Know Your Competition
Insights drive pricing, offers, SEO and marketing strategies
Research your market and competitors before you configure offers and decide pricing on products. This exercise is valuable to get insights that will help you close more business in less time because your research insights help you provide the best value and prices.
The Competitive Statistics spreadsheet provides several suggested fields to compare company, web and social media site numbers. Hoovers, BBB.org and SimilarWeb are a few of the tools that provide company revenues, credentials and web performance statistics.
Evaluating the business figures and media elements forms a base for your marketing content and sales strategy. Reviewing features of competitors and benefits of their products helps you decide how to stand apart to achieve better loyalty, growth and built a bigger pipeline of prospects.
Examples of top line business data may include revenues, credentials, number of customers, email subscribers, products and employees. Study the prices, products and offers your competitors display. Free shipping with a $50 purchase is an example of an offer. Examine competition by segment; for instance, your site may cover both diet and exercise, but one competitor may just produce exercise equipment and content. Add a field for other values that you want to analyze, such as whether competitors use surveys or polls.
Valuable web site statistics include keywords, monthly site traffic and rank, both by geography (U.S. and global) and by industry category. From their home pages, right click to View Page Source and look between the <head tags for their keywords and those in their title. The average time that visitors spend on a site and the number of pages viewed per visit tell the content story of the its appeal, known as stickiness. The number of links from other sites, called backlinks, demonstrates the level of interest of businesses to promote and the quantity of sites directing traffic.
Available social media metrics include followers, likes, views, subscribers and connections, depending upon the platform. As you peruse competitors’ social media, take note of reviews, comments and whether each company is good at responding quickly, completely, helpfully and appropriately to customer issues.
Thorough analysis of available competitive data should provide substantial fodder to help you reduce pricing mistakes, learn new tricks you might want to adopt with your own special twist and craft a master strategy.
Use the download button to get your competitive statistic templates: one for top line business reviews and one for web and social media counts:
