How Does Competitive Analysis Inform Marketing Decisions?

Analyzed Competitors for Market Gaps

We identified key competitors and analyzed their marketing strategies, product offerings, pricing, and customer engagement tactics. This included examining their online presence, advertising campaigns, and social-media strategies. The insights gained helped us identify gaps in the market and areas where we could differentiate our product.

As a result, we tailored our marketing strategy to emphasize our unique selling points, targeted our advertising more effectively, and adjusted our pricing to offer better value, leading to a successful product launch and increased market share.

SEO Strategy and Content Gaps

In looking at competitors' SEO strategies, we often find easy wins for building backlinks and identifying content gaps. Most of our competitors just produce, produce, produce, and do not take the time for research and analysis. This is one reason why we have consistently grown traffic over the past two years.

Reputation Management Enhances Client Strategy

At Stratosphere, a notable instance of leveraging competitive analysis for our insurance clients involved recognizing a competitor's success with a reputation-management strategy. Understanding the paramount importance of online presence in the insurance sector, we integrated our reputation-management tool into our client's strategy.

This decision not only enhanced their online credibility but also contributed to an increase in customer trust and policy conversions. It exemplifies our commitment to tailoring marketing decisions based on industry-specific competitive insights, offering our insurance clients a strategic advantage in managing and enhancing their online reputation.

PPC Campaign Outperforms Competitors

One example would be when I worked on a PPC advertising campaign for a client. Through competitive analysis, I identified the keywords our competitors were bidding on and how they were structuring their ad copy. This gave me insights into how to create more compelling ad copy and identify relevant, high-performing keywords that boosted our ad visibility and click-through rates.

For instance, I found out that our competitors' ads didn't highlight the free shipping they offer, which was a pain point for customers. I then made sure we highlighted our own free shipping policy upfront in our ad copy. This led to a significant increase in our click-through and conversion rates.

This experience solidified the value of competitive analysis in my marketing practice—it's not about copying the competition, but learning from them and finding unique ways to outperform them.

Competitive Analysis Reveals Social Media Gaps

Developing a competitor analysis is our go-to marketing research technique. When we conduct a competitive analysis for a client, we gather three competitors in their industry and assess their strengths, weaknesses, brand personality, and analytics (i.e., audience engagement, etc.).

Conducting a competitive analysis allows us to clearly show clients what is working in their niche, what isn’t, and what we can do to take their social media to the next level. We recently did this for a realtor client in Arizona. Social media leads us to believe there is only so much room at the table, especially in the real estate space, but a competitor analysis allowed us to show our realtor just how many gaps her competitors had in their social media strategies.

Even top competitors with large followings don’t have picture-perfect strategies, and showcasing this to clients allows them to feel like they have an opportunity to establish themselves as an authority in their field.

Content Strategy Pivots to Video

Competitive analysis has been instrumental in informing my marketing strategies, particularly in refining the content strategy. When working with a client in the real estate investment financing industry, a comprehensive analysis of competitors' content revealed a notable gap for engaging video content.

Recognizing this opportunity, we shifted our content strategy, channeling increased resources and creative efforts into video production. This strategic pivot resulted in the creation of several viral videos across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, significantly increasing brand awareness.

This shift in content strategy opened doors to media opportunities as well as generated a substantial increase in audience engagement and web traffic. The success derived from this shift validated the pivotal role of competitive analysis in steering our marketing decisions, showcasing its tangible impact on our client's business outcomes.