#22. Going 007 On The Competition
The Spy Who Loved Marketing.
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Hi, Friend!
I’ve never worked with a CEO who didn’t want to know what was going on over the fence at Competitor X.
Competitive research offers tons of potential advantages, but it can be complicated to execute.
Here are 6 no-cost, easy-to-use tools you can use to help you do some investigative work to see what your competition has going on behind the scenes. Let's start spying! 👇
1. Built With: This is one of my favorite tools of all time. It gives you a deep dive into what digital tools are (or were at some point) integrated into any website. Want to know which advertising pixels your competitors are using? What do they use to send emails? What other tools are in their MarTech stack? This serves everything up for you to review and compare. There’s also a Chrome extension you can use for easier website research.
2. Social Mention: A nifty tool you can use to track mentions across social media and the web of not only your brand, but also your competitors’ as well. As an added bonus, it gives you an indication of whether most mentions are more positive or negative.
3. Google Alerts: An alternative option to Social Mention, this offers nearly instant notifications of new online mentions. Set up alerts for your competitors’ brand names, product names, executive names. Also comes in handy for finding public relations opportunities and identifying the reporters who cover your industry.
4. SimilarWeb: Take advantage of this site as another way to scope out what’s happening with your competitors’ websites. It gives you a general idea of site performance, including channel sources and breakdown of paid vs organic. To note, the accuracy isn’t perfect. But you’ll get a broad sense of digital strategy.
5. Ahrefs: This one focuses on SEO competitive analysis. Get details on which keywords they’re ranking for, the content that’s working best for them, domain authority ranking, and much more.
6. Facebook Ad Library: To align with the goal of “advertising transparency,” Facebook shares all the active ad content that brands are running on the platform. I’ve talked about this one before, and I’m always surprised when people don’t know about this. This is great to keep your finger on the pulse of what kinds of ad content others in your industry are running, or even just finding inspiration from your favorite brands.
Feeling Shaken, Not Stirred By Digital Ads
The paid acquisition landscape has been rocky this year. Buckle up because the turbulence isn’t going anywhere on this ride.
The industry has rebounded following the early impact of the pandemic, and more advertisers rushing back means more competition and higher prices. That includes B2B companies. B2B digital ad spend in the US grew 32.5% last year, and is expected to grow 24.9% in 2021.
Facebook reports engagement + impressions for all social content are expected to continue to slow down in the weeks & months to come.
There’s been a 47% increase in average ad price over the last 3 months. As with every year, those numbers are only going up as more advertisers jump on board for the holiday season.
Accuracy of ad targeting will continue to be diminished as the effects of iOS14.5 ramp up and more iPhone users opt out of tracking.
What This Means For You
For one, this is a tough time if you’re just getting started or looking to increase ROI with digital advertising. You need to clearly define your goals and the success KPIs to make sure you’re not just draining money.
That means daily monitoring of ad performance. It also means expanding the metrics you normally track. Not just CPM, but also CPC, cost per result, channel-specific CLV, CAC (sorry for the alphabet soup here -- there are a lot of data points!).
Overall I recommend remaining flexible and realizing that your strategy will have to adjust.
That's all for this week, folks.
If this was interesting I'd really appreciate it if you'd share this newsletter with others!
And remember, tomorrow never dies, so I'll be back in 2 weeks with another installment. 🙏🌸
<3
Marcelle. Chantelle Marcelle.
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