Success no longer just lies in just measuring your brand’s performance but also your competitors. Keep your enemies closer! While this is not a topic that is often talked about loud, it is important to know what your competitors are doing. Regardless of the industry that your brand is in, the marketing game is quite fierce everywhere. You may have great ideas to capture your audience with good marketing channels, but knowing what your competition is up to will important to keep up.
You don’t only get to catch up with some new trends, but analyzing their campaigns could help your marketers to get a perspective of what worked and what didn’t work. Choosing influencers can sometimes become an easy job for you when you know exactly what kind of influencers to look for.
Why spotting your competitor’s campaigns could be advantageous for you?
Competitor tracking gives your brand an insight which helps fuel your own influencer marketing strategy. Off the top of my mind, here are a few reasons why tracking their campaigns is a good idea
This is another form of making smart, data-driven decisions – instead of being cooped up in your own brand’s brainstorming content room.
Apart from your homework, this is a shortcut to know the pulse of your industry and niche, and what your competitors are doing, can help come up with excellent ideas for content creation.
This gives you an opportunity to watch your competitors’ business strategies play out, and analyzing them helps you learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making them yourself. Let’s say your competitor ran a campaign on Facebook and Instagram and got great results in Instagram but performed dismally on Facebook, you know which platform to stay away from without any spendings.
Tracking your competitor’s campaigns can also help your brand figure out their strategy and key to their success. You will also know what kind of influencers to work with.
How to spot the details of your competitor’s influencer marketing campaigns?
To know, how your competitor’s brand performance is on social media, here are a few tips for tracking them
The direct method – Checking their social media profile
This is probably the most primary and quick method a brand could do to find out if any campaign is ongoing. Constantly set a check for their social media to see if they have posted any recent content featuring influencers. Look for posts in which influencers are tagged, reposts of brand content by influencers or even takeovers by influencers.
See for instance how Cadbury Dairy Milk posted a video of Srishti Dixit @srishtipatch in their post and talked about how she is part of their campaign which battles online bullying.
A post shared by Cadbury Dairy Milk (@cadburydairymilkin) on Aug 6, 2019 at 10:10pm PDT
This will now lead you to the influencer’s profile to see if this account and peers match your brand image. A few things to check in the profile would be – influencer’s match for your brand, engagement rate, previous content, likes and comments vs follower count.
Study your competitor’s backlinks
Most of the users and influencers will not be making direct mentions of the brand on social media. For eg, a collaboration between a brand and an influencer for a product review – these social media users may have just blogged or named the product. A smart way to identify your competitor’s influencers would be to analyze backlinks that lead customers to their website.
Simple tools like Semrush or Similarweb is good at showing where any link is getting their traffic from. Check backlinks to their product or service page. You can check a variety of metric here – backlinks, the number of clicks the link gets from the backlink. So if an influencer backlink performs well, you can explore the marketing strategy to apply it in your brand’s next campaign.
Not only content, but this could also help your brand understand what a great backlink looks like. This hits a double goal for influencer marketing and SEO objectives.
Look out if your competitor’s brand name gets a social mention
Keep a check and set up a Google Alert not just for your brand name and keywords, but also your competitor’s. Influencers will ideally mention the brand name in their posts. So a simple brand name search on the preferred social media would also help.
You can search for your competitors’ branded keywords and names using a multitude of tools on the web. You can check all the social media channels to see who is talking about your competitors and the users with a high number of followers engaging in those conversations. Analyze the content to see what kind of sentiment is prevalent throughout the mentions.
Using a Google search can help find brand mentions on the web, but finding the tagged partners through native searching is close to impossible. if they are tagged, the job becomes easier – you can just go to Instagram and check their tagged posts to find the influencers.
On Facebook, such searches are easier, since you can just add an @ and search for the brand name or keyword and all related posts/groups/photos and other mentions show up.
Check your competitor’s hashtags
This works if your competitor has a lot of regular hashtags. Just entering the hashtag on your search engine should give some mention results. Not only brand name and their related products and services, look out for their motto or consistent hashtags. A great example would be Nike. You know their campaigns would always have their signature ‘Just Do It’ as a hashtag. You can also find related hashtags with the current hashtag you possess.
Conclusion
These are some of the ideal ways to keep track of your competitor’s influencer marketing performance. If your competitor’s strategy works out great, then think about adopting the method only with your brand’s touch. Blatant copying will only backfire.
Have you ever optimized your influencer marketing strategy from competitors analysis? Let us know below in the comments. To know more about Greenroom and how we can help your brand’s influencer marketing campaign, visit our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram pages.
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