Ray Sawvell and Blake John join Ben Page to discuss the importance of competitive intelligence in digital marketing. They start by highlighting how often the competitors that clients bring to marketers are different from their digital competitors. The team then explain why competitive intelligence is important and how it can help businesses understand where they stand in their market. They also mention how tracking the competitive landscape over time can inform adaptive strategies. Blake and Ben emphasize that while businesses should focus on serving their customers, they still need to keep an eye on their competitors. Furthermore, they suggest that gaining awareness of who the significant players are in a given acquisition channel and reverse-engineering their model of acquisition can help businesses understand the market and develop effective strategies. The team share expert tips about understanding your competitors' tech stack, evaluating their tools and strategies, and analyzing their site structure to identify gaps that your business can fill. They recommend using tools such as Call Tracking Metrics, Salesforce, Hot Jar, Microsoft Clarity, and Screaming Frog to gain insights into your competitors' online presence.

Ben, Blake, and Ray stress the significance of identifying competitors and understanding their digital marketing strategies, including keyword gaps, creative gaps, and offer gaps. The team advise using tools like SEMrush to conduct keyword gap analysis and identify the whole keyword matrix. They also mention that understanding keyword spaces and content gaps in your industry, user needs and specific user intents is crucial in building content and ranking for keywords organically and improving your SEO efforts. Join Ben, Blake, and Ray as they share actionable insights and expert tips to outsmart your competitors and grow your business faster.

Episode Highlights

03:28 - There's the idea that if you're always pursuing your competition and chasing after them, that you're always going to be in second place. So I think on the one hand, you need to concern yourself with your customers and your product and just serving their needs more effectively, more efficiently, to gain an edge. However, I think it is still useful to keep an eye on the market and your competitive set.

14:16 - I will say, if your target audience is older and it's more of a B2B type industry or niche, Bing is relevant because a lot of people are on work computers. They're doing their searching. They're doing their looking for their next supplier or whatever it might be on their company laptop. And a lot of times the default browser and the default search engine is Bing. And so, honestly, it could be relevant. But for most almost every other industry, though, I would recommend Google.

37:15 - Ad Creative is like one of the biggest insights you can gather from competitive analysis. And again, I want to preface all this with we're not going to copy & paste like Blake mentioned and just take everything and put it into our ad copy, but there are tools out there or we can Google it to find exactly what are our competitors going to market with from a visual format copy offer. There's a lot of different ways to look at this and then you can determine how you may want to go to market for a specific product or offer as well. Getting more tactical, you can use tools like Facebook or Meta Ads Library where you can literally see the ads that they are running on Facebook today. And you can find out, are they running videos? Carousel ads? Are they doing memes? Like, what are they doing for their marketing strategy? And then what might be gaps in your current marketing strategy from an advertising standpoint.

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Ben Page

Ray Sawvell

Blake John

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