How to Utilize Competitive Analysis for your Small Business
Running a small business in the big bad world of giant corporations may be scary, but you can still compete in your market with effective competitive analysis. Utilizing Pay per Click and Competitive Analysis successfully can give your business that competitive edge to push back your competition as well as compete with bigger businesses.
However, the first stumbling block that you may face is deciding where to start. As they say, imitation is the best form of flattery and you can just begin by observing and following the steps taken by successful competitors in your market.
In the online world, this translates into conducting competitive analysis on your competitors and their strategies that you can then implement in your own PPC and marketing campaign.
A quick search on Google or any other search engine will enable you to locate your competitors. A few clicks will enable you to view their websites as well as their advertisements. To begin with, all you need to do is to view their advertisements and create your own ad that is one-up on those ads. For instance, you can offer slightly more discounts on the products advertised by your competitor, provide better services than those mentioned, present unique offers not yet presented by anyone in your market, etc.
Your competitors’ ads can thus form the base of your own campaign and you need not scratch your head to come up with a new campaign. Based on that spying strategy, you can also look at what keywords are being used by the competition. You can look at their bids, monthly volume, CPC or Cost per Click, specific keywords, and their budget for each keyword. Comparing more than a single competitor will help you gain further insight into different strategies and choose one that seems to be paying the best dividends.
You can also use competitive analysis to go back in time to understand how your competitor handled a particular month or season in the previous year. This information will give you a head-start in the current year as you can emulate a proven strategy in the current month or season. You will need to look at the historical AdWords report to extract this data. Furthermore, you can also get backlinks and enable the tracker to track keywords as you follow your competitors’ footsteps.
Competitive analysis can help you formulate a successful organic as well as paid PPC campaign. You can use this spying strategy to merely follow a successful path taken by your competitors instead of getting flustered at the very start of your campaign. However, be ready to have another small business use the same strategy on you after a few months or years since as they say, imitation is the best form of flattery.
