So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on understanding your competitors. We walk through what the general SWOT framework, where to find competitive data, and how to take action. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- what to consider with your competitors
- how big your digital footprint is
- what to do about it
Upcoming Episodes:
- Video SEO – TBD
- How do you benchmark a website’s performance? – TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:41
Well, hey, friends, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show I’m joined by Chris and John, as always, today we’re talking about your competitors. So keeping track of your competitors. And what does this mean? So I’ve been asking around in our slack community, with different clients that I’ve been working with just sort of asking, like, do you keep track of what your competitors are doing? And if so, what do you do about it? And honestly, it’s been a mixed bag of responses. And so some people have said, you know, we don’t do anything about it, but we justify it by saying, Oh, we have to stay focused and stay in our lane and not worry about other people are doing. And that’s their way of saying, we don’t have the time and resources to deal with what our competitors are doing. Other people have said, Well, for my clients, I generate the reports. And they say, That’s nice. We don’t have anything that we want that we can do about it. But we still want to know what’s going on, you know, which kind of seems like a waste of time all around. And then there are other people who just, you know, have no idea and then we can start to get into the different kinds of interpretations of competitive report. So before we dive into sort of the nitty gritty in tactical, Chris, John, when you hear competitive reports, competitive analysis, what do you think of what some of the feedback that you’ve gotten?
Christopher Penn 2:10
I think management consulting, I think, two by two grids, SWOT analysis, Porter’s five forces, BCG growth matrix, you know, strategic group analysis, all the things that, you know, we all learned in Business School, how to do dust off those old textbooks and stuff. And I also think binder were, like, shelfware people do a lot of these analyses, and then don’t really do anything with them, because they’re so abstract, that they’re not really helpful, it’s very difficult to turn them into action.
Unknown Speaker 2:50
Hmm. What about you, John?
John Wall 2:52
Yeah, that’s, uh, you know, it’s funny to having worked here at Trust Insights, I’m completely biased. And I have my own take on this now. And that there’s two huge things. One is to find opportunity, because like you’re looking at your five or six marketing campaigns you want to do, but what if you knew today that Oh, by the way, this one campaign over here of your five competitors, nobody is doing that right now. And this other campaign over here? Yeah, you could do that. But all four of your competitors are doing well in this. So which one do you want to go to. And so to find that, you know, whatever it used again, go back to consultants speak, find your blue sky, stay away from the red ocean, you know, but to find the stuff that you can jump on is huge. And then there’s the same thing, but a slight variation is do you know, stuff that you’re doing really well already. And you could lose that you could have, you know, competitors who are making a run at you. And so maybe you need to be doing some work to hold the beachhead that you’ve already earned. And you may not even know that you have such a huge advantage. And that is driving a ton of your business. So to be able to see the opportunity and see what to defend. That’s unique stuff that I’m excited about it because it’s stuff that people normally don’t get from competitive analysis.
Katie Robbert 4:02
So what’s interesting is that none of us have actually yet mentioned anything that’s actionable. And so we talked about we want to do it actionable. So a lot of times what happens is, someone will say, Okay, I need a competitive analysis on what our competitors are doing. And what they’ll turn up, what they’ll bring back is, okay, here’s a list of products that they have in the market. Okay, great. What do I do with that? Am I supposed to create the identical product? Or here’s a list of the markets that they’re in? Are we going to enter those markets if we’re not currently in them? And so what we want to do today is talk about a competitive analysis in such a way that marketers can do something about it. So we’re going to focus on the fundamentals of a SWOT analysis, what goes into it, but looking at it from the lens of if I’m a digital marketer, and I have control over these digital channels, what do I need to know about what my company Here’s your doing so that I can do something about it. So Chris, should we start with the SWOT?
Christopher Penn 5:06
Yeah, let’s briefly review SWOT analysis only because every agency I’ve ever worked out have dealt with doesn’t completely wrong. And the reason is, because
Katie Robbert 5:16
that’s why it’s not that difficult to like, wrap your head around,
Christopher Penn 5:19
though it isn’t. But it’s one of those things. Okay, so let’s do our drawing here. Here’s our, our standard two by two square, right? We have our strengths and our weaknesses. And we have our opportunities and our threats. The part where people really hose this a lot is, especially down here on the opportunities and threats. So strengths and weaknesses are internal things, right? They are, what attributes What things do you have control over? Right? We have control, for example, over your audience, maybe you have control over your products, for example, what are your weaknesses, things that you don’t do? Well, maybe your brand isn’t particularly strong, right? Maybe your customer service is sucks and people want to just throw you overboard. Whatever those things, Are those your internals, and to that the person who said, you know, we were focusing on ourselves Absolutely. This part here, the the weaknesses part is definitely something you would do want to fix, right? And you also want to double down on the stuff that’s working for you. But then go to the other side. What are the opportunities and threats, and this is where people completely lose the train of thought, because it’s not a free for all. Opportunities, is the equivalent of your competitors weaknesses. So where are your competitors? Weak, right? So if we were doing say, Starbucks, where are the competitors against Starbucks week? Well, for example, Dunkin Donuts has milky week coffee is not particularly strong coffee. So
Katie Robbert 6:49
let’s see, this is where you’re starting to get subjective.
Christopher Penn 6:52
Exactly. So this
John Wall 6:54
is a new england fighting words, do
Christopher Penn 6:55
we get it? Exactly. And then your threats are your competitor strengths. So in the case, for example, with Trust Insights, like are the people that we see as competitive, a lot of time, our massive brands, right, Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte, you know, these are companies, their cream cheese budget exceeds our annual revenue. And so that, you know, there’s there’s a massive disadvantage there. We just don’t have the brand strength and and that’s their strength. So the first part of of competitive analysis really is figuring out the landscape. Using a SWOT analysis properly, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are your opportunities where your threats, you have to assume that your competitors are going to be taking a strong advantage of your weaknesses with their strengths, right, they’re going to beat you up, you have to assume that they’re going to hopefully try and mitigate your strengths with something that their weaknesses with something so that they prevent you from going after their their soft spot if they’re doing their competitive analysis correctly. Now, the good news is almost nobody does. So it’s not a huge problem. But
Katie Robbert 7:59
so let’s talk about this for just a second, Chris. So you keep saying that people don’t do a SWOT analysis, right? What are some of the missteps that people take with a SWOT analysis,
Christopher Penn 8:11
throwing things into the bottom quadrant that don’t belong there is the the the biggest thing that they do wrong? Either they put internal factors there, for example, I’ve seen SWOT Analyses where somebody say an opportunity is improving our customer service. That’s not an opportunity that’s that’s either a strength or weakness, that’s an internal thing to your organization. They will also put things that are external to the competitor in there. So it’s a threat, you know, Congress could legislate us out of existence. Yes, that’s an existential threat. That’s the landscape but but that doesn’t belong in a SWOT analysis that belongs to something like Porter’s five forces analysis, where you’re looking at the industry as a whole. When you’re doing a SWOT, it is a one to one competitive analysis, right is you versus a competitor, not you versus the industry, not you versus politicians, not you versus the Teletubbies, it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s one to one for you versus a competitor. And that’s the other thing that almost everybody gets wrong. When if you do it correctly, and you’ve got multiple competitors, there should be a different SWOT analysis for each competitor.
Katie Robbert 9:13
I think that’s definitely something where it’s a misunderstanding of how to use this kind of framework. So as we’re talking about things that are tactical and actionable, so let’s just take the threat, for example. So the threat to Trust Insights with some of our competitors out there, is that there massive, well, people who are watching this, you’re looking at the entire company right now, we’re not suddenly overnight, going to become massive. And so, you know, yes, it’s good to be mindful of that. But there’s not a whole lot that we can do about it at the moment.
Christopher Penn 9:47
There isn’t, but let’s turn this tactical. So I’d love to buy two matrices. I did go to business school. So that’s probably why I’ve read enough Harvard Business Review case studies and you just do two by two matrices for everything. Including what to have for dinner. But even with this particular analysis, there’s still there’s still lacks that Okay, so what do we do? Like? What are the things we should be looking at? The next step is to say, Okay, we have a, we have a mass competitor, what do we currently what currently works? And what is our competitive exposure to that? So let’s go over to good old fashioned Google Analytics, right? Google Analytics, everybody knows it. Everybody loves it. Except of you work for Adobe. Well, that you have to love Adobe analytics, it’s literally by your paycheck. I’m looking at our assisted conversions here are our multi touch basic multi touch conversions. And I’m looking at Trust Insights. And look at the last last 30 days or so. And I see here email, direct social organic search referral, right? I don’t know about you, but I kind of personally expect organic search to be doing better for us, right? That’s like, it’s not great. So to me, when I look at just our data, this is kind of a weak spot for us. We’re not doing great on organic search. So now, we can start to get into the idea. Okay, well, how can we? How do we figure out why we’re weak? Or, or what is what a strength look like? And now we can start to actually use that two by two matrix for comparison. So where do we go to get that information about organic search? Right? What goes into that? A big part is, are you getting? Are you showing up for a good number of keywords? Are you getting clicks, right are getting valuable clicks, things like that. So you won’t get that in Google Analytics. But you can get that out of an SEO tool. So let’s go to one of my favorites, company called SpyFu. And I put in Trust Insights. And we have, you know, get some, some cool stuff here. You got fun lines and on charts and things. And then you get a list of here’s your company and all the other companies, here’s some common measures, right? Common keywords, number of keywords, monthly clicks, monthly value of clicks. This is good. This is good data to have. But we’re still a kind of a loggerhead right of, well, what do we do? Right? So what we can do is take this, export it to a spreadsheet and then doing in Excel doing in tableau, whatever the hell Power BI. Let’s just go ahead and make a two by two matrix. So I’m going to go ahead and open up tableau. Here we have, I like doing a tableau because I can do scatter plots easily faster than I can in Excel, but you can use whatever you want. And let’s take a look at total number of SEO keywords, and how many clicks they get by domain. And now if you think about that two by two matrix of, you know, gets, yes, fewer keywords, has more keywords, has fewer clicks has more clicks, we run, say some very basic clustering. Let’s make four clusters. Obviously, there’s a big one here, data crunch Corporation, right? big winner, lots of clicks, lots of keywords, they’re doing it right. They got, you know, listen, first media here is sort of in that if you if you drew lines on the screen, actually, let’s do that. Let’s draw some you can
Katie Robbert 13:33
actually draw lines on it.
Christopher Penn 13:35
I can, I’m going to delete though, and I’m going to just do it in here.
Katie Robbert 13:42
And so the thing that I think is important to point out is that we are looking at a two by two matrix, which is not identical. So don’t look at the quadrants as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, like we were just looking at, this is a different kind of two by two. So it’s your standard x y axis, where you know, the more you go up and the more you go to the right that’s the way you want to be reading it.
Christopher Penn 14:07
Right exactly. If you’re familiar with like a Forrester wave or Gartner Magic Quadrant that’s all there there things are they’re just two by two matrices with numbers behind them. So here I’ve kind of drew you know this is the if this was garden hose without the leader quadrant right you know this that data crunch Corporation kill it there they’ve they’ve got the goods got here, somebody who’s sort of a challenger, and they got all of us including TrustInsights.ai down here the loser I
John Wall 14:34
think that’s they call that the growing quadrant or growing,
Katie Robbert 14:37
or you call that the trying super hard quadrant world.
Unknown Speaker 14:41
quadrant you
Christopher Penn 14:43
get that you get the you tried award.
But what you see is that Oh hey, look, there we are. We’re about to edge our way into like one of the niche quadrants. Yay for us. What we see is that we’re getting good placement on keywords like we’re showing up for for keywords, we’ve got a decent number of them that are in this competitive set, we’re just not getting the traffic for them. Right? Whereas data crunch, corporations getting the keywords and the game, the clicks. So our next step is to say, Okay, if we go back to this tool, and let’s, let’s do a little bit of combat. Let’s take that out, let’s put data,
Unknown Speaker 15:32
crunch,
Unknown Speaker 15:33
crunch,
Christopher Penn 15:38
cereal, you got 33 keywords that are shared, that we’re fighting over, than there are, which are like problems with predictive analytics. But then there’s a whole bunch of keywords that they do well on, that we don’t graphing database, for example, kind of an important one here, Pareto charts discrete versus continuous. And now, instead of this abstract, you know, I’ve got a two by two matrix, just by doing this exercise with a little bit of clustering, I can figure out, Okay, what specific things do I need to go? And do? I need to, if I want to go after this leader, I need to go and figure out okay, this stuff that only they rank for? Should I be creating content about this Shakespearean translator? Probably not. Tableau dashboard. Yeah, linear regression analysis. Yeah, I should be creating content about this. Confirmation bias examples. Really good one. So we’re taking the competitor now. And we’re sort of dissecting what, what they’ve got going on, I’m gonna go ahead and export this. Because now in addition to that’s very cute. Now, in addition to our analysis here of who the competitors are, let’s go ahead and bring in, oops, I chose Excel, I didn’t want Excel, I want stuff. I want our just these keywords. And we’re gonna do the exact same thing. We’re going to have a search volume, right? How much volume does a keyword get? And how difficult is it to rank for by keyword. And so there’s some things here that, you know, very high volume, but lots of competition, ideally, we would find something in this quadrant where there’s lower difficulty, but higher via the closest things, there are like a weather forecasting thing, Tableau prep, right. We’re talking about Tableau maps and stuff. So there’s some opportunities there looking at our competitors data to see okay, there’s some stuff that we could probably challenge them on. But stuff like you know, anything after 80, there’s gonna be a real hard battle to fight for anything, you know, the 40s, and 50s. Even if there’s not a lot of volume, might not be that bad. In fact, if we hover over this, and we say, I will only want to keep these. Now, we start digging in like, okay, now, Tableau be source, how to make a dual axis Tableau chart, Tableau filters, if I wanted to go after this competitor traffic, it looks like they do a lot of stuff on tableau, and that it’s valuable, working for them. How do we, how do we start creating content to go after that?
Katie Robbert 18:28
Well, and I think that you’ve touched on a lot of really good tactical things. And the things that, you know, as you’re evaluating, you know, all of this is what makes sense for your company, your brand. And so Chris, you just called out like the weather forecasting thing. That doesn’t make sense for Trust Insights. So someone else can go after that we don’t need to, it’s not something we ever want to be known for. And it’s not something we want to try to draw people into our website for. Because we’re not the experts on that, we’re not going to be able to create really good quality content, that’s going to help us rank really high for that keyword. But the things that you’ve hit upon, we know a lot about tableau. We know a lot about Data Prep. You know, those are probably things that, you know, we want people to be coming to our website for services that we want them to be finding us for. So the next step is we need to start putting together some sort of a content plan to address all of these things.
Christopher Penn 19:25
Exactly right, because we got to figure out what can we do that will get us that information. Now, this is using SEO data, right? Pretty straightforward, pretty easy to understand. If we were backing our Google Analytics account, though, and a Google Alex account said, Hey, social media, kind of a thing you might want to, you know, think about that. And maybe if we went in and dug around by source medium, what are those source mediums that, you know, slack is one of them Twitter’s in there, too, though, like Twitter’s a contributor to our conversions. So we got to ask ourselves, competitively, is there something we should be doing with with that, right? Is there a there there? You could take Twitter data, do the exact same thing take, you know, likes and retweets, and I just look at the tweets, say on a marketing Twitter hashtag, or with your five named competitors do the same two by two analysis, who’s in the leader quadrant? What content are they tweeting about? And can you do the same thing, or it’s something similar, who’s getting, you know, not a ton of one metric, or the other metric, you know, looking at your competitors, looking at who they react to even stuff like, if you were to take all the influencers that you had, they could identify that a competitor had. And, again, any two numerical values, put them on a two by two grid, you can say, Oh, this influence over here looks vulnerable. Maybe I could pick them off, and recruit them to join the dark side. alternative to the dark side of the force.
Katie Robbert 20:58
So you know, what’s interesting is when I do talk with people about, you know, doing, you know, digital marketing competitively, they often think only about keywords, and paid ads. And so those are very tactical, tangible things where you can see, okay, I can compete, I can literally compete for this keyword, or I can compete monetarily to get my ad shown. And you’re sort of talking about Chris about social media. And so that’s a little bit more abstract. And then if you think about one of our strongest channels is email. So we would put that in the strengths for us? Well, what is what would a competitor do to try to take our email? Like, how does that work that seems less tangible, but something that we should still be protecting?
Christopher Penn 21:54
It is less tangible, but there you can transform any, any piece of information into a number of some kind, right? Think about, like stack ranking, you know, you’re number one, number two, number three, as the number of mentions something with email, I’ll give you a fun example. Let’s go to MX toolbox, which is one of my favorite email tools. And I want to do an email health check. And let’s go ahead and put in Trust insights.ai. Or check my health. Right, so I’ve got 10 warnings, one error, 527 checks, pass no blacklists, great one. A few things here that one of the things is that okay, that’s doing an ACP that I’m not worried about. Because we don’t run an unsecure website, we only run HTTPS. I’ve got a couple a few warnings. So I could just count up the number of warnings, right? And see, like, how, how good are we at the basic technicals of email marketing? Now let’s go ahead and go back here to health check. And we’ll put in our Ada crunch. corp.com. Let’s see what
Unknown Speaker 23:04
comes up for them. Interesting.
Christopher Penn 23:07
Huh? See what two errors four warning signs 20? past? So they don’t have any demark? They have no demark? They have no MX That’s weird. Why don’t they have someone call them there? their email doesn’t look good?
Katie Robbert 23:25
No, don’t we need to keep beating them?
Christopher Penn 23:27
Exactly. But so even on something that’s categorical, like, just how many problems do they do they have on something like technical infrastructure. Another one if you want to, if you want to get you know, make your cmo really nervous. Put in your domain into a blacklist check like how many black lists are you on? You know, people have accused you of spamming? We have so far Trust Insights, we have two timeouts, which is fine. And we’re okay across the board. So Katie breathe a sigh of relief we are not on Yeah.
Katie Robbert 24:00
No, but I think that you know, those are, that’s actually a really good thing that I’m guessing a lot of people don’t think about, I believe we’ve covered, you know, some of this email, the technical side of email before, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say a lot of people don’t know about some of these more technical settings for email, which can be a whole other episode. But this is a really great, sort of like broad stroke, check for your competitors against yourself, you know, so obviously, focusing on your weaknesses and fixing those first and then making sure that if your competitors are doing something really well, but you’re also then starting to do that thing, or that you have the same settings so that you aren’t getting blacklisted more than they are.
Christopher Penn 24:46
Exactly. With any of these channels that that are out there in digital marketing land. There’s always something that you can measure, it may not be the best thing. It may not be the ideal but there’s some hint of, you know, in search in social media, you know, you can look at people’s channels that they you know, that they’re on and stuff like that there’s, there’s some way to make a determination about what they’re doing, you may have to use third party software to do it, you know, if we go back to our friend SpyFu here Lago, there’s, there’s Pay Per Click research. So let’s take a look at the pay per click competitors.
And who’s paying, you know, pay wick, which is matomo, they’re shelling out 900 bucks a month. You know, there’s always some kind of number, if it’s, you know, email, you know, pay per click budget and things like that. The part though, I think, is really important that we’re not that all the competitive data analysis never really gets, right, is that we tend to just, for lack of a better term, puke numbers on a page. And we don’t put it into some kind of framework. And when you have this two by two matrix, what whatever framework this magic quarter, whenever you have, you have two metrics that matter. This layout gives you some sense of, of where to go, right? If you got a leader up here, and then you’re you’re down here. What do you need to do to take your company into this leader slot? What are the you know, along those two metrics, and you use things like your Google Analytics and the data available to you to make those decisions to judge? Okay, here’s what we need to do. You know, if this is followers on Twitter, and this is engagements on Twitter, which we need more of, which is easier for us to get, I’m just making this up. But maybe we get followers first. And that leads to more engagement, or vice versa. But by putting any two competitive metrics into a grid, you can start to go okay, I can start to make decisions as opposed to here’s a spreadsheet. Hmm. Well,
Katie Robbert 26:57
so speaking of that, Chris, one of the things that we’ve started doing is putting together what we call a digital footprint analysis. And so you can see that reflected on Chris’s screen. It isn’t, it isn’t, though, the spreadsheet that powers the graph is not something that we show, it’s not something that we send out to people. But what we do is essentially, you know, I mean, we could turn this into a two by two matrix, if that was, you know, something that people could understand a little bit more easily. But essentially, what we’ve done is we’ve broken it down by the major channels, so you have search, social, earned, owned and paid, and then the overall aggregate total. And so what we do on the back end is we calculate, using a lot of those metrics that Chris was just seeing to figure out how big is your digital footprint compared to your competitors in the space? And so in search, in social in earned and so what you’re looking at example of Allstate, Canada, so the Canadian version of Allstate us against their competitors, you know, so there’s a handful of them. And what you can see is that all say overall, is the leader, but not the leader in every single one of those buckets. And so what we then do is talk through, here’s what you can do, to either find those opportunities to improve or protect what you already have, you know, pay is an interesting one. And this is not uncommon to see one person leading because that really comes down to who’s willing to spend money on these ads. Not everyone does ads, we’re not currently running ads, we will be shortly so we’ll have more competitive data. You know, but so for search, for example, you know, Allstate is not the leader in search. And so, you know, what we’re saying is that, you know, a more focused SEO strategy that covers on site, off site and technical. And so a lot of what that means is what Chris was just demonstrating, with doing that really deep dive into the keyword research and the backlinks and figuring out which ones get the highest value that are easier to go after, you know, so there’s a lot of things that this company could do to increase their digital footprint in search, you know, in social, you know, again, it’s sort of it’s coming down to those really tactical numbers of followers and engagements. And so do you have a lot of followers but no engagements or do you have a lot of engagements but not a lot of followers? So how do you keep doing that same thing, you know, earned comes down to making sure that you have, you know, good PR progress, making sure you’re getting placements in really good quality publications, and then getting those referral links back, you know, owned pairs a lot with search in terms of the type of content that you’re creating your emails and then paid is how much money are you willing to spend?
Christopher Penn 29:53
Exactly. And the thing that, you know, is is so important that we keep beating it over the head that we named the show after is the so what I think Okay, once you have this, what are you going to do about it? What is the what decision you’re gonna make? Are you going to? If you’re Allstate, are you going to let Viva continue to beat you at search? Well, the question that question is answered by your Google Analytics, right? If your Google Analytics and your Allstate and you say like, yeah, 1% of our conversions come from search, okay, I guess it’s not that important. On the other hand, at 40% of your conversions come from search, then like, Yeah, what would your sales funnel look like, if you beat the leader at search, and you just start taking their market share. And so your competitive analysis always has to start with your own data to know what’s working for you and what’s not. And then once you’ve got your, once you understand yourself, then you go and go after your competitors and find out, okay, where, if even if you’re getting 40% of your leads, say, from search in your all state? How much more is the Viva getting? And are they getting better customers? Maybe because they rank better? Are they getting more valuable customers? It’s difficult to know. But if you were to start taking them on and and, you know, essentially depleting their fair share of search, you do a lot better.
Katie Robbert 31:17
I think the other thing, you know, worth noting, again, is this is all great information. But if you’re not willing to do anything about it, then why are you keeping yourself up at night thinking about it and looking at it and having people spend their time pulling information. The example, Chris, that you like to give is the fitness tracker. And so, you know, a lot of us have these, you know, fitness trackers, slash watches on these days, and it collects your number of steps, it collects your heart rate, you know, it tells you what’s good, what’s bad. But if you’re not going to do anything about it, then why do you have it? Why do you spend your time collecting that data? If you’re not going to suddenly, you know, take more walks around the block, or if you’re going to do something to reduce your stress so that your heart rate goes down? You know, John, what is your take on all of this? Because you’re talking to a lot of prospects? And, you know, do they say like, we need to be better than our competitors? Are they just solely focused on what’s right in front of them in their own? You know, trash fire? Yeah, I
John Wall 32:19
think you hit the biggest resistance point for everybody. It’s kind of like, well, we just worry about our customers, you know, we can we’re not even sure what we’re doing. So we don’t have time to look at competitors. But I think in that last page there, if you’re all state Canada, in that situation, like you’ve got to look at what’s going on in social, you know, you’re just getting completely destroyed there. And everybody else is doing better than you. So it especially when you’re dominating so much in the other categories, you want to at least go take a look and figure out what’s going on there and go, and that’s a very simple dive there, you just go look at the two that are, are beating you four to five to one and see what they’re doing and try and figure out, hey, is there is there there there. But that does, and it takes the pressure off of you of, hey, those other six categories, like those are not on fire, like we can go chase money somewhere else, because we are just dominating the competition. In fact, the one thing with that report is, it’s almost embarrassing. You’re like, we, you know, we’re pummeling the competition so much that we don’t even have to look at what they’re doing and a couple of those categories. So but yeah, it’s, you know, for any VP of Marketing cmo, I mean, this just completely changes your life, because it’s Look, here’s 60% of the stuff that you don’t have to worry about right now. And it’s all about jumping from fire to fire.
Katie Robbert 33:33
I think that that’s a really good point. I would however, say that Yeah, they don’t right now have to worry about earned, owned and paid. But they should keep an eye on it. Because that could change. Because if they’re so focused on search, and social, and they forget about those other three buckets, they could get complacent and stop putting all of the hard work into it. And so if they want to have that really good, balanced footprint for their balanced customer journey, then they should be paying attention to all of them and figuring out which and here, which in each of these buckets, can we start to you know, block and tackle against? You know, but I think that your point, John is well taken. So, you know, in social, maybe they don’t worry about PC insurance, and you know, sure x right now, but maybe they worry about what the other guys are doing. And really just focus their energies there. You know, again, it’s if, if you’re not going to take action with the data, then why are you keeping yourself up at night, you know, thinking about worrying about what the other guy is doing. And so, you know, it’s sort of, you know, fitness is always a really great example to go back to you know, people get really competitive as well. You know, I was walking in that guy walked faster than me. Are you going to go home and be butthurt about it? Are you going to actually do something about it and start doing like more squats and practicing your speed walking and you know, maybe, you know working out a little bit more so it’s that like, yeah, you can be mad about it, but Then what are you gonna do about it? The So what?
John Wall 35:04
Yeah, and there’s a, you brought up a great point, which is, you’re going to add a whole nother dimension to this now when you have, you know, five or six months of this report, and you can see, okay, which channels do we go up and down in? Are there certain times of the year that certain competitors do better? Why is that your this will start to surface, you know, cyclical things in the calendar that you know, maybe you’re not even aware of and give you some insight that you can take advantage of once you see how things tend to trend.
Katie Robbert 35:32
The thing that I like about a report like this, and it doesn’t have to be this report, obviously. So you know, Chris, you started off showing those very tactical SEO examples. Those are all measurable things. And if you so if you can’t measure what you’re doing, then why are you doing it? That’s a different so what you know, that I could sort of soapbox about, but you know, it gives you the opportunity, John, as you mentioned, month over month to see, are you improving? And are you starting to overtake your competitors in that space, that’s the way if you’re going to spend your time and energy on a competitive analysis that you want to be thinking about it, it’s great that your competitors are over there building widgets and doodads and whatnot. But if you’re never gonna do that, then don’t worry about it. But if you’re going to then find a way to measure that progress to see if you’re doing better, and maybe it’s customer feedback, customer satisfaction, customer retention, revenue is always a good benchmark to see if you’re doing better than other people. And then you can dig into those tactical channels with search and social and paid, and the other other two that I earned and owned up with the other shoe that I can’t remember.
Christopher Penn 36:41
All right. So that’s essentially how to get started with competitive analysis, have a framework, any framework that gives you some structure that tells you what you should be doing about it, the data is fine. It’s important. But at the end of the day, if you don’t take action on it, it’s not going to help you. As Seth Godin famously says, You’re not going to change what you eat or health next size, don’t get on the scale. And the same is true for all forms analysis, but prioritize it within the data you have like Google Analytics, nothing we’ve shown here was fancy machine learning or artificial intelligence, just a bunch of spreadsheets. That’s really all you need to get started to make those decisions. any parting words before we head on out folks?
John Wall 37:25
Go destroy your competition? What are you waiting for?
Christopher Penn 37:29
If you do have questions about competitive analysis, or you would like some help with it, feel free just pop on over to the Trust Insights website. Go to TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash contact and happy to have a chat with you about it. Otherwise, we will see you all next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Thanks for the great tips! Every business needs to do a SWOT analysis, and understanding what their competitors are doing is key to being successful.