EMBiz: How to Define Your Competitors

Laurel Mintz

Hi, everyone, Laurel Mintz here, CEO of Elevate My Brand. Today, we're going to talk about how to find, define and (hopefully) best your competitors. 

Competitor research is so incredibly important. What we see a lot of times is that brands create their campaigns or their strategy within a vacuum. They're so myopically focused on themselves, their category and their brand when really what needs to happen is a zoom out of that for a 30,000-foot view, because if you're spending, let's say, $10,000 a month on Google Ads but your competitors are spending two, three, four times that, then you're not going to see the conversion rates, the traffic or whatever the KPIs that you're tracking towards increase at a rate that is sufficient for you. That's why it's so important to pull back and really understand what your competitors are spending in which categories so that you can do a proper competitive analysis and ensure that you're spending in the right categories. Or, alternatively, if you can't compete with spend, that you are finding where the white space is where you can compete.

Competitor Research Tools

There are a couple of great tools out there that can help you not just find but really research your competitors.

Number one is SpyFu. We love this platform because it can actually tell you from a spend perspective what is happening with your competitive set. Again, this is a critical component to defining and investing your competitors. Because if you can see that they're spending X number of dollars in each channel, then you understand what you need to spend in order to be competitive. Or trump them in terms of traffic conversion, etcetera. 

Number two is Semrush. We use this as an industry-standard tool and this really helps you with that 30,000-foot view in terms of what's happening from your competitive set. Now, I will say that it's really important that you have an agency team or a marketing expert to review all of these different platforms, because data in a vacuum is not really that effective. You need to understand it. "Here's the data, here's what that really means, and here's the go-forward plan that needs to happen accordingly."

Your Roadmap to Success

Of course, if you need any support, make sure you reach out and ask us about our Discovery process. This is the same process that we go through with clients, whether you're a baby start-up or one of the big global brands we work with, because it's important to create a foundational understanding of where you exist and where your competitors are so that we can define a Roadmap for success for you.