How to beat your competition (through digital marketing)

In any business, it is essential that you stay ahead of the competition. It might be that you have found a niche and can keep yourself separate from any other businesses; another way is through clever digital marketing.

If you haven’t updated your digital marketing techniques in a few years, then you might want to reconsider your approach. New and emerging technologies are coming to market all the time adding a new angle to digital marketing.

Designed to help you scale your business faster, analyse customer data more easily or simply automate tasks, employing technology will free you up to focus on the more important job of, you know, actually running your business.

So, here are 5 digital marketing strategies that you might want to consider to help beat your competition.

1. Competitor research
2. Local SEO
3. Email marketing
4. Video content
5. Chatbots

We’ll go through each digital marketing strategy, in turn, explaining how they work and how you can best put it to use for your business.

1. Competitor Research

If you don’t know who your online competitors are, or if you think you don’t have any. Or if you do know who they are, but you don’t think they’re worth your time, you are being naive.

Business can be cut-throat and keeping on top of competitor research is vital to ensuring your survival online.

So whether you’ve been in business a while, or you’ve just set up, doing some simple competitor analysis is going to help you exponentially.

Why carry out competitor research:

• Uncover your competitors’ digital marketing tactics
• Figure out their social media strategies
• Learn who their potential customers are
• Find holes in their marketing campaign strategies and exploit them

Ways to conduct competitor analysis:

• Dig into their social media channels – learn who their target audience is, how they have chosen to grow and how often they communicate with their audience. Knowing these things will enable you to plan your own social media channels to take advantage of their downtime, and their weaknesses, as well as answer their audiences’ questions.
• Use online tools to find out information. SEMrush is a great paid tool that you can use to find out how your competitors are performing organically as well as learn what keywords they are using to target their customers.

2. Local SEO

If you aren’t on Google Business and you have a local business, stop reading now and go set up a profile. At the very least claim your business on Google Business, in case a nefarious competitor claims it on your behalf.

Most consumers rely on local searches to yield the answers they’re looking for, and if your business isn’t there, they won’t come to you.

By establishing a Google Business profile you’ll ensure that your business is visible in any local Google search and on Google Maps, in your local area. But best of all, it’s free to sign up and your customers also get the opportunity to leave reviews for you. Nothing boosts sales quite like a 5* rating.

Google Business means your audience can easily find you and find out:

• Your opening hours
• When you’re busy
• Your exact location
• Your business description
• What you look like through photos
• How to contact you

3. Email marketing

Email marketing is often one of the most overlooked digital marketing channels. But it is one of the easiest and probably the most bespoke digital marketing strategy you can employ to attract customers. In fact, email marketing converts 40 times more customers than social media.

Through email marketing you can target consumers who have shown interest in your company – you are literally pushing on an open door with people who want to know more about your products and services.

By taking advantage of email marketing you stand a greater chance of increasing your profits, driving traffic to your site and increasing your ROI – all for the sake of spending a few hours a week or month crafting email content that converts. What’s not to love?

Easy strategies for email marketing

• Personalise all emails to all users. Never use ‘dear customer’.
• Be creative with subject lines to increase conversion rates.
• Separate customers into cohorts based on their buying/engagement behaviours and craft a targeted email to each group.
• Encourage customers to create user-generated content and share it with the rest of your email cohorts.
• Ensure all your emails are mobile-friendly. If it’s not, you can guarantee it won’t get read.

4. Video content

Video marketing is one of the fastest-growing forms of digital marketing. In the hierarchy of users’ preferred content, video is number one. Videos allow you to succinctly share pertinent information, they allow customers a better glimpse inside your brand and they make your brand instantly personable.

The easiest way to take advantage of video content is by using the live video streaming functions of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Choose your preferred channel and get streaming.

Reasons to use video content for digital marketing

• Boosts conversions and sales
• Builds trust
• Appeals to mobile users
• Google loves videos
• Users like sharing videos

5. Chatbots

If you are unable to man your phones and respond to emails 24/7, then you might want to think about harnessing AI and using chatbots as your digital assistant.

Quite simply, chatbots ensure that your business is open and someone is available to meet your customers’ needs 24/7/365.

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