One of the most important things you can do in business is to monitor your competitors regularly. You likely do this at some level whether it's checking out their Facebook page, following them on Twitter or subscribing to their newsletter. Maybe you even check out their advertising.
There are hundreds of digital platforms that can help you gain detailed insights about your competitors. You will learn a few that can make an immediate difference for your business. If you read the whole article, I will give you a BONUS for free.... or just scroll all the way down. I'll never know.
Online Tools That Provide Epic Data
Know Your Traffic Rank
(Check out Alexa for a comprehensive report)
Have you even wondered how a website ranks in the wonderful world of Google? For that matter, do you know how your website ranks? More often than not most people have no idea how they rank, what it means and how to improve. Everyone throws around acronyms like SEO, SEM, PPC, YMCA. If you aren't in marketing these can be relatively foreign concepts. By definition, a website "traffic rank" determines the rank compared to millions of other sites on the Internet.
Traffic rank is only one piece of the puzzle.
HubSpot's Marketing Grade
Are you curious about your Marketing Grade? What is a Marketing Grade? HubSpot quantifies this for us.
First, HubSpot is an online inbound marketing platform that specializes in marketing automation and lead generation. They were nice enough to develop a tool that measures your site's overall online presence from a scale of 0-100. This tool analyzes and scores how you are doing in the following categories:
- Blogging
- Social Media
- SEO
- Lead Generation
- Mobile Optimization
If you follow their recommendations, your Marketing Grade will increase significantly. Moreover, if you see how your competitors are graded you can get a distinct advantage by addressing your strengths in these areas.
MozRank
Moz is a global leader in assessing a brand's business score by measuring link authority (how qualified the people are that link to your site.) MozRank is a fairly common term in the marketing world. Every good marketer frequents Moz to learn the latest information on important metrics that will help them gain an advantage. MozRank operates a little differently than HubSpot, but they will give you a MozRank score from 0-10. According to Moz, the average rank of all the sites they have checked is 3! 3 isn't good. If you give some attention to your MozRank, you can position your business for even better success.
Social Network Analysis
Social media is a serious marketing platform that virtually no one uses correctly. By 2018, 22% of the average marketing budget is projected to be invested on social media. Let me frame it this way, social media is the newest hottest and best way to advertise for most businesses. Gary Vaynerchuk sums this up appropriately: if you start viewing Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat as the modern NBC, CBS and ABC of the world it will change your perception. The brands that excel in this space will leave everyone else in the dust. Let me repeat, virtually no one advertises properly on social media.
There are dozens of tools where you can check your followers vs your competitors. Our team developed a Facebook Competitor Analysis that is free and lets you compare your top competitors. We recommend looking at your competitors pages to see what's going on. How often are they posting? How often are people engaging? How many followers do they have? Their customers are your customers too or very well could be.
As Promised, a FREE BONUS for You!
If you have all the time in the world, feel free to navigate to all the websites in this article and get your own reports. Most will begin to charge you at some level, but they do have some great free data too. We have a tool that analyzes all of this for free! All you need to do is tell us the competitors you wish to analyze and we will send you a report within one business day. Below is a link for you to review what's in the report. Enjoy!
COMMENTS