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Never Start a Campaign With a Blank Piece of Paper
How good would it be if you did not have to reinvent the wheel when promoting a new offer or working on a channel with which you are not familiar? Well you do not In fact, when starting a new campaign, starting with a blank sheet of paper is the last thing you should consider doing.
The process we use to create and launch winning campaigns has proven to be so valuable and so simple that we thought we should share it.
We begin our campaigns with a simple but effective amount of research. The fact is that the best marketers build their campaign fundamentals in research and you should too. Research does not have to be boring or hinder creativity or launch incredible campaigns. Research can be done quickly and effectively, and will generally save you enormous amounts of time when it comes to making your campaigns profitable.
The purpose of competition research is for you to see what the best companies in your space do, so you can make informed decisions about how to compete with them or learn from them.
There are many ways to approach the investigation of the competition. This is a simple approach that we find incredibly effective when starting to work for a new client.
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Build a list of websites
Always start here You need to create a list of websites / companies on which you will base your research. The companies are divided into three groups:
Direct competitors: this includes the companies with which you compete in your sales efforts. It also includes the companies with which it competes through digital channels: who appears on Google when you search with a brand or without a brand in your area?
Similar companies in other locations: this includes companies like you, but with those that do not compete directly because they are in different locations or markets. This may be in other parts of Australia or internationally. For many companies, you want to look at the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, etc., where many industries are very similar to those in Australia. It is unlikely that the company that does the best marketing work is the one that is around the corner.
No competitors that target similar people: these are companies that promote the people of their customers but offer a different product or service. You will never compete against them, but you could learn from them.
Depending on your industry and the level of competition, you should try to build a list of 10 to 20 quality websites to review. Only include low quality campaigns / websites on this list if they are very important competitors and, therefore, you want to monitor them. Otherwise, you want a list of companies that perform solid work in your digital presence and marketing. Always learn from the best.
Here are some tips on how to build your list:
- Talk to your sales team and ask about the competitors that prospects most often mention. You should also ask about lost sales and find out which competitors these sales come from.
- Ask other people in your company who they think quality companies are in your space.
- Go online and search your key terms. Who appears in the paid search? Who emerges organically? Visit their site and see what they are doing.
- You should also do online searches for your brand. Is there any company offering? They are identifying as a competitor.
- The more you research and visit competitors’ websites, the more likely you are to see remarketing and show ads from competitors or related companies. Who is doing a good job in remarketing?
- Use research tools to accelerate your research efforts (more on this later).
- Do a “related” search on Google (for example, related: aussiedigitalmarketing.com.au). You will almost certainly find some surprising but relevant companies that you may not have thought about.
- Cull your list
First, manually scan your competitor’s websites. Unless you are an important direct competitor, you should close the tab if you are approaching digital technology poorly.
For the remaining websites, mark them and save them in a folder in your browser. This is important since it means that you can return to these sites quickly and easily in the future. Research is a process, not an isolated event.
Gap analysis – design, messaging and offers
The next step is to spend a little time in each place. How is the quality in these sites? How is compared? How do other companies approach perspective? What kind of language and words do they use? How do they paint the image of the potential client’s pain and the solution? Basic research can help you better understand your own prospects or see angles you would not have considered otherwise.
What are the headlines in the key pages? Are there interesting offers you are making? CTAs? On what kind of subjects do the competitors write on their main pages and blogs? How is it different from you?
Do your competitors have brilliant websites and your own website is terrible? This could be a future conversion killer. Are you alone in terms of the language you are using? Is this something good or bad?
Gap analysis – ads, creative and more
- Once you know the best quality companies, you need to do a deeper dive:
- What are you doing with text ads, banners and more in your advertising campaigns?
- How are they classified organically in a wide range of keywords?
- Where do you get most of your traffic, including estimates of your traffic levels compared to yours?
- Find your key landing pages. What are they saying in them?
- How do they approach the social?
- How much are you spending on paid traffic?
There are many tools that we use that help enormously to answer the previous questions. Some of those we can recommend include:
- semrush.com
- ahrefs.com
- adbeat.com
- moat.com
- buzzsumo.com
- spyfu.com
- similarweb.com
Record what you’ve learnt and check back often
If all you do is follow these steps, make a series of decisions and then continue and forget about everything, making your life much harder than it should be.
You need to record everything you’ve learned. Then you should go back to this when you are looking for inspiration. Open all the sites again, what has changed? If you take this seriously, you will get new ideas incredibly quickly in the future.
Our challenge to you
If you got here, you’re probably thinking that this type of research is a good idea. You might even be thinking that it could really impact the performance you get from your marketing efforts (you’d be right).
Do you know what will surely make it completely ineffective for you? Actually not doing anything about it!
So, before you get distracted, why do not you set aside the next 30 minutes and start with the steps above? I can guarantee that what you learn will impress you.
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