With 2023 now here, Social Media Today put together a new series of guides on various key elements of digital strategy to help you map out the best approach for your business. At the very least, SMT’s collection of resources should give you some pointers to further refine your process. This is actually the third installment of the compilation; you can check the first one here, and the second one here.

Competitive Nature 

This third overview explores the next stage, which is all about researching your competitors to better understand your business landscape and learn from their examples, which should provide some boons for your digital marketing efforts. It might take a bit of time, but there are new tools and techniques available to help you make this task more detailed and streamlined. 

Studying the Competition

Before you even head into the whole online competitor sleuthing thing, you have to first know who you’ll be researching, along with finding out their various socials. Your best friend here will be Google. In this video from Andy Gray, you can use the new chatbot ChatGPT to generate a listing of key competitors in your region, including links to all of their Social Media handles. 

So, first, you’ll want to list how many followers each of your primary competitors has on each platform so that you understand which brands are performing the best. This is mainly to provide you with a benchmark for the figures you’ll be shooting for. Something like Facebook’s comparison data would help you gain some insight into this. 

Going a level deeper, you may also want to find out how many likes each brand generates per post. If you have additional resources at your disposal, you can also check out some of these other tools: 

These tools don’t really differ all that much when it comes to core functionality; they only really differ in the amount and complexity level of additional features. Some of them do feature free trials, but for the most part, you can consider these more ‘premium’ options. To add, you can also use Facebook’s Ads Library to analyze a brand’s advertising approach, along with TikTok’s ‘Top Ads’ mini-site. 

Analyzing the Data

Naturally, after having collected all the needed raw data, you can proceed to dabble into specifics. Each element will have its own value and relevance, allowing you to learn a lot from what’s working, and helping you avoid the missteps of those whose engagement didn’t take off. You can also compare your competitors’ posting frequency and upload schedule, which could also guide your approach. 

The Wrap

In the end, the main goal is to simply give users a clearer vision of what your competitors are doing and how they’re seeing success. These elements could then help you refine your posting process, while also highlighting which platforms you should focus on.

Sources 

https://bit.ly/3k1NCT1