Top 6 Tools to Research eMarketplace Competition
We often hear a lot about defense being fundamental to any winning strategy. Jack Dempsey said, “the best defense is a good offense,” and John Locke said, “the only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.” This concept of studying your competition and knowing just how to attack in order to keep yourself safe isn’t just important in basketball, it’s important in all sorts of things, including marketing.
Staying competitive in today’s online marketplace can be a tricky task. It seems like there are more things to pay attention to every single day, from pop-up trends to shifting consumer attitudes and everything in between.
Luckily, while it may seem like a lot to handle at first, there are powerful tools you can use to make sure you really get to know your competition, which in turn will help you better plan your marketing strategies. Here are 6 great tools to help make sure you’re getting the best possible competitive analysis.
1. Buzzsumo
Social media has rapidly become one of the most competitive and creative battlegrounds for online presence. Brands put a lot of attention into their social media accounts in order to make them as relatable and informative as they are trendy. And brands like Fenty and Taco Bell have absolutely mastered the craft.
Highly shareable content can take your brand image onto everyone’s screens and can make your image instantly recognizable to so many people. Both of these aspects help turnaround clicks and, if managed correctly, can help you be highly competitive with your competition. Ask a young person to try and name car insurance companies that aren’t GEICO.
With Buzzsumo, you’re able to take a peek into your competition’s social strategy. Take a look at what platforms they’re on, who shares their content, how it compares with your content, and many more features. Seeing precisely where your competition is thriving on social (and where they aren’t) can help you refine your own social strategy.
2. Owletter
Similar to a social strategy, a solid email strategy can be a great way to increase your site traffic. Emails can be tricky terrain, especially as algorithms are trained to happily send some messages into the spam folder.
But unlike social media, a good email strategy might go unnoticed a lot more easily since it isn’t going to land on your timeline in the morning after going viral. That doesn’t mean there aren’t quick and simple ways to look at how your competitors are running their email strategies.
Owletter is a powerful tool that helps you do just this. Insights precisely into spam reputation, into your competitor’s email schedule, trends, and popular topics can help you see what kind of things you might be missing in your own strategy.
3. SEMrush
Social and emails aren’t the only ways we should be worried about clickthrough rates. Most of us are probably pretty familiar with SEO already. But just in case - Search Engine Optimization, in a nutshell, is a way of making sure your content is friendly enough for search engines so that it’ll pop up more quickly under your target audiences’ online searches. You can have the best blog selling your brand or products, but it’s practically useless if Google puts it on the fifth page, or even just as a late result on the first one.
SEO is not an easy game, especially since everyone is putting a whole lot of time and resources into it. This means that a big part of a great SEO strategy is knowing what your competition is doing, and how well they’re doing it. That’s where SEMrush comes in, giving you a look into competitors’ traffic, backlinks, external links to their site, and keywords (both organic and paid).
4. Rank Signals
We mentioned backlinks alongside SEO sort of passively, but backlinks are anything but passively important. Backlinks are when other sites link to your site, which serves as a consistent source for traffic. The more reputable and popular the site linking to you, the higher quality traffic.
Checking out what backlinks your brand has can be a good way to check where good and bad traffic is coming from. You can also check the backlinks your competitors have and evaluate if there are target sites that are performing well for your competitors. You might be able to reach out to these sites and have them link to you as well (or instead).
5. Spyfu
Not all marketing is a carefully crafted strategy. As we know all too well: you have to spend money to make money. That being said, we also can’t just funnel loads of money into campaigns and expect to see reasonable returns. Paid ads have their fair share of strategy as well, and Spyfu can help with that.
Spyfu helps you take a look at how GoogleAds perform by analyzing keywords and how your competitors pay to have them pop up in different places. This ad analysis is very important because it can help you draw out a detailed and purposeful spending plan. Funneling money into ad campaigns isn’t always a winning strategy, but skillfully deciding where to spend money (and where not to spend) can do wonders for your SEO.
6. Similar Web
Great SEO and social, email, and ad campaigns are all meant to help you with one thing: driving traffic to your website! Tracking this is just as important, if not more, than all of the other tracking we’ve gone through. Similar Web is a great tool that helps you do just this.
The tools Similar Web offers can help you compare the traffic on your own site with the traffic on competitors’ sites. It’ll tell you about volume and about sources and rank your traffic on a global, country, and category scale. This is a great way to find out how and what to focus on in your marketing campaigns—what’s getting plenty of attention and what needs to be boosted?
Staying Competitive
Competition is never easy, and when it comes to online marketing, it feels like everybody is getting better at it every single day. Staying relevant in such a dynamic and competitive online market can seem like a daunting task, but these tools should help give you the edge you need to make sure you and your brand will come out on top.