You don’t have to be a business expert to know in order to grow your business and be a force in your industry, you just have to be better than the competition. The products or services you sell have to be better, the presentation has to be better, your presence must be better and your customers have to know all of these things. This is where the services of a digital marketing consultant can enter the picture to ensure you have a leg up on the competition.

A quality marketing strategy consulting firm helps businesses narrow down their strategies, while taking every aspect of business into consideration. And the good news is it’s never too late or too early to develop or revise your digital marketing strategy. So whether you’re just starting a business or if you’ve existed for a while and are ready to expand and grow, digital marketing services can help. Here’s how you can analyze the digital marketing strategies of your competitors so you can develop yours better.

Know Your Online Competition

One of the first topics a digital marketing consultant will want to talk to you about is your online competition. This could be the same companies as your actual competition, or it could be much different. For example, if you own a landscaping company where you help homeowners and businesses with their landscaping projects, one of your online competitors could be a company that sells landscaping equipment. Even though these companies serve different purposes, they are within the same industry, so the search terms by consumers would be similar.

Some digital marketing services will suggest putting together a list of all potential relevant search terms that could be used by consumers to find your business online. Then do a search yourself using those terms and see which websites show up highest in the results. When you see a website show up multiple times in different searches, you can likely consider them to be your main online competition, even if they aren’t your actual business competition.

Analyze A Competitor’s Backlinks

Your own website can be stronger when you use strong and healthy backlinks. Google likes websites with backlinks because they give your website more domain authority. However, using a poor backlink can have the opposite impact and significantly damage your domain authority. A marketing strategy consulting firm can help you analyze a competitor’s backlinks to ensure they are strong and relevant for you to use for your own website.

Utilize Tools To Gain Insight

Plenty of online tools are available to gain insight about a competitor’s digital marketing strategy. All digital marketing services utilize these tools to help their clients strengthen their online presence. These tools can provide a great comparison to your website, including looking at ranking history, keyword usage, search terms, how much money is spent, organic visitors and much more. After analyzing the results from these tools, a digital marketing consultant can help you identify which of the results are relevant to your website and what you can change to either keep up or stay ahead of the competition.

See How Your Competitors Use Social Media

It’s important for every business to have a social media account today and be active with it. In fact, most companies need to be active on multiple platforms, depending on how relevant the platform is to the specific company. A marketing strategy consulting firm will look at not only how your competitors utilize social media, but also how their customers interact with them. This includes what posts or messages the customers share or like, the time of day customers are active and more.

The main thing digital marketing services suggests regarding social media is to be consistent among all platforms used. Your brand identity is critical for consumers, so people have to know who you are whether they view your Twitter page, Facebook, Instagram or any other platform. Develop your identity and stick with it, but also shape your content and posts in a way that allows you to keep up with the competition.

Evaluate Content Thoroughly

Take a close look at your competitor’s blog page and see what type of content they are posting. Some websites choose to post SEO-rich content that doesn’t provide much value to readers, while others don’t focus much on SEO, but instead gives readers valuable and useful content. Any digital marketing consultant will say a good blog post will be valuable to readers, while also improving SEO. The ultimate goal is to have your blog become a go-to resource for consumers, so they will know exactly where to visit when they need answers to their questions or advice. When looking at a competitor’s blog, consider what they do well and what they could improve on to help shape your own digital marketing strategy.

Develop Your Strategies Based on Your Findings

Analyzing a competitor’s digital marketing strategy doesn’t mean you should shape your strategy exactly like theirs if it’s a good one. The best way to analyze these strategies is to make a list of what you think works well for competitors and what doesn’t work well. When you analyze multiple competitors, you can combine all of the positive things to consider incorporating into your own strategy. And instead of disregarding the negative things, do an honest assessment of your own strategy and see if you are doing any of the negative things you found. Looking at both sides will help you shape the strongest digital marketing strategy possible.

Humble Bear works with companies of various sizes and various experience levels. We provide comprehensive digital marketing services to help clients shape the perspective of their business exactly how they want to. It’s difficult for business owners to do all of the research needed to create an effective digital marketing strategy, so we are here to do the leg work for you. It all starts with a consultation to learn about your current business goals, your competition, potential growth and more. Be sure to contact us to learn more about our digital marketing services and how we can help take your business to the next level.