As a digital marketing agency owner, you probably spend a lot of time focusing on your own business. Understanding your KPIs, evaluating your targets, and altering your strategies are all important steps for the growth of your digital marketing agency. But to rise to the top of your industry, you also need to know your competitors.
Performing a digital marketing competitor analysis periodically is an important step in growing your agency. You must understand what your competitors are doing well to outperform them. Analyzing your competitors can also help you stay on top of trends and ensure that your agency doesn’t fall behind.
But there’s a right and a wrong way to perform a competitor analysis. Read on to learn how to conduct a successful digital marketing competitor analysis.
What Is a Digital Marketing Competitor Analysis?
A competitor analysis is an in-depth analysis of your competitors. This process allows you to evaluate your competition at a high level, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and know what you can do differently to match their success.
Even if you feel like your digital marketing agency does everything right, you won’t find success until you analyze your competitors. You not only need to offer high-quality services to clients, but also outperform your direct competition and show leads you’re the right choice.
How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis the Right Way
The best way to conduct a successful digital marketing competitor analysis is to look at many facets of a competitor’s strategy — not just one or two components. Here are the steps you can take to perform a competitor analysis:
1. Know the Different Types of Competitors
First, you must understand the different types of competitors and which ones you should focus more energy on.
As a digital marketing agency, you have both direct and indirect competitors.
- Direct competitors are companies that offer your same services to the same audience.
- Indirect competitors offer similar services to a different audience or different services to the same audience.
Your direct competitors are the ones you need to outperform, but you can also glean insights by analyzing your indirect competitors’ strategies. For now, focus on your direct competitors in your digital marketing competitor analysis.
2. Profile Each Competitor One At a Time
It’s best to profile each competitor separately rather than analyzing multiple at once. As you move through the remaining steps, focus on one digital marketing agency that is your direct competitor.
3. Know Their Customers
You may assume that your competitor has the exact customer base as you, but there could be slight variations in your audiences. Understanding your competitor’s target customers can help you understand whether your agency should target that same customer base.
You can learn about a marketing agency’s customers by reading their customer reviews, reviewing their mission statement, and analyzing their social media followers.
4. Evaluate Their Presence Across Different Platforms
Next, review what your competitor is doing to market their services and engage with customers across platforms. Analyze their:
- Website
- Social media presence
- Videos and podcasts
- Emails
Consider which platforms they spend the most time on. How does that compare to your presence on those platforms?
5. Understand Their Best Practices
Next, dive deep into what makes your competitor successful. What best practices have they developed that allow them to land more sales and outperform your agency?
For instance, if your competitor has high search engine rankings, they’ve probably implemented effective SEO strategies. If they have a large social media following, maybe their TikTok gained traction after a viral video.
6. Organize Your Data
Once you’ve collected data about your competitor, it’s time to organize it in a way that allows you to compare it to other competitors and your own agency. We recommend an Excel spreadsheet.
Create columns for criteria like search engine rankings, target audience, social media presence, and website, and record notes and data in each column.
7. Perform a SWOT Analysis
Finally, it’s time to analyze the data. While you can use any method you’d like, we recommend performing a SWOT analysis.
SWOT analyses help you evaluate your own agency in comparison to your competitors. You’ll analyze your:
- Strengths over the competition
- Weaknesses compared to the competition
- Opportunities for growth in your market
- Threats of emerging competitors or changing environments that could hinder your success
Once you’ve performed your digital marketing competitor analysis, you can begin scaling your digital marketing agency beyond the competition.
At Seven Figure Agency, we help digital marketing agencies gain the tools and strategies to achieve seven figures in annual revenue. Check out our book and podcast to learn more.
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