More companies than ever before are shifting their budgets from traditional advertising to digital marketing.
This shift is why content marketing is predicted to be a $300 billion industry by 2019.
With so much money flowing into content and other forms of digital marketing, competition for online attention is fierce.
If you want to ensure your brand is able to stand out, here are five competitive marketing strategies you need to put into action:
1. Deep Dive into Competitors
The best way to stand out from competitors is to understand exactly what they’re doing. By evaluating every element of their marketing efforts, you’ll be able to identify their weak points.
After you identify where a competitor is falling short, you’ll be able to launch your own marketing initiative in that area. This can work with anything from SEO to social media.
2. Know Your Ideal Customer
Plenty of businesses dive into marketing without first thinking about exactly who they want to reach. Since this often leads to wasted resources and lower ROI, take the time to identify your ideal customer.
Once you have a clear persona for your ideal customer, it will make the competitive marketing strategies you implement even more effective. You will also be able to take full advantage of the targeting tools offered by platforms like Facebook.
3. Craft a Clear Message
Your potential customers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages when they’re online. Crafting a clear message is essential for raising above all that noise.
You can see a great example of a well-crafted marketing message here. The headline explains exactly what someone can do, and then the rest of the page hits all of the product’s key benefits.
Writing as many variations as you can think of is a good starting point for crafting the right message. From there, you can take the top options and A/B test them to see which resonates the most.
4. Let Data Guide Your Efforts
New marketing campaigns require making some educated guesses. But once a campaign is live, you can tell whether or not it’s working by looking at the data.
In addition to reviewing high-level data, you should dig into this information. Doing so will provide clear guidance about changes and tweaks you can make to your campaigns.
If you’re new to using data, installing Google Analytics on your website is a good starting point. You can then connect your data to other marketing platforms like Facebook or AdWords.
5. Try Competitive Marketing Strategies on Different Platforms
There are many underutilized online platforms. This is true for both new and established platforms. Being an early adopter of a new platform provides a big advantage.
And with an existing platform, finding areas that are underutilized by other brands presents the perfect opportunity for executing competitive marketing strategies. This can give your online visibility a major boost.
Online reviews are a powerful platform many businesses overlook. If you’re in this position and aren’t sure how to get started, take a look at our online reputation services to learn how we can help with this marketing channel.