In a world that has moved most of its activities online, like shopping and entertainment, it only makes sense that marketing catches up.
This is why digital marketing is essential today. LinkedIn notes that digital marketing is especially vital for businesses, with 2022 seeing 6.3 billion customers online. This presents many growth opportunities that marketers can leverage to increase brand exposure and profit.
While our post on the “8 Effective Marketing Strategies for This Year” outlines that some effective approaches to achieve this include influencer marketing and targeted advertisement, these strategies may not be enough for your business to stand out from the crowd. However, with digital marketing becoming the norm, all businesses are doing it, too.
That’s why you need to use digital marketing to outsmart your competitors. Here are some ways you can do just that.
Conduct A Competitor Analysis
You can only outsmart your competitors if you know them. Therefore, conduct a competitor analysis. This enables you to identify their strategy’s strengths and weaknesses, letting you perform better than them.
However, instead of the traditional competitor analysis focusing on the keywords they use to rank on search engines, Fast Company recommends competitor research-focused pages.
This approach identifies your competitor’s content topics in addition to the keywords to rank their website on search engines. Given this information, you can get inspiration on what topics or content to release on your site.
To conduct this analysis, gather your competitor’s top-ranking pages on their site and those of their competitors. Identify what they have in common—like a topic, they all discuss on their website’s blogs—and use this as a basis for upcoming content. By writing more updated content, you’ll attract more customers with unique insights
that can’t be found on your competitor’s sites.
Bid On Competitor Keywords
Using Google Ads is one of the most common digital marketing strategies today. Nearly everyone uses Google, so it only makes sense that businesses want to be among the first few links on a results page. This means you have a lot of competition for ranking on Google Ads.
Fortunately, you can get the upper hand by bidding on competitor ads.
Digital marketing agency Ayima suggests that competitor ads involve using your competitor’s brand names as keywords. You will then appear among the top results when people search for their brand name. There is no rule against this, so you can rest assured that it is a viable
digital marketing strategy to use.
To start, identify any competitor offerings that overlap with yours. Then, use these in your Google Ads, so you’ll show up when people search for their brand name. For example, Nike can put up a Google Ad so their site appears when people search for Adidas.
Use Multiple Marketing Channels
Some digital platforms are more popular than others. For example, TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps because people are into visual, short-form content. This impacts the popularity of other apps, like Facebook and Instagram.
Despite this, it doesn’t mean you should focus your marketing efforts on one platform—which is what your competitors might do. This is especially true for businesses with a general audience, like retail stores. Statista’s 2023 report “Distribution of Facebook Users Worldwide” reveals that males aged 25-34 comprise the majority of its user
base. Meanwhile, TikTok has females aged 18-24 as its primary audience. So, if you’re a retail store carrying clothes for all ages, you’ll only target females 18-24 years old when promoting on TikTok.
Prevent this by taking advantage of other digital platforms, despite one app being more famous than the others.
Simplify The Customer Journey
The final and easiest way to outsmart your competitors is to simplify the customer journey. Customers want to receive products or services quickly, so you need to deliver accordingly. You can start this by making your digital marketing campaigns as seamless as possible from start to finish.
For example, if you’re selling a product on an Instagram reel, tag or attach a link to the product at the bottom or caption of the video. With one tap, customers will be brought to your store and can quickly check out the item in question. If you make them manually search for the product, they may be discouraged, preventing you from
increasing sales.
Digital marketing is a competitive industry. Use these tips to outsmart your competitors and bring success to your
business today. For more business insights, check out our other business articles here on Your Beauty Pantry.
For yourbeautypantry.com by JB Murphy
