So What? Keeping track of your competitors

Well, hey friends, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm joined by Chris and John as always. Today we're talking about your competitors. So keeping track of your competitors.

And now what does this mean? So I've been asking around in our Slack community, um, with different uh clients that I've been working with, just sort of asking, like, do you keep track of what your competitors are doing? And if so, what do you do about it? And honestly, it's been a mixed bag of responses. And so some people have said, you know, we don't do anything about it, but we justify it by saying, Oh, we have to stay focused and stay in our lane and not worry about other people are doing.

And that's their way of saying we don't have the time and resources to deal with what our competitors are doing. Other people have said, well, for my clients, I generate the reports, and they say that's nice. We don't have anything that we want that we can do about it, but we still want to know what's going on, you know, which kind of seems like a waste of time all around. And then there are other people who just you know have no idea. And then we can sort of get into the different kinds of interpretations of competitive reports.

So before we dive into sort of the nitty-gritty and tactical, Chris, John, when you hear competitive reports, competitive analysis, what do you think of and what some of the feedback that you've gotten? I think management consulting. I think uh two by two grids, SWOT analyses, Porter's five forces, BCG growth matrix, you know, strategic group analysis, all the things that uh you know we all learned in business school, uh how to do them, dust off those old textbooks and stuff. And I also think uh binder wear, like shelf wear. You know, people do a lot a lot of these analyses and then don't really do anything with them because they're so abstract that they're not really helpful.

It's very difficult to turn them into action. What about you, John? Yeah, that's you know, it's funny too. Having worked here at Trust Insights, I'm completely biased and I have my own take on this now, and that there's two huge things. One is to find opportunity because like you're looking at your five or six marketing campaigns you want to do, but what if you knew today that, oh, by the way, this one campaign over here of your five competitors, nobody is doing that right now, and this other campaign over here, yeah, you could do that, but all four of your competitors are doing well in this.

So which one do you want to go to? And so to find that uh, you know, whatever you should again go back to consult and speak, find your blue sky, stay away from the red ocean, you know. But to find the stuff that you can jump on is huge. And then there's the same thing, but uh slight variation is do you know stuff that you're doing really well already? And you could lose that.

Like you could have you know, competitors who are making it a run at you, and so maybe you need to be doing some work to hold the beach head that you've already earned. And you may not even know that you have such a huge advantage, and that it's driving a ton of your business. So to be able to see the opportunity and see what to defend, that's unique stuff that I'm excited about it because it's stuff that people normally don't get from competitive analysis. So what's interesting is that none of us have actually yet mentioned anything that's actionable. And so we talked about we want to do it actionable.

So a lot of times what happens is someone will say, Okay, I need a competitive analysis on what our competitors are doing. And what they'll turn up, what they'll bring back is okay. Okay, great. What do I do with that? Am I supposed to create the identical product?

Or here's a list of the markets that they're in. Are we going to enter those markets if we're not currently in them? And so what we want to do today is talk about a competitive analysis in such a way that marketers can do something about it. So we're gonna focus on the fundamentals of a SWOT analysis, what goes into it, but looking at it from the lens of if I'm a digital marketer and I have control over these digital channels, what do I need to know about what my competitors are doing so that I can do something about it? Um so Chris, should we start with the SWOT?

Yeah, let's briefly review a SWOT analysis only because every agency I've ever worked at or dealt with does them completely wrong. Um a SWAT's not that difficult to like wrap your head around, though. It it isn't, but it's one of those things. Okay, so let's do our drawing here. Here's our our standard two by two square, right?

We have our strengths and our weaknesses, and we have our opportunities and our threats. The part where people really hose this a lot is it especially down here on the opportunities and threats. So strengths and weaknesses are internal things, right? They are uh what attributes, what things do you have control over, right? Uh we have control, for example, over your audience, maybe you have control over your products.

Uh, for example, what are your weaknesses, things that you don't do well? Um maybe your brand isn't particularly strong, right? Uh, maybe your customer service uh is sucks and and people wanted you know just uh throw you overboard. Whatever those things are, those are your internals. And um to that the person who said, you know, we were focusing ourselves, absolutely.

This part here, the the weaknesses part is definitely something you do want to fix, right? You also want to double down on the stuff that's working for you. But then to go to the other side, what are the opportunities and threats? And this is where people completely lose the the the train of thought because it's not a free-for-all. Opportunities is the equivalent of your competitors' weaknesses.

So where are your competitors weak, right? Um, so if we were doing, say, Starbucks, where are the competitors against Starbucks weak? Uh well, you know, for example, uh Dunkin' Donuts has milky weak coffee. It's not particularly strong coffee, so well, let's see, this is where you're starting to get subjective. Exactly.

So there's those are New England fighting words, too. We gotta be trying to exactly and then your threats are your competitors' strengths. So, in the case, for example, with Trust Insights, like our our the people that we see as competitive uh a lot of the time are massive brands, right? Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte. You know, these are your companies, their cream cheese budget exceeds our annual revenue.

And so that you know there's there's a massive uh disadvantage there. Uh we just don't have the brand strength, and that's their strength. So the first part of competitive analysis really is figuring out the landscape using a SWOT analysis properly. What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what are your opportunities, what are your threats. You have to assume that your competitors are going to be taking uh a strong advantage of your weaknesses with their strengths, right?

They're gonna beat you up. Um, you have to assume that they're gonna hopefully try to mitigate your strengths with something or their weaknesses with uh something so that they prevent you from going after their their soft spot if they're doing their competitive analysis correctly. Now, the good news is almost nobody does, so it's not a huge uh problem. But so let's talk about this for just a second, Chris. So you keep saying that people don't do a SWOT analysis, right?

What are some of the missteps that people take with a SWOT analysis? Throwing things into the bottom quadrant that don't belong there, is the the biggest thing that they do wrong. Either they are put internal factors there. For example, I've seen SWOT analyses where somebody will say an opportunity is improving our customer service. Uh uh, that's not an opportunity.

That's that's either a strength or a weakness, that's an internal thing to your organization. They will also put things that are external to the competitor uh in there. So it's a threat. You know, Congress could legislate us out of existence. Yes, that's an existential threat.

Uh that's a landscape threat, but that doesn't belong in a SWOT analysis. Um, that belongs to something like a uh Porter's Five Forces analysis where you're looking at the industry as a whole. When you're doing a SWOT, it is a one-to-one competitive analysis, right? It is you versus a competitor, not you versus the industry, not you versus politicians, not you versus the teletophies. It doesn't matter what it is, it's one-to-one for you versus a competitor.

And that's the other thing that almost everybody gets wrong. When if you do it correctly and you've got multiple competitors, there should be a different SWOT analysis for each competitor. I think that's definitely something where it's a misunderstanding of how to use this kind of framework. So as we're talking about things that are tactical and actionable. So let's just take the threat, for example.

So the threat to trust insights uh with some of our competitors at that they're is that they're massive. Well, people who are watching this, you're looking at the entire company right now. We're not suddenly overnight going to become massive. And so, you know, yes, it's good to be mindful of that, but there's not a whole lot that we can do about it at the moment. There isn't, but let's turn this tactical.

So I I love two by two matrices. I did go to business school, so that's probably why. Um read enough Harvard Business Review case studies, and you just do two by two matrices for everything, including what to have for dinner. Um, but even with this particular analysis, there's still there still lacks that, okay. So, what do we do?

Like, what are those things we should be looking at? Um, the next step is to say, okay, we have a c we have a massive competitor. Um, what do we currently what currently works and what is our competitive exposure to that? So let's go over to good old-fashioned Google Analytics, right? Google Analytics, everybody knows it, everybody loves it, except if you work for Adobe.

Um well that you have to love Adobe Analytics, it's literally part of your paycheck. Um I'm looking at our assisted conversions here, our our uh multi-touch basic multi-touch conversions, and I'm looking at trust insights and look at the last uh last 30 days or so, and I see here email direct social organic search referral, right? I don't know about you, but I kind of personally would expect organic search to be doing better for us, right? That's like it's not great. Um so to me, when I look at just our data, this is kind of a weak spot for us.

We're not doing great on organic search. So now we can start to get into the idea of okay, well, how can we how do we figure out why we're weak or or what is what does strength look like? And now we can start to actually use that two by two matrix for for comparison. So where'd we go to get that information about organic search? Right, what goes into that?

A big part is are you getting are you showing up for a good number of keywords? Um, are you getting clicks? Right, are you getting valuable clicks, things like that? So you won't get that in Google Analytics, but you can get that out of an SEO tool. So let's go to uh one of my favorites, uh company called Spy Foo, and I put in trust insights, and there we have you know, get some some cool stuff here.

Uh fun lines on charts and things, and uh then you get a list of here's your company and all the other companies. Here's some common measures, right? Common keywords, number of keywords, monthly clicks, monthly value of clicks. This is good. This is good data to have, but we're still a kind of a a loggerhead, right?

Of well, what do we do? Right. So what we can do is take this, export it into a spreadsheet, and then doing it in Excel, doing it in uh tableau, uh, whatever be you know, Power BI. Let's just go ahead and make a two by two matrix. So I'm gonna go ahead and open up Tableau.

And here we have, I like doing a tableau because I can do scatter plots easy faster than I can in Excel, but you can use whatever you want. Um let's take a look at uh total number of SEO keywords and how many clicks they get by domain. And now if you think about that two by two matrix of you know, gets yes, fewer keywords, has more keywords, has uh fewer clicks, has more clicks. And we run, say, some very basic clustering. Let's make four clusters.

Now we see there's a big winner here, data crunch corporation, right? Big winner, lots of clicks, lots of keywords. They're doing it right. Um you got uh you know, listen first media here, sort of in the if you if you drew lines on the screen. Actually, let's do that.

Let's draw some lines. You can actually draw lines on it. I can. Uh I'm going to cheat though, and I'm gonna just do it in here. Um, and so the thing that I think is important to point out is that we are looking at a two by two matrix, which is not identical.

So don't look at the quadrants as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats like we were just looking at. This is a different kind of two by two. So it's your standard XY axis, where you know, the more you go up and the more you go to the right, that's the way you want to be reading it. Right, exactly. If you if you're familiar with like a Forrester Wave or a Gartner magic quadrant, that's all there, their things are.

They're just two by two matrices with numbers behind them. So here I've kind of drew, you know, this is the the if this was Gartner, it was the leader quadrant, right? You know, this that Data Crunch Corporation, kill it. They're they've got they've got the goods. Got here's somebody who's sort of a challenger.

I think that all of us, including Trust Insights, down here in the loser quadrant, which I think that's they call that the growing quadrant. It's growing or they call that the trying super hard quadrant. Third world quadrant. You get the you get the you tried award. Yeah, that's right.

Um but what you see is that oh hey, look, there we are. We're about to edge our way into like one of the the niche quadrants. Yay for us. Um what we see is that we're we're getting good placement on keywords, like we're showing up for for keywords. Um we've got a decent number of them that are in this competitive set.

We're just not getting the traffic for them, right? Uh, whereas data crunch corporations getting the keywords and they're getting the clicks. So our next step is to say, okay, if we go back to this tool and let's let's do a little bit of uh combat. Let's take that out. Let's put data crunch crunch.

It's like a serial. Um you have 33 keywords that are shared that we're we're fighting over. Uh, then there are which are like problems with predictive analytics, but then there's a whole bunch of keywords that they do well on that we don't. Graphing database, for example, kind of an important one here. Pareto charts, discrete versus continuous.

And now instead of this abstract, you know, I've got a two by two matrix. Just by doing this exercise with a little bit of clustering, I can figure out okay, what specific things do I need to go and do. I need to, if I want to go after this leader, I need to go and figure out, okay, the stuff that only they rank for. Should I be creating content about this? Shakespearean translator?

Probably not. Um tableau dashboard. Yeah. Linear regression analysis. Yeah.

I should be creating content about this. Confirmation bias examples, really good one. Um so we're taking the competitor now and we're sort of dissecting what what they've got going on. I'm gonna go ahead and export this because now, in addition to that's very cute. Um now, in addition to our analysis here of who the competitors are, let's go ahead and bring in.

Oops, I chose Excel. I didn't want to want Excel. I want stop that. I want our just these keywords. And we're gonna do the exact same thing.

Uh we're gonna have a uh search volume, right? How much volume does a keyword get? Uh, and how difficult is it to rank for by keyword? And so there are some things here that are you know very high volume, but lots of competition. Ideally, we would find something in this quadrant where there's lower difficulty but higher volume.

The closest things there are like uh a weather forecasting thing, uh, tableau prep, right? Um we're just talking about tableau maps and stuff. So there's some opportunities there looking at our competitors' data to say, okay, there's some stuff that we could probably challenge them on, but stuff like you know, anything after 80 is gonna be a real hard uh battle to fight. But anything, you know, the 40s and 50s, even if there's not a lot of volume might not be that bad. Uh in fact, if we hover over this and we say, I won't only want to keep these.

Now we we start digging in, like, okay, now Tableau uh V source, uh how to make a dual access tableau chart, Tableau filters. If I wanted to go after this competitor's traffic, it looks like they do a lot of stuff around Tableau and I and that it's valuable, it's working for them. How do we how do we start creating content to go after that? Well, and I think that you've touched on a lot of really good tactical things, and the things that you know, as you're evaluating, you know, all of this is what makes sense for your company, your brand. And so, Chris, you just called out like the weather forecasting thing.

That doesn't make sense for trust insights, so someone else can go after that. We don't need to. It's not something we ever want to be known for, and it's not something we want to try to draw people into our website for because we're not the experts on that. We're not going to be able to create really good quality content that's going to help us rank really high for that keyword. But the things that you've hit upon, we know a lot about Tableau.

We know a lot about data prep. You know, those are probably things that you know, we want people to be coming to our website for services that we want them to be finding us for. So the next step is we need to start putting together some sort of a content plan to address all of these things. Exactly right. Is we got to figure out what we could do that will get using SEO data, right?

Um, pretty straightforward, um, pretty easy to understand. If we were back in our Google Analytics account, though, and our Google Analytics account said, hey, social media kind of a thing. You might want to think, you know, think about that. Um, and maybe if we went in and dug around by source medium, what are those source mediums that you know Slack is one of them? Twitter is in there too, though.

Like Twitter's uh a contributor to our conversions. So we got to ask ourselves competitively, is there something we should be doing with with that, right? Is there a there there? Um you could take Twitter data, do the exact same thing, take you know, likes and retweets. And I just look at the tweets, say on a marketing Twitter hashtag or with your five name competitors, do the same two by two analysis.

Who's in the leader quadrant? What content are they tweeting about? And can you do the same thing or something similar? Um, who's getting, you know, not a ton of one metric or the other metric, you know, looking at your competitors, looking at who they react to, even stuff like if you were to take all the influencers that you had that you could identify that a competitor had, and again, any two numerical values, put them on a two by two grid. You could say, Oh, this influencer over here looks vulnerable.

Maybe I could pick them off uh and recruit them to the join the dark side, you know, it will uh we'll turn you to the dark side of the horse. So, you know, what's interesting is when I do talk with people about you know doing you know digital marketing competitively, they often think only about uh keywords and paid ads. And so those are very tactic, tangible things where you can see okay, I can compete, I can literally compete for this keyword, or I can compete monetarily to get my ad shown. And you're sort of talking about Chris about social media, and so that's a little bit more abstract. And then if you think about one of our strongest channels is email.

So we would put that in the strengths for us. Well, what is you what would a competitor do to try to take our email? Like, how does that work? That seems less tangible, but something that we should still be protecting. It is less tangible, but there you can transform any piece of information into a number of some kind, right?

Um think about like stack ranking, you know, you're number one, number two, number three, and the number of mentions of something with email. I'll give you a fun example. Let's go to MX Toolbox, which is one of my favorite email tools. Um, and I want to do an email health check. And let's go ahead and put in trust insights.ai.

I'm gonna check my health. All right, so I've got 10 warnings, one error, 527 checks passed, no blacklists, great. One uh a few things here and there. One of the things is I've got okay, that's throwing an HTTP. That I'm not worried about because we don't run an unsecure website, we only run HTTPS.

Uh, I've got a couple of a few warnings. So I could just count up the number of warnings, right? And see like how how good are we at the basic technicals of email marketing. Now let's go ahead and go back here to email health check and we'll put in our data crunchcorp.com. Let's see what comes up for them.

Interesting. Uh so you two errors, four warnings, 128 passed. So they don't have any they have no D mark. They have no MX. That's weird.

Why would they someone call them? They're their email doesn't look good. No, don't. We need to keep beating them. Exactly.

Um but so even on something that's categorical, like just how many problems do they do they have on something like technical infrastructure? Uh another one, if you want to if you want to get you know, make your CMO really nervous, um, put in your domain into a blacklist check. Like how many blacklists are you on? You know, people have accused you of spamming. Um we have uh so far trust insights.

We have two timeouts, which is fine, and we're okay across the board. So Katie, breathe a sigh of relief. We are not on no, but I think that you know, those are that's actually a really good thing that um I'm guessing a lot of people don't think about. I believe we've covered, you know, some of this email, um, the technical side of email before, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say a lot of people don't know about some of these more technical settings for email, which can be a whole other episode. But this is a really great sort of like broad stroke check for your competitors against yourself, you know.

So obviously focusing on your weaknesses and fixing those first, and then making sure that if your competitors are doing something really well, that you're also then starting to do that thing, or that you have the same settings, or that you aren't getting blacklisted more than they are. Exactly. Um with any of these channels that that are out there in digital marketing land, um, there's always something that you can measure. It may not be the best thing, it may not be the ideal, but there's some hint of you know, in search in social media, you know, you can look at at people's channels that they, you know, that they're on and stuff like that. There's there's some way to make a determination about what they're doing.

You may have to use third-party software to do it, you know. Um, if we go back to our our friend spy foo here, um go or you know, there's there's pay-per-click research. Yeah, so let's take a look at our the pay-per-click competitors. And who's paying, you know, Pivack, which is Matomo, uh, they're they're shelling out 900 bucks a month. Um, you know, it's there's always some kind of number if it's you know email uh or pay-per-click budget and things like that.

The the part though I think is really important that we're not that all the competitive data analysis never really gets right, is that we tend to just for lack of a better term, puke numbers on a page, and we don't put it into some kind of framework. You know, when you have this two by two matrix, what whatever framework it is, magic quadrant or whatever, and you have you have two metrics that matter, this layout gives you some sense of of where to go, right? If you got a leader up here, and then you're uh you're down here, um, what do you need to do to take your company into this leader slot? What are the you know, along those two metrics? And you you use things like your Google Analytics uh and the data available to you to make those decisions to judge, okay.

Here's what we need to do. Um, you know, if this is followers on Twitter and this is engagements on Twitter, well, which do we need more of, which is easier for us to get. Yeah, I'm just making this up, but maybe we get followers first, and that leads to more engagement, or vice versa. But by putting any two competitive metrics into a grid, you can start to go, okay, I can start to make decisions as opposed to here's a spreadsheet. Well, so speaking of that, Chris, one of the things that we've started doing is putting together what we call a digital footprint uh analysis.

And so you can see that reflected on Chris's screen. It is and it isn't though. Um, the spreadsheet that powers the graph is not something that we show, it's not something that we send out to people. But what we do is essentially, you know, I mean, we could turn this into a two by two matrix if that was you know something that people could understand a little bit more easily. But essentially what we've done is we've broken it down by the major channel.

So you have search, social, earned, owned, and paid, and then the overall aggregate total. And so what we do on the back end is we calculate using a lot of those metrics that Chris was just seeing, to figure out how big is your digital footprint compared to your competitors in the space, and so in search, in social, in earned. And so what you're looking at is an example of Allstate Canada, um, so the Canadian version of Allstate US against their competitors. Um, you know, so there's a handful of them. And what you can see is that Allstate overall is the leader, but not the leader in every single one of those buckets.

And so what we then do is talk through here's what you can do to either find those opportunities to improve or protect what you already have. Um, you know, paid's an interesting one, and this is not uncommon to see one person leading because that really comes down to who's willing to spend money on these ads. Not everyone does ads. We're not currently running ads. We will be shortly, so we'll have more competitive data.

You know, but so for search, for example, you know, Allstate is not the leader in search. And so, you know, what we're saying is that, you know, a more focused SEO strategy that covers on-site, off-site, and technical. And so a lot of what that means is what Chris was just demonstrating with doing that really deep dive into the keyword research and the backlinks and figuring out which ones get the highest value that are easier to go after, you know. So there's a lot of things that this company could do to increase their digital footprint in search. You know, in social, you know, again, it's sort of it's coming down to those really tactical numbers of followers and engagements.

And so do you have a lot of followers but no engagements? Or do you have a lot of engagements but not a lot of followers? So, how do you keep doing that same thing? You know, earned comes down to making sure that you have, you know, good PR programs, making sure you're getting placements in really good quality publications and then getting those referral links back. You know, owned pairs a lot with search in terms of the type of content that you're creating, your emails, and then paid is how much money are you willing to spend.

Exactly. And the thing that you know is it is so important that we keep beating it over the head that we named the show after is the so what? Like okay once you have this, what are you going to do about it? What is this what decision you're going to make? Are you going to if you're all state, are you going to let uh Aviva continue to beat you at search?

Well the question that question is answered by your Google Analytics, right? If you're Google Analytics and you're all state and you say like yeah 1% of our conversions come from search okay I guess it's not that important. On the other hand if 40% of your conversions come from search then like yeah what would your sales funnel look like if you beat the leader at search and you know you just start taking their market share. And so your competitive analysis always has to start with your own data to know what's working for you and what's not. And then once you've got your you once you understand yourself then you go in and go after your competitors and find out okay where if even if you're getting 40% of your leads say from search in your all state how much more is a viva getting and are they getting better customers maybe because they rank better um are they getting more valuable customers it's it's difficult to know but if you were to start taking them on and and you know essentially depleting their their share of of search you do a lot better.

I think the other thing you know worth noting again is this is all great information but if you're not willing to do anything about it then why are you keeping yourself up at night thinking about it and looking at it and having people spend their time pulling the information. The example, uh, Chris, that you like to give is the fitness tracker. And so, you know, a lot of us have these, you know, fitness trackers slash watches on these days, and it collects your number of steps, it collects your heart rate, you know, it tells you what's good, what's bad. But if you're not going to do anything about it, then why do you have it? Why do you spend your time collecting that data if you're not going to suddenly, you know, take more walks around the block, or if you're going to do something to reduce your stress so that your heart rate goes down.

You know, John, what is your take on all of this? Because you're talking to a lot of prospects, and you know, do they say, like, we need to be better than our competitors, or are they just solely focused on what's right in front of them in their own, you know, trash fire? Yeah, I think you hit the biggest resistance point for everybody. It's kind of like, well, we just worry about our customers, you know, we can't, we're not even sure what we're doing. So we don't have time to look at competitors.

But I think in that last page there, if you're all-state Canada in that situation, like you've got to look at what's going on in social. You know, you're just getting completely destroyed there, and everybody else is doing better than you. So especially when you're dominating so much in the other categories, you want to at least go take a look and figure out what's going on there and go, and and that's a very simple dive there. You just go look at the two that are are beating you four to five to one and see what they're doing and try and figure out hey, is there is there there? But that does, and it takes the pressure off of you of hey, those other six categories, like those are not on fire.

Like we can go chase money somewhere else because we are just dominating the competition. In fact, the one thing with that report is it's almost embarrassing. You're like, we you know, we're pummeling the competition so much that we don't even have to look at what they're doing in a couple of those categories. Um, so but yeah, it's you know, for any VP of marketing CMO, I mean, this just completely changes your life because it's look, here's 60% of the stuff that you don't have to worry about right now. And it's all about jumping from fire to fire.

I think that that's a really good point. I would, however, say that, yeah, they don't right now have to worry about earned, owned and paid, but they should keep an eye on it because that could change because if they're so focused on search and social and they forget about those other three buckets, they could get complacent and stop putting all of the hard work into it. And so if they want to have that really good balanced footprint for their balanced customer journey, then they should be paying attention to all of them and figuring out which in here, which in each of these buckets can we start to, you know, block and tackle against. You know, but I think that your point, John, is well taken. So, you know, in social, maybe they don't worry about PC insurance and you know, uh Surex right now, but maybe they worry about what the other guys are doing, um, and really just focus their energies there.

You know, again, it's if if you're not going to take action with the data, then why are you keeping yourself up at night, you know, thinking about it, worrying about what the other guy is doing? And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, fitness is always a really great example to go back to. You know, people get really competitive of, well, you know, I was walking and that guy walked faster than me. Are you gonna go home and be butthurt about it, or are you gonna actually do something about it and start doing like more squats and practicing your speed walking and you know, maybe, you know, working out a little bit more. So it's that like, yeah, you can be mad about it, but then what are you gonna do about it?

The so what? Yeah, and there's a you brought up a great point, which is you're gonna add a whole nother dimension to this now when you have, you know, five or six months of this report. And you can see, okay, which channels do we go up and down in? Are there certain times of the year that certain competitors do better? Why is that?

You know, this will start to surface, you know, cyclical things in the calendar that you know maybe you're not even aware of and give you some uh insight that you can take advantage of once you see how things tend to trend. The thing that I like about a report like this, and it doesn't have to be this report, obviously. So, you know, Chris, you started off showing those very tactical SEO examples. Those are all measurable things. And if you so if you can't measure what you're doing, then why are you doing it?

That's a different so what, you know, that I could sort of soapbox about. But you know, it gives you the opportunity, John, as you mentioned, month over month, to see are you improving and are you starting to overtake your competitors in that space? That's the way, if you're going to spend your time and energy on a competitive analysis that you want to be thinking about it. It's great that your competitors are over there building widgets and do dads and whatnot, but if you're never gonna do that, then don't worry about it. But if you're going to, then find a way to measure that progress to see if you're doing better.

And maybe it's customer feedback, customer satisfaction, customer retention, revenue is always a good benchmark to see if you're doing better than other people. And then you can dig into those tactical channels with search and social and paid and the other two that I earned and owned. That's like the other two that I can't remember. All right. So that's essentially how to get started with competitive analysis.

Have a framework, any framework that gives you some structure that tells you what you should be doing about it. The data's fine, it's important, but at the end of the day, if you don't take action on it, it's not gonna help you. As Seth Godin famously says, if you're not going to change what you eat or how often exercise, don't get on scale. Um, and the same is true for all forms of analysis, but prioritize it within the data you have, like Google Analytics. Nothing we've shown here was you know fancy machine learning or artificial intelligence, just a bunch of spreadsheets.

Um, then that's really all you need to get started to make those decisions. Uh any parting words before we head on out, folks. Go destroy your competition. What are you waiting for? If you do have questions about uh competitive analysis or you would like some help with it, uh feel free to just pop on over to the Trust Insights website.

Uh go to trustinsights.ai slash contact, and happy to have a chat with you about it. Otherwise, we will see you all next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at Trustinsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.