Creative Ways to Spy on Your Competition
Even before the world of ecommerce started to dominate the business landscape, it was always important to know what your competition is up to.
With the interconnected world we live in today, it makes it even easier to identify the marketing strategies of your competition. Numerous tools allow you to gain essential insights on what your rivals and other industry players are currently doing with respect to their marketing tactics.
The use of such online tools is widely accepted and even encouraged by marketing experts. Alongside these tools, you can also manually investigate what your opponents have been focusing on recently. Here are some of the simple, yet creative actions that can be done to spy on your business competitors.
Purchase Their Items or Services
If possible, purchase an item or a service from your competitor. This is a creative and effective way to understand the kind of customer experience they are providing. This is also an excellent method to feel their buying experience and see how good their communication is with their customers.
It is also a good chance to analyze how they display their products visually and how the actual item looks like once it is delivered to you. Examine their post-sales customer support as well to see if there are some techniques that you can adopt for your own company.
Ask Questions Via Social Media Accounts
Studying how they use their different social media accounts will be easy. The next best step to take is to communicate with them as if you were a regular customer. Identify their response speed, their communication skills with their customers and their knowledge of their own product.
Social media is the place where businesses and their customers interact. It is also the best platform to target an audience. It only makes sense to check how they incorporate them into their marketing campaigns as well.
Observe Their Customer Service
Email or call your competition. Are they using a conversational tone on their emails? Are they sticking to template emails? Do they go the extra mile to assist their customers on their needs, especially on social media? These are just some of the things you need to examine.
If you want to dig deeper and discover more technical information regarding your contenders, here are some of the things you can do, and the tools you can download.
Track Web Traffic
Perhaps the most used tool to track web traffic is Alexa and Similarweb. Knowing their traffic can be a great source of comparison to yours. Check their peak seasons and try to identify their best-performing web pages.
Identify Their Backlinks
A website’s backlink profile can boost its page ranking. Moreover, good quality backlinks can help grow your DA score and improve one’s business image to search engines like Google. Tools similar to Majestic Site Explorer, Ahrefs, and Moz’s Onsite Explorer can help you identify where your competitors get their backlinks. Once you have this data, you can try to mimic their backlinking strategies and observe how search engines would react to your website.
Explore Ads Monitoring Tools
Ads are essential in digital marketing. In addition, their targeted keywords also help your competitors gain their traffic. Tools such as AdGooRoo and Moat may help you identify the ads and the keywords they are using.
Succeeding in the competitive digital world can be challenging. But with some creative spying skills and appropriate tools to use, you can put your business one step ahead of your business rivals.
Understand the successes and failures of another company and learn from them. This will help you strategize sensibly, save budget and increase profits. A mindful approach with the use of powerful tools makes you a better entrepreneur, and possibly an eCommerce mogul.