A common topic during platform demos, conferences, and discussions with digital marketers is whether or not they’re capturing the market accurately. What’s scary is that people seem okay with tracking two or three competitors, but you need to know what’s happening across dozens of places. Just not every data point every day. In our recent episode of Found Friday, a weekly series dedicated to all things findability related in content marketing, search, and digital, I took on the topic of competitor tracking and intelligence… And lack thereof.
Competitor intelligence basics
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There’s plenty of research done into how our audiences make choices about what content they consume, and what of that content sticks and makes an impact. But how do we leverage that as marketers? How do we know when the research is applicable to us and our industry? Good questions.
In this post we’re going to explore core topics around competitor intelligence for content creators, SEOs and marketers, and tie it together with a broader discussion around what’s involved in today’s competitor intelligence and where might we be going in the future.
This blog post and Found Friday episode correlate to our other recent episode “Are you tracking enough keywords” and also with a big issue I see in the marketing analytics and monitoring tools market.
People are too often constrained by budget to actually track the total number of competitors that they really need. Obviously, at , we feel differently and promote a different type of workflow for competitor content tracking – but regardless of what SEO and content marketing tools you’re using, let’s talk about what “enough” is in competitor intelligence.
How do you know when enough is enough in competitor
Okay, so let’s talk about what types of competitors most of us are tracking now. I’ll give you the most common scenarios and we’ll see if you fit into one:
One: You are allowed to track three to five competitors in your platform and you’ve picked the top few most direct competitors as determined by research or marketshare.
Two: You inherited competitors in a platform when you took on your role and they have been there for a hot minute and you may or may not have changed one or two but it’s mostly still the same.
Three: You have no authority to choose or change the competitors in your analytics platform or monitoring tools and you either think what’s in there is fine or you see some opportunities for updates and want to make recommendations.
I’m guessing most folks fit into one of these spots, but regardless, let’s get down to some other options.
For most people, tracking a hundred competitors on a daily basis is too much – and what do you even do with that data regularly anyway? (Actually, I could give you some ideas if you had the bandwidth, but that’s for another time.)
What we actually need to get to is a more fluid way to understand the competitor landscape. Because the reality is that our competitors are changing all the time and they are making moves and delivering marketing messaging that impacts our findability. And we’re doing the same to them.
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Segmentation for smarter competitor analysis
In our episode about tracking enough keywords we discussed the power of segmentation and keyword grouping. This is a big part of that discussion. With segmentation and grouping what you’re doing is looking at your marketing effort from different facets. Here are some examples of segment categories that we recommend and build in our client’s dashboards:
Product lines
Services
Features
Solutions
Campaigns
Messages
Audience types / personas
Funnel stages
Locations
Within these, there are segments that we can create detailed groups around. Let’s walk through an example so we can illustrate how this works. I’m going to use a B2C example because I can pick a product that most people know and it’s easy to follow – like coffee – but this works for B2B and other marketing efforts as well.
Let’s say I’m Keurig
the coffee maker brand. Like a lot of organizations, Keurig has a variety of product lines that span coffee makers for individuals and businesses, they also have partnerships with coffee brands like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, and their own brands within Keurig. They also make accessories for their machines and have services offered to businesses and individuals.
A few of their services and offerings include things like coffee auto delivery and servicing for their corporate machines.
content categories and segments for creating a content calendar
At
Competitor Intelligence For Content Creators, SEOs, and Marketers
In the last Found Friday episode, we explored topics surrounding the common question of “are we tracking enough keywords?” A related question we often hear from clients and colleagues is “how much is enough competitor intelligence?” Plenty of research has been done on how our audiences make choices about what content they consume, and what content sticks and makes an impact. But how do we leverage that as marketers? How do we know when the research is applicable to us and our industry? This week we will explore this related question and several aspects you should consider when addressing competitor intelligence..
One major issue we see in the marketing analytics and monitoring tools market is businesses being too constrained by budget to actually track the total number of competitors that they really need. At , we feel differently and promote a different type of workflow for competitor content tracking. Regardless of what SEO and content marketing tools you’re using, let’s talk about what “enough” is in competitor intelligence.
Existing approaches
There are many different approaches to determine what types of competitors to track. However, in working with clients of various sizes across multiple different industries, we find a few common scenarios play out. These are the most common scenarios we have seen. Does your business fit into one?
Scenario one, you are allowed to track three to five competitors in your platform and you’ve picked the top few most direct competitors as determined by research.
Scenario two, you inherited competitors in a platform when you took on your role and they have been there for a long time. You may or may not have a step by step guide for business changed one or two, but you’re still tracking mostly what has been tracked for years.
Scenario three, you have no authority to choose or change the competitors in your analytics platform or monitoring tools and you either think there is no reason to change the status quo, or you see some opportunities for updates and want to make recommendations.
We suspect you fit into one of these scenarios. Maybe you do not. Regardless, let’s discuss some other options.
How do you know when enough is enough in competitor intelligence?
For many businesses, only tracking three to five competitors may not be covering all your bases. However, because of platform limitations, you have to make due with this hard limit. Even in a world where cost is no object, tracking 100 competitors daily to cover all your bases is probably too much. Most businesses are not going to have the bandwidth to make use of that volume of data. So, where is the sweet spot?
This is hard to say, as there’s no one right answer. Different businesses have different needs. What makes sense for one business likely won’t make sense for another. Consider a slightly different approach than honing in on a certain number. What we actually need is a more fluid way to understand the competitor landscape. The reality is, the competitor landscape is constantly changing. Competitors regularly come and go. They make moves and deliver ever changing marketing messaging that continually impacts findability.
Building on segmentation
If you missed our last Found Friday episode, we discussed tracking enough keywords, the power of segmentation, and keyword grouping. Competitor intelligence joins nicely with these topics. With segmentation and grouping, the goal is to look bank email list at your marketing effort from a variety of different perspectives. Below are some examples of segment categories that we recommend and build in our clients’ dashboards:
Product lines
Services
Features
Solutions
Campaigns
Messages
Audience types / personas
Funnel stages
Locations
Kurig as an example
Within each of these categories, there are segments that we can create detailed groups around. Let’s walk through a B2C example of a product most people know that is easy to follow. These concepts work just as well for B2B and other marketing efforts too.
Let’s say I’m Keurig, the coffee maker, coffee, and coffee making brand. Like many other organizations, Keurig has a variety of product lines that span coffee makers for individuals and businesses. They also have partnerships with coffee brands like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, in addition to their own brands. They also make accessories for their machines and have services.
Their services and offerings range
from coffee auto delivery to servicing for their corporate machines. In addition to their variety of product and service offerings, they run different marketing campaigns throughout the year. Some of these campaigns are related to holidays like Mother’s Day or Christmas. Others focus on things like “summer iced coffee sale.”
The reason we’re diving into all of what Keurig does so deeply in this conversation, is that they have competitors for all of these different facets that have been highlighted. Traditional market
, we make Segment Maps for our clients (this is not an example of a Segment Map – simply of the categories we may consider) so they can analyze their marketing efforts more easily.
Additionally, they run campaigns throughout the year, some of which are related to holidays like Mother’s Day or Christmas, and others that are things like.