How to Leverage Competitor Data for eCommerce Marketing

eCommerce is not easy. With a multitude of competitors coming out of the woodwork every day, staying afloat seems hard and success seems even harder. Take a load off and make your job easier by letting your competitors do all the heavy lifting. In other words, leverage competitor data with competitive analysis.
Data is good; more data is even better. The more you know about your business, your customers and your competition, the better set you are to tackle the eCommerce world. Why? Because good data can help you improve your business and meet the various goals you set.
If knowing your audience — their demographics, lifestyle’s and purchasing trends — can help you better communicate with them, then knowing about your competition can help you beat them. What we’re talking about here is leveraging competitor data, AKA competitive analysis. And it’s not just about identifying your competition, it’s about narrowing on their past and current strategies, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, finding their products/services, knowing their preferred media, and so much more — all relative to your own business.
For one, when you research, analyze and compare competitors to yourself, you’re presented with a treasure trove of insights that lets you stand out and shine. In simple terms, you can see what your competition is doing right and make it better, and what they’re doing wrong and improve it.

3 Competitive Analysis Practices to Keep You Ahead of the Game

The best way to stay ahead of the game is by analyzing everything you can get your hands on. In other words, make use of analytics and track, track, track! Once you’ve compiled a decent amount of metrics, plan a strategy that’ll keep you on top of the eCommerce game.
To get you started, here are some practices and tools you’ll be wise to include in your marketing efforts.

1: Subscribe, Subscribe, Subscribe!

 
What if you could know exactly what your competition is up to? And not just what they’re up, but also what they’re doing for their customers? Well, with that information you would be able to conduct a decent SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to tailor your own strategy.
If you like the sound of that, your first step is to subscribe to your top competitors’ newsletters (you probably want to create a generic email address for this) and organize your inbox, which expands your inbox into a flexible set of email lists. Once the emails start coming in, create a spreadsheet and analyze everything. For example, track:

• Frequency of emails
• Arrival time
• Email designs
• CTAs (call to action)
• Whether the email was triggered by an action on your part (e.g., if you clicked something on their site)

From here, you can take a visual route and create a word cloud with tools like TagCrowd that capture any themes your competition is honing in on. Finally, conduct the SWOT analysis we touched on earlier, which will help you draw conclusions from your data.

2: When in Doubt, Go Social

 
Don’t stop your ‘spying’ at emails, go the extra mile (or click?) and track all of their social media activities as well. You’ll be able to know exactly why one competitor has more followers than you, why another competitor seems to be getting more engagement, and so on.
Similar to our email analysis, track everything. For example, track:

• The frequency of Tweets/posts/etc. —> includes dates, not just times
• Content of Tweet/post/etc.
• Whether Tweet/post/etc. was liked, commented on or shared
  • If it was, then track metrics

By analyzing your competitors’ social presence, you’ll not only be able to see what they’re doing that’s garnering the most buzz, but also how you can tailor your own strategies to better resonate with your audience. And because sifting through Twitter feeds and Facebook posts are not good enough, here are some tools that’ll make your social media competitive analysis easier:

• Social Mention uses keywords to show you what’s up in the online social world. As their site states, Social Mention is a social media search ad analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.
• BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring tool that lets you find competitor content that is most shared on social channels and gives you an idea of how they’re performing.
• Fanpage Karma lets you analyze your and your competitors’ social accounts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You’ll get an idea on metrics like engagement, growth, keywords, most-used content and more.

3: Keep an Eye on Their Links, Backlinks

 
Regularly monitor your competitors’ backlinks to get a clue on who your business can build relationships with. Not only will you get an idea of your competition’s online authority, but by seeing who’s linking to their site, you’ll also be able to get a clue on who could backlink to your site, which functions to improve your own SEO efforts.

• Monitor Backlinks does what its name states, namely monitors your competition and lets you know when they get new links with SEO value, or when the links are removed.
• Ahrefs uses competitor domains and pages to identify unique backlink sources, shows you entire competitor backlink profiles, and sends you alerts when competitors add new backlinks.
• Moz shows you the quality of inbound links with metrics like Page Authority, Domain Authority, and Span Score.

Final Thoughts & TL;DR

A study that surveyed 467 marketers revealed that 74% found competitive analysis to be “important to very important”, and that competitive analysis actually correlates with higher conversion growth. The takeaway? You’re not doing yourself any favors if you’re not integrating competitive analysis in your eCommerce marketing strategy. In fact, you risk falling behind while your competitors prosper. Don’t do that; don’t be that business that thinks it’s fine as-is.
Do yourself a favor and take another look at what we covered today (in a convenient tl;dr version):

• Subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters to keep tabs on what they’re up to
• Track your competitors’ social activities to see what’s getting the most buzz
• Monitor your competitors’ backlinks to get an idea of how they size up in the online world

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Best of luck!
Matthew is a content writer for Aumcore, a digital marketing agency based in New York City. Even though he specializes in eCommerce SEO, he writes on a variety of subjects that range from social media analysis to search engine optimization.