Guide To Analyzing Your Competitors’ B2B Strategy Stay Updated!

“In the long run, competition makes us better… it drives innovation,” – Dennis Muilenburg

Are you growing and developing your business? If yes, you must be looking toward the competition.

How much can you learn from your competitors’ B2B strategy? Enough to surpass their efforts and leave them behind.

The ability to evaluate other companies’ strategies puts you above the competition, allows you to learn from their mistakes, and copy their victories.

This simple step-by-step guide to analyzing your competitor’s B2B strategy can help your company thrive. But only if you follow it closely.

1. Find Out Who Your Competitors Are

In order to analyze the competition, you have to find out which companies fit the description. Even if you have a formidable list of who you think your competitors are, a little extra research can help.

Go to the search engine and ask the questions your clients ask you. Whatever keywords you use for your SEO strategy can help you find the competition. You may discover a few companies you haven’t known about before.

If you have a local business, you can use location-tied keywords that lead you to similar companies in other cities. Even though they aren’t your direct competitors, their strategy is worth looking into.

Don’t try to analyze each competitor you find. Research the competition’s status and how successful it is. Obviously, trying to learn from an unsuccessful competitor is a bad idea.

Narrow down your competitors’ list to maximum 10 companies. Spreading yourself thin over dozens of businesses won’t help you learn.

When looking for your competitors, you can take advantage of such useful tools as:

•        SEM Rush – gives information about the competitor’s performance.
•        Stat – tracks your competitor’s performance in search results.
•        SpyFu – searches for information about keywords, backlinking, rankings.
•        Google Maps – helps find local competitors.
•         And more

2. Evaluate Your Competitor’s Website

Visiting a website is an excellent way to see what your competitor is doing and how it’s doing it. Act as a customer, who visits a company’s website for the first time. Make observations. Your first impression of the website is highly important. What do you like? What do you hate? You can use this information when drafting your own website.

Look at such parameters as:

•         Navigation – is the website easy to navigate? Can you find what you need within seconds?
•         Design – do you enjoy graphic design? Does it employ colors? Are you overwhelmed with information?
•         Loading time – does the website load fast enough? Do you think it should be faster?

Does the competitor employ backlinking and interlinking? What is the website’s conversion rate? What is the number of estimated monthly visitors? The average time a visitor spends on the website? The website’s bounce rate? Top referring websites and much more.

Software experts from Tricension recommend using automated tools to evaluate your competitor’s website performance in order to make changes to your own.

•        SimilarWeb
•        Alexa
•        Quantcast
•        Moz
•         And many more

You can use these programs to evaluate the performance of your website and note differences as well as similarities.

3. Study The Content

Content is king for SEO purpose and client conversion strategies. You need to evaluate the competitor’s content in order to understand their B2B strategy fully. You must look at what they say and how they say it.  

Look at the type of content they are using on their website and social media accounts and the content they link to:

•         Blog articles – how frequently do they publish blogs? How long are their blogs? Which keywords are they using in the blog articles?
•         Podcasts and audios – it’s impossible to make a website attractive without audio content. What type do they take advantage of?
•         Webinars – do they offer webinars? Which topics are they discussing? How many people are viewing these webinars?
•         E-books – do they offer free e-books in exchange for contact information? How extensive and readable are their e-books?
•         Videos – do they use videos for branding purposes? What can you learn from them?
•         Newsletters – which content do they think works to attract new clients? Which one is worth sending out in newsletters?

Take advantage of the topics your competitors’ are using. Which ones do they view as worthy? Inspect their social media pages and blogs to find out which topics are the most popular.

Use software to make content evaluation easier:

•        SproutSocial
•        Phlanx
•        MozBar
•        MailCharts

Final Thoughts

The key to analyzing your competitors’ B2B strategy is figuring out what works for them and what doesn’t. By using the above steps, you can get an idea of what helps the competitors succeed. After that, it’s up to you to understand which points can also work for you.

By learning from your competitors’ mistakes and capitalizing on them, you can improve your B2B strategy and boost profits.

Joseph Harisson

Content Specialist