One of the best ways to understand your market is to spend time studying your competition.
The great benefit of being online is that you can easily see what they are doing and get a good idea of what offers and approaches are effective.
Clearly you may already know who your main competitors are but you can identify more by running an internet search using some of the main keywords related to your product or service.
We cover identifying keywords in more detail in How to Use the Google Keyword Tool to Understand Your Customers.
In looking at competitors in general, you want to know:
- Who are the main competitors?
- What are they selling?
- Who are their customers?
- Who are the industry leaders and why do they stand out?
- What marketing strategies are competitors using?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of competitors?
When you enter in the keywords, take note of the main sites that come up in your search.
Look both at those that come up in the organic search and those which are advertising alongside the organic search results.
Keep a note of the main sites that attract your interest as you will probably want to revisit the sites later. You can learn a great deal from them.
Things to look out for on the search page:
- How many pages there are competing on the topic (top right)
- What products and services are being advertised (right and top of page)
- Related searches for similar topics (bottom of page)
Click on some links (search results and advertising) and note:
- Products and services are being sold
- Type of companies selling them
- The amount of competition
- The price ranges
Spend some time reading the sites you find; look at the messages and the language used and note what is useful for you in the future. If they seem appropriate, sign up for newsletters or free reports.
If you are considering a new market or service, look for evidence that there are already some serious companies in this market offering that type of product or service.
If you cannot find much evidence of competition, it most likely means there is not enough of a market to make it worthwhile.
Standing out from the competition
When studying competitors, you also want to be thinking about ways that you can differentiate your offer.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that the best way to differentiate themselves is to be cheaper.
This is a very short-term approach because your competitors can use it just as easily as you and you end up in a price war that means you lose money.
You need to find a real point of differentiation to make you stand out. I cover this in more detail in 5 Keys to Positioning Your Expertise for Maximum Profit
Here are some questions you should ask:
- What is missing from the current offers in this market?
- If I were the customer, what information or service would I want that is not currently easily available?
- What can I add in this market that would be different?
- How could I repackage this information to make it more valuable?
- How could the same needs be met in a completely different way?
- How could the information be made available much more easily?
- What would be a completely different way of meeting those needs?
What you can learn from online advertising levels
One way to test the potential for a market is to look at what paid-for advertising comes up at the top and on the right of the page when you do an internet search.
The first point to consider is how many ads there are.
- If there are none or just one or two, it does not indicate a large market potential.
- If they run over several pages, this suggests strong prospects.
Note that using very specific keywords for this part may limit the number of ads. You will get the best picture from searches where the keywords make it clear exactly what market you are interested in but are not so detailed that they focus on one small element.
For this purpose, you are interested only in how many ads there are – not who is advertising or what they are selling.
Tools to help you learn more about your competitors
1. SpyFu: Keywords, search results and advertising
Here’s a great tool that will give you a more in-depth picture of your potential market and competition:
Simply enter relevant keywords to find out about the market behind them.
You can also enter specific domain names for information about individual competitor websites.
Here are some of the things you can discover:
- Cost/Click: Higher cost for advertising reflects a competitive but likely profitable market
- Top Domains: Main websites showing up for the keyword
- Ads: Details of number of ads and actual ads on this topic
- Search Results: Results that appeared for one specific search on this topic
- Top Keywords: From paid and organic search
2. Quantcast.com: Understanding the Demographics
The key to dominating your market is knowing as much about it as possible. That includes knowing what kind of people they are, their mindset and what drives them to buy.
When you know who some of the key competitors are, you can find out what sort of people are visiting their websites using an online tool such as:
This gives you a profile of the people who visit particular websites based on directly measured audience data, combined with panel-based estimates.
You will be able to find out valuable demographic information such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Household income
- Ethnicity
- Education
- Children in household
- US geography
This gives you a very powerful insight into what kind of people are in the market.
You can also use this tool to find out about the typical users of blogs and forums you identify as important.
The example shows an analysis of YouTube.com. You can get similar information on many other websites – though not all will provide the same level of detail.
3. Compete.com: Competitor Site Analytics
Another site that will give you valuable information about your competitors is: 
Data available includes traffic and engagement stats for any website and information about competitor keyword and marketing strategies.
These sites all provide a useful level of information free but will provide more detailed data to paying subscribers.
PDF 
{ 0 comments… add one now }
{ 1 trackback }