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How to monitor your competitors, so you can create better conversion strategies

better conversion strategies_ BLOG

Before all, I will tell you my story (don’t worry, it’s short and boring. It’s not interesting):

When I started my first company, I had a lot of competitors. I assumed that my company will provide more value to people than others. And for sure, it did. But, after one and a half year, we failed.

The reason?

Our competitors literally slew us.

“How they were better than you if you shared more value?” – you probably asking yourself right now.

When we started, they already had much more traffic, bigger community and people who supported them.

The answer is easy. They just monitored us every single day, and because of that, they were one step ahead!

That’s the reason why I would like to share with you my knowledge and experience.

Entering in a red ocean full of competitors it may be really, really hard and exhausting. Your mentors and business advisors were for sure consulting you to make a new market or to find a hole in the existing one and to build your sustainable and enduring business there.

But, be honest, is that really achievable?

Yes, it is, but the chances that you will be the next Airbnb are very small.

Instead, what you can do, is to regularly monitor your competitors’ websites, social media and conversions strategies!

In this article, you will learn:

  • 5 tips on how to find out your competitors strategies
  • How to use your research to beat them
  • How to convert their customers into yours

via GIPHY

Your competitors have massive email databases? Wooow, what an opportunity for you!

We have all heard the myth that email campaigns are the most effective type of marketing. I suppose it’s really annoying for you to create massive newsletter campaigns and outreaches almost every single day (at least it is for me). But, I will need to disappoint you. 🙁

Yes, it is the most effective way to reach new customers. And if your competitor frequently has email campaigns (I am sure he does), then, of course, you must have too!

Hiring a blogger outreach agency can be a win-win situation when you don’t plan to manually reach your audience and get great results.

There is one secret way how you can find out your competitor newsletter conversion campaigns.

Believe me, just one secret can be really helpful to you!

Are you ready?

It’s pretty easy and simple. All you need is to just join your competitor newsletter!

That isn’t so hard. Right?

For the example we will take the next scenario:

Your competitor will change his newsletter call to action button from “Register here” to “Start your free trial now! No credit card required!”

This is very valuable to you or your marketing team because you can easily find out what’s your competitor strategy.

Track mentioning your competitors on the Internet

If you track mentioning of your competitor on the internet, you can easily find out his popularity on the web and among the customers.

Google Alerts is the good way to do that! Just in the Google Alerts dashboard, enter the keywords you would like to follow. It can be, for the example, the name of your competitor or the names of some executives who work there.

For example, if you find out that your competitor was just mentioned in the New York Times or Forbes, you might be worried and give more attention to your PR campaigns.

Of course, if your competitor is a very big company, your email dashboard can sometimes be very crowded with your Google Alerts notifications, and sometimes it can be time-consuming to check all of them. But believe me, it’s worth it!

Identify opportunities in your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Don’t be afraid to stalk them. Leave a shame behind, and start beating them!

Through social media, we communicate with the foundation of every business – our customers. If you regularly monitor your competitors’ presence on social media, you can find what strategies are they using, what content are they writing, and much important, you can find out are their customers satisfied or not!

If they are not satisfied, ask yourself: “What can I do to be better than them?”

BrandMentions is an alternative for Google Alerts, just for Social Media. It allows you to monitor your competitors mentions on social media.

The valuable data you got from your everyday competitors’ social media research can help you a lot! You can very often skip through “trial and error” process, and save your time. You need to understand the network and important metrics.

Interview your competitor’s customers to find holes in their strategy

As I mentioned above, monitoring your competitor’s presence on the web is very important, but one thing you can’t afford to forgive is constant communication with your competitor’s customers, who can very likely one day become yours.

Try to find out place on the web where your competitor’s customers are gathering. That can be either:

  • Facebook groups or pages
  • LinkedIn groups and competitor’s followers on LinkedIn
  • Or some other channels specialized for your industry

Go and speak to them. Interview between 20 and 50 customers (Believe me, this is not wasting your time). Ask them:

  • “What are your biggest pains about [problem]?”
  • “Do you have any solution for that?”
  • “Are you using [competitor’s service/product]?”
  • “What are your thoughts about it?”
  • “What would you like to be better on the product?”
  • “How do you hear about them (or became their customer)?”

Answers to this questions can help you determine and understand competitors’ acquiring strategy better, or to find out their customers biggest pains and holes in their product or service.

Think about this! 😉

Monitor your competitors’ websites, SEO strategies and Keywords

Sometimes, even the smallest change on the website can raise a conversion rate. Let’s take the following situation as an example:

Your competitor e-commerce website requested from customers to make an account so they could make a purchase. They realized that they have a huge bounce rate when potential customers find out that they can’t buy something, without creating an account, so, they decided to remove the registration form.

This is very important to you because if your competitor decided to remove the registration form, it’s very likely that you have a huge bounce rate because of the same situation.

Or, for the example:

Your competitor change his meta <title> or <h1> tag to target a different keyword

By the way, there is one tool you should check out! It’s called Competitors.app. This tool helps you to monitor your competitors’ websites, keyword changes, social media accounts and newsletter campaigns. It helps you to save a lot of time.

competitors.app
competitors.app

At the end of the day, if you are carefully monitoring your competitor on the internet, you can always be one step ahead of them and you can be familiar with their strategies anytime.

Think about this. I didn’t monitor them very well at my first startup and the end result was terrible for me. Why does it need to be terrible for you too? 🙂

The young entrepreneur from Serbia. SaaS Enthusiasts and result-oriented Digital Marketing expert with a Growth Mindset.