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Spying for Success: Top 10 Tips for Competitive Intelligence

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It’s time to become a spy.

Now, I don’t mean it’s time to grab a suit, throw on a pair of sunglasses and channel your best James Bond. But it is time to become an online sleuth, poking around and researching your competition to uncover new ways of racing ahead in the quest to better reach customers.

Smart competitive intelligence is the fuel behind effective marketing and successful campaigns. From a macro point of view, competitive intelligence in search marketing involves analyzing competitors’ tactics, strategies and results in their organic and paid search activities. The benefit is fairly self-evident: by understanding how your top competitors use search to best reach customers, you can apply learnings and re-strategize your own approach to increase your competitive advantage.

Competitive intelligence starts and ends with keywords.

But on a more fundamental level, competitive intelligence starts and ends with keywords. Keywords are the driving force behind all of marketing – they make up the messages, the ads and the offers that attract and resonate with customers. Keywords also represent customers themselves, as they use specific terms to search and in doing so reveal their intents, needs and desires.

Effective competitive intelligence, then, means researching and analyzing the keywords your competitors use to gain the edge needed to become an industry leader. If you find your competitors are ranking and performing better than you, determine what keywords are driving the difference. And if you discover you’re leading the way in specific channels, leverage your intelligence to maximize your competitive advantage.

Sound intimidating? Don’t worry – we’ve got 10 Tips for making the most out of competitive intelligence. Actionable insight is only a few steps away:

    1. Understand What “Competitor” Truly Means
    Identify your true ranking competitors for both organic and paid search – they often differ from your core business competitors. For example, luxury hotels like Gramercy Park Hotel and the Four Seasons have different online clientele despite offering the same service.

    2. Know What Keywords Your Competitors are Targeting
    Discover your main opposition for certain keywords and use gap analysis to find which keywords your ads are not showing up for. Advertisers with larger keyword lists win more traffic at a lower cost.

    3. Pick Your Keyword Battles
    Research thoroughly before optimizing for specific keywords. Isolate the most frequently used ad copy and leverage themes that distinguish your messaging.

    4. Assess Competitors’ Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) Readiness
    Survey your competition’s digital assets. Find out how they use non-text based content – such as videos, images and PDFs – to gain above-the-fold visibility, and take advantage of any channels they’ve yet to utilize.

    5. Analyze Competitors’ Web Analytics Tools
    Check out what analytics programs – if any – your competitors are using. Analytics tools can reflect how sophisticated your competitors’ campaigns are and also indicate what data they’re able to measure.

    6. Sign Up For Your Competitors’ Newsletters
    Read their content. Determine how often they engage their database and the types of messages they send to find the offers that resonate best with customers.

    7. Set Up Alerts on Your Competitors’ Activities
    Sign up for Google Alerts to stay on top of changes to your competitive keywords and to track your competitors every time are mentioned online.

    8. Be a Link Spy
    Identify new linking partners by finding out who’s linking to your competitors. They’re already roped into your industry, so it should be a warm sell.

    9. Look for New Opportunities
    Analyze how competitors market their products to discover new markets and channels for you to enter. Similarly, leverage your edge if you’re active in places your competitors are not.

    10. Incorporate the Best from Your Competition
    Study your competitors’ highest-ranking ads to generate new ideas for your own campaign, and integrate compelling message into your own copy. There’s no reason why you can’t learn from what’s working for the competition!

    Bonus Tip. Scrutinize the Social Scene
    Launch company Facebook groups, Twitter accounts and MySpace pages. They’ll help build brand awareness and create additional touch points with users, ones your competitors may not yet have.

Keeping a close eye on the competition will enable you to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing search marketing environment. On-going monitoring of competitor actions will alert you to shifts in strategy and provide real-time insight into trends and industry developments, turning you from a reactive firm to a proactive one. Most importantly, competitive intelligence will empower you to take advantage of the areas where competitors are most vulnerable, placing you on the road to increased visibility, industry leadership and best of all, more customers.


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