🕵️♂️ How to analyze your competitors like Sherlock Holmes?
Are you still using statistics from research papers? They are great. But c'mon, let's bring LIVE data to the party!
Secondly, a shift in mindset is needed. You're not really in competition. From the customer's point of view, they're "alternatives". (kudos Brian Balfour)
Does it sound scary?
The idea of knowing alternatives can help you provide a better perspective.
The 2 principles I use to gather insights from "alternatives", such as website traffic, social media feed, content strategy, newsletter frequency, ad creatives, winning keywords, and more.
1/ Compare one company with another.
Example: Identify the gap between Airbnb and Expedia, research their customer's preferred channels
2/ Choose a product vertical and go deeper
Example: Understand the landscape of productivity SaaS, its marketing strategies, and content frequency
Visualized my thought process (image above) and the use of my 7 favorite tools, links and use cases:
The 7 tools I used to become Sherlock Holmes:
- SimilarWeb - https://www.similarweb.com/ - Compare any website traffic statistics & analytics
- Mention - https://mention.com/en/ - Enables brands and agencies to monitor the web, listen to their audience
- SpyFu - https://www.spyfu.com/ - Competitor keyword research tools for AdWords
- Browse AI - https://browseai.com/ - Monitor any webpage for changes
- BuzzSumo - https://buzzsumo.com/ - Run a search to discover content ideas and identify influencers
- MailCharts - https://www.mailcharts.com/ - Competitor email monitoring
- Facebook Ad Library - https://www.facebook.com/ads/library - Provides advertising transparency, searchable collection of all ads
I'd add CompetitorTrack io to the mix... it subscribes to your competitors' email lists for you so you get every promo, launch email, and nurture sequence they send, without them knowing. Track 1 competitor for free.
You can also analyze competitors web performance and loading time which is huge for conversion and SEO - https://www.lightest.app/
Such a smart and simple idea! Thanks for sharing @defly
+1 for spyfu.
For Competitors Analysis on Social Media you could try out https://socialelephants.com for free, if you mention that you are an Indie Hacker our support team will give you some "extra powers" for your free trial! 🐘 🤪
Hello @bernardamus - thanks for sharing. What’s the strongest feature we should know about Social Elephants?
Hard question! It's a Suite covering a LOT of services, it's difficult to highlight just one, it's rather a "good combo" for a very competitive price (Suites tend to be expensive).
I believe we are quite unique in the following areas:
Amazing customer care, from the demo, training or any question to help our customers. It's not just a cold call center .. it's a family!
We "digest" data and offer universal KPIs for direct comparison of performance across different social networks. Usually social networks tend to present data with different signals and different formulas...
Of course it would be great to get your feedback to know if I am right!
Thanks for share it, very helpful!
It's my pleasure to hear that @kapustin - what else do you wish to know from competitor analysis?
I'm interested in competitor traffic channels for my first step in marketing. Because I have MVP at this moment, so for the start I don't want to make a mistake. Similarweb can help me with that right?
Yea can do. When you conduct a research. Select a few sizable companies and compare their marketing traffic.