A Timeline of What Happens When You Don't Do Competitive Analysis

Competitive intelligence today for marketers can be summed up in several words — frustrating, painful, headache inducing, and hard. And a typical human reaction to those things is to avoid it all together because along with the other laundry list of items what marketer wants to tackle that war? Frankly, I feel the same way, I’m tend to flee from conflict and I’ll tend think “What will happen when I do nothing?”

Except, competitive intelligence and analysis is something we can’t just brush under the rug. As marketers, we can’t hope that if we do nothing that our competitors will just go away. In reality, they won’t ever go away. Here’s a scenario of a timeline of events of what will happen when you don’t do a competitive analysis report.

Day 1

After writing a few pieces of content, you begin to check Google Analytics to see the health of your daily traffic. You stop dead in your tracks realizing that your traffic has dropped significantly during this past week. You have maintained your social media outlets, you’re still ranking for your major keywords, your ads are seemingly doing well — What’s the deal? After researching on Twitter, Facebook and a deeper dive into Google Analytics, you find out that there is a new kid on the block, a new competitor.

You put it on your to-do list to check them out in a couple of days.

Day 3

So this new competitor showed up, but you can’t really figure out what they are doing that is kind of taking away traffic from you. You’ve glanced over their site, but after looking over there blog, Twitter, Facebook, and features page you started to get a headache. You couldn’t see what made this competitor so great in taking the traffic away from you, so you decided to just take a pause on the competitive analysis because it was just so frustrating anyway. You continue with your own marketing activities and monitor what is just going on with your own productions.

Day 10

Your traffic starts to continuously fall and there are a couple of keywords you have dropped in rankings. You begin fortifying some of your SEO strategies, churning out some more blog posts and ramping up a new marketing campaign you plan to realease, but what are your competitors doing? How are you stacking up with your competitors? What insights can you gain? Ouch, my head hurts.

Day 11

You begin to haphazardly scramble around to look at all of your competitors on social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.), check up on your SEO on Moz.com, you some how stumble on some display and text ads your competitors put out, and you look at some traffic sources like Alexa and Compete, but there is an overwhelming amount information that it just turns into meaningless mush. You’ve got a pretty bad migraine now and you keep working on your own strategies.

Day 20

All of the aforementioned things above, happened all over again like a competitive cycle of pain. On a good note you’ve done pretty well on your end marketing wise, minus the several bumps you’ve hit with your competitors. You also go the attention of your CEO because of the successes you have gotten with the marketing strategies you’ve executed. There seems to be plateau in the distance, but you plan on continuing to push through hoping that your competitors stay away.

Day 30

You denial and lack of competitive analysis has caught up with you. You can’t hide what your competitors are doing, even though your marketing has proved some of its worth. Several customers have approached you why you are better vs. the competitor, but you always have trouble telling them why frankly that competitor just stinks over you…mainly because that competitive analysis you did is just a gobbly-gook nothing-ness. You really want to forge ahead because a competitive analysis is just so annoying and all of your marketing is seemingly working out until your CEO approaches you…

“Did you see what x competitor did?” “How do we stack up with them?” “We need to know when they do something new, how can we find this out?” “Marketing looks great, but if you want a larger budget we need a more insightful competitive analysis to comparably see our potential ROI.”

It all becomes an annoying, frustrating, headache of a cycle that can all be avoided if you started off with the right competitive analysis in the beginning. Yes, we agree that your competitors are difficult, stressful and overall irritating, but don’t let that stop you from crushing them. Maybe you shouldn’t worry the about the value of your competitors, some of your focus should be on the value they can take away from you with the potential customers they can acquire over you.

Frustrating, time consuming, headaches, a straight pain, and something we know we need to do, but it’s just so annoying — tracking your competitors. Competitive intelligence isn’t a fun process especially since tracking your competitors, mapping out your competitive landscape and then setting up a competitive analysis report are all feel like you are reaching around in the dark to compile the right pieces of information.

There has always been a battle with marketing budgets to provide the best ROI and it is predicted by 2017 CMOs will be spending more than CIOs. This increase in budget provides validity in that marketers are changing to adapt with their own business landscape. However, as a marketer, without knowing how you stack up with your competitors, where should you allocate more of your marketing budget to, and how effective are the pieces of information your competitors are sharing all outline a competitive landscape that will show actionable insights in order to gain the market share over your competitors.

Curious how to set up a killer competitive analysis now?

We’ve got you covered with our webinar on how to do just that.

How to Set Up A Killer Competitive Analysis

Wednesday July 24th, 2013
1pm EDT

Looking foRuffward to it!