Know your Competitor

Watching your competition really helps you find out how you can be better (or at least equal to) than your competitors with your services offered and the way in which you let your target audience know about them. Win the race by quietly analyzing your competitor’s progress, shortfalls, and innovations. 

Find your competitor’s strengths by taking a look at where they are standing at the moment and analyze them from their past performance. If you have a good analysis of your own current performance and weaknesses, knowing your competitor’s business better gives you an advantage.  This would be the place where you can start to improve.  

One way of doing this is to analyze their websites and/or their social media.  Zany can run reports of your competitor’s websites that show their effectiveness on Google or other search engines.  This type of analysis itemizes what you could do better or at the very least what you need to do to keep up with them.  

Zany has come up with a seven-step method to finding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor in the past 6 month’s time. Here are the 5 steps you can implement this week.  We will be going over those steps in this article.

Step 1: Research, Research, Research

Pull reports on their current SEO, tech stack, Web Vitals, Alexa Ranking, Social Media Followers, Social Media Hashtags, and anything else you can find.   What are their rankings? Are your’s better?  If the competition is ahead, figure out which areas you could improve to rank equally and eventually outperform.

Step 2: User Experience

Next, go to your competitor’s site and play with their processes.  Is it easy?  Is there something on their site that really speaks to your target users?  Or is there something that you just don’t like?  By looking at your competitor’s site first and then going to check your site to see if you have the same issues, you are able to see a bigger picture.  Remember sometimes we need to stand back to see the experience from another person’s point of view.  This will allow you to improve and gain new ideas to implement.

Step 3: Tech Stack

Is the technology that the competitor is using outdated? or is it better than yours?  If it is better,  are they able to perform certain functions that you can not?  Have they done anything that gives them an edge?  If so, is there a way you can capitalize on this and implement it yourself?

Step 4: Follow Trends

Is there something the competition is doing that reflects current trends? Following trends always increases user engagement.  By looking at what the competition is doing we are able to see how new trends affect your current market.  Try to be as forward-thinking as possible and predict new trends that are emerging and reflect them in your user engagement and marketing.

Step 5: Keep Records

Make sure you keep a record of how you have changed things and this changes the outcomes.  See how your outcomes in different areas are affected by your new insights and compare them with your competitors.  This is basically a large-scale A/B test with lots of variables.  By recording this over time you gain a true baseline of how everyone in your field is doing.  This means that when something changes you can immediately see the cause.

Hopefully using these 5 steps you will be able to increase your ROI and Profits.  It is not always about doing better than your competitor.  Ultimately it is about being able to better attract and service your own customers.  No two businesses, even in the same niche, attract exactly the same customers.  Know your business so well, that you attract the right customers for your business.