Your competitors & you.

Do I care about what my competitors are doing?

Uh, yes, of course, and for lots of reasons; intelligence on competitive spending, product development, user feedback, etc. Are you analyzing the consumer decision-making environment though? If you aren’t, here is how to start today (recommended.)

The decision-making environment.

Wherever your customers are seeing your content or ads they are also seeing the content or ads of your competitors. Does the content and messaging you are producing differentiate your brand enough to draw your target customer to you more than your competitor? I’m talking about in their minds here, not just is the content designed to perform in an SEO context. Big brands from companies with deep pockets always do this level of research and analysis as advertising (and often content) is developed so that they know their communications put forth an effectively differentiated brand message before consumers even see it. Smaller brands often skip this step entirely. Mainly due to concerns about the cost of doing the research or a lack of awareness that this is something they should do. There is a lot to be learned from what the big guys do that a small brand can learn from. Just need to re-scale a bit.

Where to start.

One quick hack for getting a picture of what your target is seeing is to pull examples of what your top 10 competitors are putting out there. Screenshots of their sites, some representative recent content (blog articles, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn), recent social posts, and recent ads (display and search.) Line all of these up on an online whiteboard (my favorite is Miro) and spend some time reviewing with your team. This gives you a good picture of what your potential customers are seeing when they are deciding whether to buy from you and how well your brand content and messaging stack up. In my experience, this always leads to some new thinking on how to keep your messaging and overall digital presence differentiated. Different is better.

Sure, your brand is the best and you know it. Showcase what makes you different (aka ‘better’) as much as you can. Perceived difference makes decisions easier.

I help growing brands by leveraging my big company experience at a scale that fits. Grab a spot on my calendar here if you want to talk about marketing for your growing business.