In this episode, I’m peeling back the curtain on my competitor analysis tactics (aka how I SPY on my competitors). Discover how I unveil their website's inner workings, dissect their search traffic, and decipher their sales funnel structures. Stay one step ahead of the game with these invaluable competitive intelligence tips!
Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.
Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.
Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.
Transcripts
Angela Frank:
The big question is how do we as entrepreneurs build wildly successful, profitable businesses without hustle, culture, burnout or venture capital? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. Welcome to The Growth Pod. I'm your host Angela Frank.
I've been a growth marketer and entrepreneur for over eight years and I've been responsible for generating millions of dollars in sales for the companies I've worked with. In this episode, I'm spilling the beans on exactly how I spy on my competitors.
From how I learn what tools that they use on their website to their search traffic breakdown, how they structure their funnels, and more. The first tool that I use when doing my competitor research is the Built With Technology Profiler.
This is a free Chrome extension that shows the exact web hosting, plugins and marketing tools that my competitor's site is currently using.
If you have an agency or need more in depth analysis, they do have a paid version but it's quite expensive and I find for my research purposes the free version is perfect. You go to their website, you open up the extension and it shows you exactly what they're using on their site.
The second tool that I use to spy on my competitors is Semrush. Semrush is a paid platform. At the time of this recording it costs $130 a month.
However, Semrush is great because it not only gives you insight to your competitors traffic analysis, but it also shows you an insight to their SEO efforts and some advertising efforts as well.
If you are in a highly competitive marketplace or you are up against people who are quite advanced with their marketing strategies and their team size, especially compared to yours, this may give you the insight that you need to create a more competitive marketing plan. And the third way that I spy on my competitors is I actually purchase their products.
By signing up for your competitors emails and purchasing your competitors products, you see their entire funnel or sales process from the inside out. Now if you are in a B2B market space and your competitors are very expensive, you can go through the motions.
You don't necessarily have to purchase in that instance, but if you have the means, I highly recommend purchasing your competitors products because the insights that you get from this are so valuable for your business and help you stay ahead of the game.
If you understand how your competitors are communicating with their customers at every stage of the journey, you can identify possible gaps and you can identify ways for your business to stand out amongst your competitors.
In his book.com Secrets, Russell Brunson outlines the five variables of successful funnels I use these when analyzing my competitors funnels and they might also be useful for you. These five variables are demographics, offer, landing page, traffic, source and ad copy.
Brunson goes so far to say that if he has two unknowns in this group of five, he will not go into that space for a business. So this gives you an advantage if you are just starting out.
If you cannot identify two of these five variables, then you should not go into that space. Food for thought. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
