You hire a marketing agency to create and enforce a marvelous marketing plan for your small or start-up business and BAM – tons of new customers reach you in no time! Just sit back and relax while your business grows. That sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, itís not quite that easy.
You can’t just rely on old school marketing tactics such as flyers and brochures to automatically grow your business or on new trendy, web-based-only ones. Today, you need a combination of both. Boost your digital presence using professional-grade custom printing services for your printed marketing material promoting your URL and social media handles to bring more people to your site.
Do you think your digital marketing strategy measures up to your competitors? Is it powerful enough? One of the best ways to find out if it is effective is by benchmarking, that is, seeing how your messaging and tactics compare to your competition. It’s a way to identify suggestions and examples in order to improve or validate what you’re doing right.
How can you compare your strategy to your competitors? After careful research, we’ve come up with a few clever tips. Keep in mind that you need to identify your top three competitors if you want an in-depth analysis. Here’s a look:
Check Out Their Websites
Basic step. You’re not working in a vacuum, check out competing websites and not just the leaders, others may have a few ideas that you can use or target. Take one strategy that you can determine is working and see if it works offline and then use a simple but effective instrument to use as a channel of distribution and diversify traffic coming through that strategy, like flyers – they don’t have to cost an eye and a leg.
Just make sure to be objective at all times and look at these websites through the eyes of potential customers. Are they using images effectively? Is the copy engaging in a tone you haven’t considered before? What could be enhanced?
A QR code to a landing page printed on your flyer can be a great way to keep track of how the ideas panning out.
Check Out Their Social Media Presence
If they’re on Facebook, what kind of content are they sharing? How often? Do friends share or comment their posts with others? Are they on Twitter? How many Followers do they have? Please never mistake social media activity for real action as these Likes or Followers don’t mean anything if they don’t get people to buy products.
Google Your Company
What keywords do people use to find you and your competitors on Google? Once you’ve figured that out, use these keywords and Google your business name. Whenever your company pops up, take a look at your meta description (the text that can be seen under your company name and link on the results page).
Is your meta description persuasive? Is it more or less persuasive that your competition? How can you change your meta description to make it more engaging, increasing the likelihood that people click on your company?
We hope this information comes in handy. Keep in mind that it is almost impossible to be able to know how your company measures up against its competitors if you don’t periodically benchmark against them.
How about you? Have you benchmarked against your own competitors? How has it helped you improve your overall marketing strategy? We would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to leave a comment below.
