Competitive Intelligence for Digital Marketing

 

Competitive intelligence gives you the insights you need for digital marketing. J. Walker Marketing can access detailed intelligence about your market, your competitors and your whole digital landscape. We can provide you with insights that will help you understand your marketing challenges and opportunities, find ways to stand out from your competitors, target advertising with precision, and get the most impact from your marketing budget.

 

Competitive Intelligence: Benchmark your marketing strategies against competitors

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Let’s say you’re in the pest control business and you want to benchmark your marketing strategies against your main competitor, Orkin. J. Walker Marketing can create an analysis showing a detailed picture of this competitor, including:

 

• Trends on their website traffic from both organic and paid traffic. When compared with your own website traffic data, this information may tell you whether the category as a whole is expanding or whether paid digital advertising might be a good growth strategy.

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• A list of organic keywords that drive the most traffic to their website. Knowing these will let you either compete directly by optimizing your own website to draw traffic from these words, or to avoid the competition and carve out a different marketing niche.

• Main traffic sources: organic, paid, social or referral. This information serves as a benchmark for your digital marketing efforts.

• How Orkin ranks against major competitors for organic keywords. This helps you understand if you can hope to rank highly for certain keywords. If particular search terms are “owned” by Orkin, or another competitor, it’s best to avoid trying to rank for those.

• Which keywords Orkin is buying to drive traffic. Similar to organic search terms, knowing which paid search terms a competitor is buying enables you to either compete with them directly or avoid them and establish a different niche.

• Major backlinks coming into their site from other websites. Seeing this information may provide you with ideas on how you can get backlinks to your website. For example, perhaps industry associations will create links to your site.

 

Getting this type of competitive intelligence is the starting point for a digital marketing plan. It identifies your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies so you can find your niche.

 

Advertising Intelligence: See where competitors are advertising and whom they target

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Knowing where competitors are advertising, and whom they target, enables you to match them there with better offers, or to carve out uncontested market space with different customers. Either, way, advertising intelligence is critical.

 

Our reports show the demographics and interests of the people your competitors’ target with advertising. Knowing this information enables you to target similar consumers with Google Ads, or avoid them and target different consumers.

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We also show samples of competitive ads which makes it easy to see their main selling points and competitive offers.

 

Positioning Insight: How distinct is your positioning from competitors? Check the overlap.

In the digital landscape, your brand positioning comes down to content and keywords because these will determine what type of searches your websites show up for and which searchers end up on your site. These also determine how similar or distinct you are from competitors. If you have similar content and keywords, you’ll be competing for the same website traffic. But perhaps you want to find less cluttered competitive space.

 

To identify where less competitive market space lies, start with a report showing shared and unique keywords. This report compares and contrasts your content with competitors’ and shows the overlap. It also suggests keywords with reasonable costs-per-click that you might want to buy.

 

Keyword Research: Find opportunity amidst the competition

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Having the right content and keywords on your website plays a large part in how much traffic your site gets and whether that traffic consists of valuable business leads. It’s also a critical way of separating yourself from the competition.

 

J. Walker Marketing can help you define high-opportunity keywords and content for your business. Let’s say you manage a visiting nurses service and want to attract leads. Google shows that the term “visiting nurses” has 3,600 searches per month- a fairly high number but not so high that it’s unattainable. It also shows that this term has a low average cost-per-click of $1.80 and a low competitive index (0.28) versus other search terms.

 

Knowing that “visiting nurses” is a good search term from which to draw traffic, a search marketing plan can be put in place including blog posts, landing pages and even paid search advertising. Doing this research ensures that you don’t waste effort trying to draw website traffic from search terms that have too much competition or ones that have very little search volume.

 

Website Traffic: See an overview of rankings for your whole business category

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Let’s use the pest control example, again. If you want to see how the Orkin website ranks against other sites in the pest control category, J. Walker Marketing can give you a snapshot of the whole sector. You can see relative traffic levels so you can see where opportunities lie for your business and know what you’re up against.

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Detailed competitive intelligence can guide your marketing strategies toward success. Let’s talk about how you can use competitive intelligence to plan your next marketing campaign.