/Social Media and Blogging Advice
Competition is everywhere – but what else are you expecting with 7.8billion humans living on this planet. Yet, when you have your own online business, or you start your own Social Media account (or Blog), competition is a crucial factor for your success.
Hostingtribunal stated that 70million new WordPress posts are published every month.
So if you want a piece of the cake, or better a higher traffic rate to your site, you have to figure out how your competition sneaks more cake off the plate and impresses their readers by their content, layout, and interactions.
A long-term competitor analysis helps you to:
- Better understand your market or niche
- Estimate your market position
- Better target your customers
- Define opportunities and threats
- See your competitions pricing and product tracking
So how do you conduct a competitor analysis?
- Identify your competition
- Check their content strategy and user interaction
- Check their products and customer interaction
- Define their Strengths and Weaknesses
- What can you learn from your research?
1. Identify your competition:
First, you have to find out who your competition is. If you are a blog owner, you can simply lookup blogs with similar content or keywords used. You can use Google as your search engine or if you are mainly interested in WordPress competition, scroll through your wordpress search bar to find similar blogs. I’d also recommend to check out Pinterest.
If you try to build a Social Media account you can also lookup similar keywords or check out recommended accounts by the provider. For both, bloggers and social media accounts hashtags exist to build communities.
Like if you are a blogger but also built your social media account you can follow hashtag groups that people are solely using to connect with other blog keepers. (eg:#bloggersofinstagram). Those hashtags can be also used to find your competition. The key is to find similar blogs with a different experience curve. Thereby you can see their actions based on their progress and see where you are at. Eg: You look for blogs that are close to your end goal and blogs that are close to your current progress.
Next, you have to diverse between direct and indirect competition:
Direct competition is in the same sector and offers the same product. Like if you are creating an online course on how to build your social media content strategy and your competition offers a course with the same title. In this case, you compete with him in either offering a better value to the customer or a better price.
Indirect competition is if your competition is in the same sector but offers a different product. Indirect competition might not have the same product but it fulfills the same needs of the customers that you want to fill with your products. Thereby it is important to gain the interest of your users. Checking your competition can give you an overview of how they attract readers and how well your own blog/account does in comparison.
2. Check your competitions content strategy and user interaction
Next, it’s time to scan their blog design or social media account. The first impression counts! How does it look like? What do you find nice to look at and what would you change? Scan how they chose and built up their pages and posts, how they designed the homepage and how they built their brand image. Anything that looks out of place? You can also check if they have an email list and how creative their newsletters are.
Then analyze their content strategy: How often do they upload, how limited is their content? how is their writing style and images? How is their color scheme? Is their content unique?
Third, it’s time you see how they interact with their users and other creators. You can check underneath posts how they reacted to comments, if they follow similar communities and groups and if they are actively involved with readers and other content creators. Having close relationships with other content creators can form strong collaborations and push you to the next level.
3. Check out your competitors products and customer relationships
Once you have analyzed the content strategy of your competition it is time to check out their product. What are they selling? What is the product’s quality? What is their pricing? How do they market their product? How is the buying process for the customer? How is the customer service?
Thanks to the modern world you don’t even have to invest in their product. You can just look for reviews online and check how well a similar blog is doing. But please be aware that not all reviews are 100% valid. The best is to check it twice or thrice to avoid fake reviews!
Once you see how satisfied their customers are with the product, you can compare their effort with yours. How is your product doing? What are you doing differently? What needs do their product cover? How is their customer loyalty?
Let’s go to the last point and take a look at the bigger picture:
4. Strengths and Weaknesses
Once you take a thorough look at your competition’s business it’s time to figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are. The best way is to make a table already while scanning through their content and relationships.
Why should you set up a table?
As described at the beginning of the post, a competitor analysis helps you see where your competition is at and how you are competing in the market.
But this is not all, with this analysis you gain important knowledge about how you can improve your own blog, content, and relationships by the doings of your competition.
If your competition is successful, they already tried many different ways to perfect their business. This gap, especially big if you just started, can be reduced by learning what they are doing. It gives you a hint on how to improve your weaknesses and how to make more out of your strengths. That’s why the last important question is: What can I learn to improve my own business and get a better market position?
Before I am closing this post I’d like to mention that: Just because you are competitors doesn’t mean you are enemies! The best way to grow fast is to help each other out, try new things, and to grow as a team. Please don’t copy any content. Implement the newly learned information in your own unique way. (bigcommerce)
