Ever wished you had a magic mirror that could look into your competitors marketing strategy and tell you how to be the fairest of them all (or is that just a really weird analogy..)?
No magic mirror required. There’s software that will do that for you!
In this video I break down how to reverse engineer your competitor’s digital marketing strategy using free or trial software so you can do it yourself if you want too.
After watching this video you’ll know:
- How to find where your competitors have their businesses listed and linked to online
- How to tell if your competitors are running ads (along with seeing how much they’re spending, what keywords they’re bidding on, and the exact ad copy they’re using)
- Whether their social media marketing is bringing them any customers
- How to tell what keywords your competitors are ranking for and how much organic traffic they are getting
- How to tell where they’re getting their referral traffic
Sound good?
Let’s go!
(But first, a tip to save you some time)
Life is crazy busy and your time is valuable, so I don’t want to waste it.
For that reason I added a kind of contents below the video with time stamps. That way you can watch the bits you’re interested in and skip everything else.
If you want to watch the whole thing though, here’s a tip to make it lots quicker:
On the youtube video, click on the little cog icon in the bottom right hand corner. In the pop up, choose “Speed”, then in the Speed options choose 1.5 times or 2 times faster.
It’s kind of like speed reading for video. You’ll be surprised how good your retention of info is even at double speed (and no, it won’t make me sound like a chipmunk..)!
What this video covers
- 0.00 – Intro to reverse engineering your competitor’s marketing strategies
- 2.00 – How to see where your competitors have their businesses listed online
- 2.30 – How to see if a competitor has a Google My Business page (which will help them rank in the map results if it is well optimised and they have enough links and business citations (listings) online)
- 4.20 – What factors organic results predominantly rely on
- 6.30 – Checking business listings through Whitespark and Fiverr
- 9.00 – How to use backlink checking tools to find what sites are linking to your competitors
- 11.35 – Using Open Site Explorer for links and Domain / Page Authority
- 12.45 – Why you need to take site stats with a grain of salt
- 13.40 – Using Majestic to check links and Trust / Citation Flow
- 14.40 – Using SEMRush to check links
- 14.55 – Using AHREFs to check links
- 16.16 – Seeing which links have the highest authority to focus on
- 17.45 – Seeing which pages on your competitor sites are getting the most traffic
- 18.58 – How to use AnswerthePublic.com for content marketing ideas
- 21.45 – How to see what search terms your competitors are ranking for and how much traffic they’re getting
- 24.55 – Using Similarweb to find referral traffic sources
- 27.50 – How to see if your competitors are running paid advertising campaigns, including seeing how much they’re paying, what keywords they’re bidding on, who they’re competing against etc.
- 30.00 – Looking at ad statistics to see which ads and keywords are most effective for your competitors and to see competitor ad copy
- 32.50 – Seeing how your competitors are going with their social media campaigns
- 36.30 – How to use the Facebook Insights tool to find out which of your competitor’s page updates are most popular
One thing I messed up in the video, at around the 20 minute mark when using SEMRush to look at rankings and volume of search traffic, I forgot to change the results to AU rather than US, so they’re not totally accurate.. Sorry!
Where to go next
So now you know how to reverse engineer your competitor’s digital marketing strategy.
But did you know that we can set up a campaign that will be almost impossible for your competitors to analyse and replicate?
Yep, we can do that. Use the button below, fill out our application form and we can talk more about it on your initial discovery call.
If you liked this video, you might also be interested to check out the other three walkthroughs in the Trust Metric Digital Marketing Basics series:
- Quick Changes to Your Website to Convert More Visitors into Customers
- How to Play Google’s Game (and Win)
If you’d like to download the mindmap that was used to structure this video and the others in the digital marketing basics series you can do that by clicking here.
Links mentioned in the video walkthrough:
SEMrush
Majestic
Open Site Explorer
AHREFs
SpyFu
Answer the Public
WhiteSpark
Fiverr