14


Q2 • 2023


FEATURE


budget-friendly or more complex formats seem to be prevalent.


 Digital response tools — Tools such as QR codes and personalized URLs drive traffic and simplify effectiveness measurement. Seeing what competitors are doing can help you determine expectations among your audience and inspire your own efforts.


 Discounts and special off ers— Direct mail’s ultimate goal is to engage the prospect and keep them involved, influencing them toward the desired action. Watching the offers that your competitors are making to their customers and which ones are used more frequently can reveal what consumers are engaging with.


 Personalization — Perhaps a competitor is using the same creative but tweaking the copy or the offer for different audiences, which is information you wouldn’t be able to garner by looking at just one individual sample of their mailpieces.


Including the above in your competitive


research helps you address what Bond considers “the big basic data points: spend, volume, how long a piece has been in circulation, where competitors are marketing to, [and] where they are pulling away from.”


Studying Social


One of the most ubiquitous marketing channels is social media. Thanks to the very nature of social media, numerous free tools—including those offered by the social platforms themselves—provide a wealth of competitive information and data. Knowing what your competition is up to on social media helps you make more informed strategic marketing decisions and have a much better understanding of your own target market. Data points to look at include the following:


 Other brands or organizations your target audience follows


 Which social networks your audience and your competitors are most active on


 How often and when your competitors post  Competitors’ engagement rates and the


type of content that garners the most (and least) engagement


 Most popular hashtags among your audience and your competitors


A challenge of relying exclusively on free channel-specific tools for data analysis is that the more platforms your organization participates in, the more tools—each with their own specific dashboards and idiosyncrasies— you need to use, making it more difficult to put together the all-important big picture. “Historically, gleaning competitive insights and benchmarks has been manual and time- consuming, leading many brands to skip the step in the spirit of ‘getting it done,’” Archibald says. Platform-agnostic tools that use AI and machine learning can generate metrics and provide valuable context in a fraction of the time.


Knowing what your competition is up to on social media helps you make more informed strategic marketing decisions and have a much better understanding of your own target market.


Another potential drawback to relying on


free tools is that as social media algorithms and formats change, the tools may no longer be capturing the data you need. “For example, in recent years, the social media landscape has shifted from traditional connection-based feeds to entertainment-driven formats, which has also shifted user behavior and preferences,” Archibald says. This led Dash Hudson to develop Entertainment Score, a tool that measures the entertainment value of TikTok and


Instagram Reels. In a subsequent project with NielsenIQ, it examined how beauty brands were using TikTok to boost sales. “The study revealed that beauty brands with an Entertainment Score of more than five grew their sales by 51 percent on average, while brands with a lower score grew by just 17 percent,” Archibald continues. “The results of this study prove that the social media landscape has evolved beyond metrics such as likes and comments.”


Searching within SEO and Beyond According to search engine optimization agency Safari Digital, fewer than 1 percent of all people who enter a term into a search engine look beyond the first page of results. If that doesn’t underscore the importance of conducting SEO comparative research so that your brand rises to the top, nothing will. Fortunately, “the process for conducting


SEO/SEM competitive analysis is similar to that of conducting competitive social analysis in that both look at what competitors are doing, analyze the content that is being produced, and determine where and how conversation is being generated,” Archibald says. “Where they differ, however, is how content is optimized to rank. While most marketers do not reoptimize their social media posts but rather refine their social strategy, SEO teams will regularly reoptimize website content based on competitive trends.” Here are some data points to investigate when studying competitors’ search marketing efforts:


 Who is ranking high on your main keywords • This could help you identify brands you might not have considered competitors.


 The number of backlinks on competitors’ pages • Google uses the number and quality of links to a page to determine a site’s trustworthiness—and trustworthy pages rank higher.


 Which pages rank for the most keywords


 Technical issues, such as redirects, missing headings and tags, and broken links that would hurt rankings


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