For many organizations, keeping an eye on the competition is often a turn of phrase rather than a documented and consistent process. It’s easy to casually see your competition in the marketplace and think, “ok, great, I see what they are up to right now.”
The problem is that a quick glance is not enough to make a difference. This approach misses the mark in truly auditing and strategically analyzing what your competitors are marketing and how they are marketing themselves. Without a process or consistency, it’s easy for your competition to surpass you and get further and further ahead. To help solve this problem we love to conduct competitor audits.
What are Competitor Audits?
Competitor audits are exactly what they sound like – an audit and review of what your competition is doing for their marketing. Audits can come in all shapes and sizes and analyze everything an outside organization is doing. These findings can range from competitive intelligence about their website’s technical performance, and social media engagement, to highlighting specific tactics such as messaging and audience targeting for a certain product or service.
The Benefits of Auditing Your Competitors
There’s a good reason why 62% of businesses plan to allocate more resources toward competitive intelligence – that information helps drive future success.
The goal of any audit should be to identify key areas where two or more organizations are competing in the marketplace and to get a feel for what changes they have made to their marketing at regular intervals. Going through the auditing process can help your business:
- Gain more knowledge about the industry. You can’t take advantage of something you don’t know. Competitor audits allow you to better understand what’s going on in the marketplace, learn new trends, and draw inspiration from what you see from your competitor’s marketing efforts.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses. Nobody’s perfect. A thorough review of your competitors can let you know what you do well and what you don’t do well compared to everyone else. Learning these strengths and weaknesses will allow you to spot new opportunities and address potential threats that could hurt your business.
- Discover what audiences your competitors actively target. It’s always good to see who your competitors are trying to reach. Whether you gain more understanding about what they’re trying to say or identify new types of customers who you didn’t target before.
- Uncover gaps in your own marketing. You might think you’re doing everything you should to market your business, but there’s always a chance that there’s something else you can do. An audit can highlight different strategies or specific tools that you can work into your future marketing plans.
- Establish what separates your business from the competition. Competitor audits allow you to evaluate what other businesses offer to the market, and where you’re different. This information can help you refine your unique selling proposition (USP) and make sure it comes across clearly in your messaging.
It’s also important to note that competitor audits aren’t something you need to do all the time. For most organizations, ongoing monitoring is too time-consuming and won’t provide enough time to see or track changes in a competitor's performance. We typically recommend conducting an audit annually or semi-annually for fast-changing tactics.
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4 Tips for Conducting Meaningful Competitor Audits
Focus on a core group of competitors and metrics
For any auditing process, the first step is to create a document that lists out who and what you want to audit. The prospect of gathering a bunch of competitive intelligence is exhilarating, but don’t overextend yourself.
We often suggest starting with your top two or three competitors, but you can go as high as five to see interesting results. Auditing more than five competitors often doesn’t provide a lot of new insight and can be overwhelming, so focus on quality over quantity.
When it comes to determining what you want to audit, it’s always best to start with the basics. Analyze two or three key visible elements for core marketing efforts, such as website performance, social media, content production, or paid advertising. Once you have your metrics and competitors outlined, it’s time to start sleuthing.
Create regular, written documentation that can be reviewed and tracked over time
Without consistent documentation, it’s easy to forget the details of what competitors were doing six months or a year ago, let alone three years ago. By following an audit schedule, you can see how seasonality, new products, new marketing tools, or tactics have shifted their efforts in real-time.
Methodically audit competitors over time to really see what they’re doing
When auditing, it’s not just the numbers we are looking for either. We want to paint a full picture of how an organization is going to market, what tactics are effective for them, what messaging is working for them, and how they are striving towards growth.
Reviewing different tactics makes it easier to see where competitors might spend their time and money. When you have this fuller picture of your competition’s efforts, you can better understand the playing field you are on and determine what tactics you need to utilize to beat your competitors.
Make plans according to your findings
The last and final step to any audit is to analyze your findings and outline the next steps for your organization. The true end-all goal of a competitor audit is to help generate new ideas or improvements for your own marketing.
Maybe the audit shows that your competition is killing it on social with ecommerce, or maybe they redesigned their website and have an entirely different messaging style than they did before. Either way, you can use this information to make a more informed decision on how to spend your marketing time and money.
Use the Competition to Your Advantage
Nearly 90% of businesses report that their industry has become more competitive in the past three years. Businesses can’t afford to tread water these days – if they aren’t moving forward, they’re often falling behind. Regularly reviewing your competition can give your business the information needed to thrive in the future.
Looking for help conducting your own competitor audit? We are here to help! Contact us today to speak with one of our experts about your marketing challenges!
