Marketing is hard! But it doesn't have to be. You can spy on your competitors, get all their best marketing tactics and the tags that are working off them, copy them, and then crush them.
In this article, we are going to share with you seven tools that will help you spy on your competitors.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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Before we get started, we have a question for you: Do you know how much traffic your competitors are getting? If you do, leave a comment below with "Yes." If you don't, leave a comment below with "No." Because in this article, we are going to teach you how to get that information.
So, let’s go straight to the point.
SimilarWeb
The first tool we have for you is SimilarWeb. When you put in a URL into SimilarWeb, even if it's a competing URL, it'll show you how much traffic they get.
You can compare it to your site and see if they get more traffic than you or if they get less traffic than you. Are they getting their traffic from referrals, social media, or searches?
It gives you all of this data and best of all, it does it for free.
Built With
The second tool to spy on the best marketing tactics your competitors are using is Built With. Built With tells you all the technology that your competition's using.
And you're probably wondering why you should care what technology your competitors are using.
Well, the fact is that if they tell you your competitor's using tools like Optimizely, that means they're running AB tests.
WayBackMachine
You then want to go and see what your competitors are doing because if you know they're doing these kinds of things like AB testing, you can then go into tools like WayBackMachine and see different variations of their page, because this will give you an idea of what's converting better and what's not.
This will give you an idea of what pages and flows and copy you should use on your site to get the most conversions versus what you shouldn't be doing.
Ubersuggest
When you put in your competitor's URL into Ubersuggest, it shows you their search traffic, how much organic traffic they're getting, and how much paid traffic they're getting, per region.
Whether it's the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, India, Canada, or Australia. It doesn't matter what region; it'll break it down for you. It'll even show you their top most popular pages.
When you click on the top pages report, it shows you all the estimated visits to those top pages, the keywords that each of those pages is ranking for, the positions, how many backlinks each of those pages has, and even how many social shares.
And the reason you want to do this is that when you're creating content for your own website, you want to make sure you're doing stuff that's popular.
You don't want to create content that no one reads.
You don't want to create content that everyone's going to ignore. But by using the Ubersuggest top pages feature, it'll give you ideas.
Alright, now before we move on with the next tools to spy the best marketing tactics, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
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Buzzsumo
The fifth tool we have for you to spy on the best marketing tactics your competitors are using is Buzzsumo. Similar to Ubersuggest, Buzzsumo just focuses purely on blog content.
Now, in Ubersuggest, you can also get blog content, but you also see landing pages. The thing we like about Buzzsumo is the moment you put in my competitor's URL, it shows you all the popular blog pieces of content, and breaks it down by backlinks and social shares.
This gives you ideas of what content you should create, and best of all, Buzzsumo lets you break down that search based on time periods, whether it's a few months or three months, a year, or two years, so you can see how my competitors are doing overtime.
This will tell you trends in the industry of types of content you should be creating, versus types of content you shouldn't be creating anymore.
Socialblade
The sixth tool is Socialblade. Your competitors have social profiles, whether it's YouTube or Instagram, they're out there on the social web. Socialblade will show you how popular their social channels are.
It'll even show you how many followers they're getting on a daily basis, compared to how much content they're posting.
If you notice that your competitors are posting five times a day, and they get extra thousand followers, but when they post zero times a day they only get a hundred extra followers, it shows you that people in your space will follow you more if you post more content.
That's what we love about Socialblade.
It even shows you their growth rate, and you now have something to stack up against.
Because you want to beat your competition. You want to do better than them. You want to track what they're doing so you can do more than them.
And if you notice that they post five pieces of content a day and they're not getting that many followers, but one day, they post one piece of content, and their follower count just grew by 10x, you want to look at what that content was, because it even gives you the date, so you can replicate it and create other variations that are very similar to that content, because you know that's what people love in your space.
WhatRunsWhere
The seventh tool we have for you to spy on the best marketing tactics your competitors are using is WhatRunsWhere. Your competition's not just doing Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
So many people are running banner ads, but what's working for them? What copy, what images?
WhatRunsWhere will show you that.
Conclusion
When you use all those tools combined, you'll get a good understanding of what your competition's doing.
You'll be able to spy on them, one-up them in their marketing campaigns, and beat them.
It’s all about understanding what works well for your competitors and making it better for you.
And if you use these tools, you’ll be able to do just that.
If you need help using the best marketing tactics to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
