A significant part of scouting your competition in a digital competitor analysis is identifying your competitors’ online performance and campaigns. Businesses need a broad overview of what campaigns their competitors have/are running, when those campaigns started, and how they are performing.
Scouting involves examining all the different online strategies, and tactics businesses can use. This can include simple information such as how fast a website loads to more in-depth knowledge such as how a website ranks on specific Google search terms and what terms they are actually targeting.
The number of digital marketing tactics and tools businesses can use is staggering. Therefore, having a high-level overview of what your competitors are doing can reveal a wide range of tactics you may need to dig into more deeply once you identify any trends.
Benchmarking means continually comparing your digital performance to your main online competition. The process includes ongoing monitoring and constantly analyzing your competition to see changes in websites, content, social media pages, and more. The goal of benchmarking is to establish a baseline that you can use to measure yourself against your competitors to see how successful your efforts are. All the information you have gathered by scouting your competition will be needed.
In addition, benchmarking helps you create an “apples-to-apples” comparison by defining measurable and purposeful metrics. This process will also help you identify gaps between your various competitors and will help you form an appropriate strategy.
Benchmarking will help you get the complete picture of how you stack up to the competition. In addition, some tools will make benchmarking easier to analyze and monitor any changes your competition makes. Business landscapes are constantly changing; seeing these changes early will help you form the best response.
