There are many trends when it comes to online competitive analysis; however, based on our experience, the best way to do a quick survey of your competition and start planning your strategy is to use the following plan we created called the DOMINATE strategy.

What is the DOMINATE Marketing Analysis?

We created the DOMINATE marketing analysis and plan to help our clients better find key areas of opportunity within their marketplace. Our strategy takes into account many factors to provide a complete strategic approach to online marketing.

• Discover major strategies
  1. Gather as much data as possible to find the major areas where your competitors are spending their money online. Look for particular and unique patterns, such as if they have a large number of Facebook likes but very few Twitter followers.
  2. Get as much data as possible from different channels. The more data that you can collect the better, since it might help to understand the overall strategy that your competition is using.
  3. Do not assume that if a channel is not popular in your industry it is not be useful. Sometimes your competition might have found a small but loyal niche that you might be able to reach if you keep your mind open.
• Organize the data
  1. Data is useless if it doesn’t tell a story. Organize the data in such a way that it allows you to understand the historical social media trends and different factors.
  2. Try to match the data with major events in your industry like major acquisitions, important events in the economy, and overall customer trends.
• Mute assumptions
  1. Even if you have worked for or with your current competition in the past, try to avoid making assumptions. Do not believe anything that is not backed up by data. Use all the analysis and historical information that you have gathered to create a bird’s eye view of your market.
• Identify strengths
  1. Find key strong points in your competitor’s marketing strategy. Look for unique patterns and noticeable strong points. Analyze projected website traffic with Alexa or look for major ranking keywords using SEMRUSH, look for unique numbers that show a particularly powerful/successful strategy.
  2. As much as possible, attempt to figure out what is working for your competition. For example, perhaps a particular niche is sharing with enthusiasm the blog entries of the company. Any major strength must be taken into account.
• Notice weaknesses
  1. Once you understand the particular strengths of your competition, take a closer look at their weaknesses. Even if they have an entire marketing department at their disposal, they have to be doing something wrong somewhere. With this mindset, look at their strategy and the data gathered to identify the “low hanging fruit”.
  2. Look at any market left-out by your competition, keywords that are not optimized, pages without proper structure markup, and dips in traffic or major search trends.
• Analyze and plan
  1. Analyze all the collected data and insight and take time to create a cohesive marketing plan. Create a plan that takes into account all the aspects of your business where you can outshine your competition. Find the uniqueness of your business and the factors that make it remarkable.
• Test
  1. Once you have a plan developed, create multiple marketing/strategy groups and test them. Create ad-copy variations, different images, font-styles, timings/schedules, etc. Look for patterns. Gather and analyze as much data as possible to select the ads that do the best and discard those that under perform.
• Evolve your strategy
  1. Constantly look at the marketing plan and let it evolve. Keep a close eye on your competition and look for any movements they make. Also, take great care of your own marketing strategy and continuously improve with a data-driven strategy in mind.