As we indicated in the GoDaddy study, 7 out of 10 Spanish SMEs still lack a website to carry out their activity. This seems to be due to lack of time and qualified personnel for the creation and maintenance of these tools, within the staff and budget of small businesses.
This, which a priori can be a handicap in global terms, can become in a great opportunity if your business already has its own website. How? You already have a greater reach than most, so you just need to study your competition and create a better online strategy than theirs.
Who is your real competitor?
Analyze who is he and how does he behave on the internet your competition is a good way to know what your advantages and opportunities are compared to them. You will also know their weaknesses and flaws, to know where you have to work to differentiate yourself. This work can be done before launching a business and also after, always using different points of view, depending on what you are looking for.
One of the complexities of the Internet is that it is a more competitive world than the real one, where each brand fights to differentiate itself. Also, It is something alive and constantly changing., which forces you to always be up to date. The good thing is that there are tools that will help you in your goal. To start analyzing your sector and find out what your most direct competitors are doing, we give you several tips.
Online analysis of your competitors means collecting and analyzing information from your competition, what are the digital strategies, as well as the tools (internal and external) that you have and make up your marketing strategy. But where do you start with this analysis? How to know who is your real competitor and who is not? Here we are going to give you some clues, from searching for keywords to checking profiles and accounts of their social networks.
1 – Study your competitor online
For a small company, devoting time and resources to researching the competition “by hand” can be too much effort. The good thing is that there are computer tools, such as the rankingcoachwho do this job efficiently and quickly.
One of the first steps to be taken, in the search and analysis of the competition, is to research the local market. Whether you have a clothing store or a bakery, the proximity business is the one that can affect you the most. Although later this search will have to be expanded, since if you have an online store, there are no distance barriers and everyone can be a potential competitor.
Nowadays, customers usually look for what they need by looking in search engines, in Spain above all we use Google. So how to encompass the infinite universe of the Internet? Today, competition can come from anywhere, making both analysis and search engine results essential tasks.
When we search for something on Google, it first shows us what it considers to be the best indexed results and that do not contain advertising. This will give us a key piece of information about what those companies have used so that the search engine considers them relevant. Here they play an important role SEO and SEM, up-to-date and quality content, a secure page and other simple tricks that fit well with Google’s policy.
2 – Spy on your strategy: holiday behavior and periodic offers
In addition to analyzing the daily behavior of the competition, it is a good idea to establish a series of patterns or, what is seen, find out what digital strategy they are following. Something very common in marketing is publishing content related to special dates, such as Christmas, Valentine’s or back to school. The idea is to relate these items to your own products or services, since users are more likely to buy at this time.
If your competition carries out this strategy, you cannot be left behind or you can go unnoticed. It is important to be original and don’t offer what everyone else; For example, if your competition offers discounts on a special day, you can make a giveaway. The idea is to be there but not to copy what the person next door is doing.
Another very common strategy is launch of regular offers, for example, once a month or one day a week. This periodicity permeates the audience, to the point of associating said day with a specific brand. What to do in these cases? First of all, analyze the situation well (what the promotion consists of, who is it aimed at, what days are it celebrated…) and check its radius of action or possible failures. We can take advantage of this to do something similar (but not the same) but improved.
It is recommended that our promotion do not remember the competition, because the user can make a mistake. Let’s look for alternatives, innovate, give something that others don’t… and we will have managed to differentiate ourselves.
Get ahead of your competitors
To stand out in your sector and increase sales, in addition to see what others do, it is important to be the first in innovative projects. And having a digital marketing strategy will give you the keys to start it up as soon as possible. To begin with, you don’t always have to go behind someone’s back, you can add value to your offer, instead of lowering prices, which, in the long term, does not work.
This value can come through customer service or diversifying the portfolio you offer, to reach more users. Also, remember to always stay alert, seeing what users say about you but also the competition. In the networks, not everyone plays fair and any negative information can hurt you a lot, even if you have nothing to do with it.
Contributing something different and innovating are two qualities that will always keep you one step ahead of the rest. Do not be afraid to take risks, try the best of online and offline and seek public loyalty.
Definitely, digitization is still not the majority among Spanish SMEs. This is an advantage for those that are, since they can not only open their shop window to an international public, but, based on an online strategy, they will grow more and better. Analyzing what the competition is doing so as not to be left behind and, above all, knowing how to anticipate, can greatly facilitate the work of small businesses. What are you waiting for?
