysis is the starting point for accurate strategy development.

The strategy is based only on data. Not understanding where we are, we do not know where we will go.

What data can we get from competitors?

1. What kind of social networks they use , and what social networks give them traffic – this gives us an understanding of what social networks we will be able to get traffic and audience.

2. The most popular type of content helps to competently develop your own content rubricator.

3. The general information background (negative and positive) helps to understand the problem areas of competitors, not to repeat the mistakes of others and to use the advantages of others.

4. Timing for posting helps to understand what days and hours most effectively publish content.

As a result, analysis of competitors gives us an understanding of WHAT to publish, WHERE to publish and WHEN to publish.

What systems for obtaining all this data exist on the market?

It is important to note that some of these services are suitable for analytics of only large businesses. If you are running a small regional project, try starting with test access or free services to see if you need to go further.

Traffic analysis: – Semrush. With this tool, you can learn how competitors act and which social networks give them traffic. This will help you choose promotion channels.

This method is especially in demand in situations where competitors are not particularly brightly represented on the network, or if they don’t have a website as such and do not need it. You can see what content is being promoted by competitors. This will help you choose the content for your own community correctly: choose the subject of posts, pictures, contests, etc.

Let’s sum up.

Competitors can be analyzed in three directions: analysis of the traffic they receive, analysis of their actions in their own communities and analysis of the information field, i.e. all references to a competitor in the network.

During the analysis, you need to pay attention to the following factors: where the competitor receives and does not receive traffic (choose which social networks we are moving on), what content in communities receives maximum involvement (choose the optimal rubricator for our own community), at what time the audience is most active we choose the time for placements), which strengths and weaknesses users see in competitors (we find out how to position ourselves most successfully).