How to Take Aim at Your Online Competitors

Competitors suck. Especially when they’re doing better than you are.

And when you’re getting your ass kicked and decide to step up your game - get better search rankings, grow your audience, land more sales, etc – the first place you look for ideas is at your competitors.

What are they doing? What’s working for them? How are they getting attention? How, exactly, did they get such a big slice of pie?

So you start spying…

You pour through their inbound links to see if you can get the same ones.

Or you look through their blog archives and see what kind of posts they’ve written that have garnered the most attention and comments – and you brainstorm some similar post ideas for your own blog.

You review the features on their website and the way they’ve written their copy, taking insightful notes.

You monitor their social media profiles to see what they’re saying and sharing and who’s spreading their ideas.

After a fashion you’ve got a battle plan together. You’ve chosen your weapons. It’s going to be a beat down. Worse than Colonel Guile gave Bison in the Street Fighter movie. (You can thank me for that link later.)

And then one of two things happens:

1. You feel guilty and act on none of it
2. You take action and nothing seems to stick

First, stop kissing ass

Ever hear that saying about mimicry being the best form of flattery? We use it to remind ourselves not to get too pissed at copycats – they’re just telling us we’re worth being copied.

Flip that around. If you’re the one mimicking aren’t you just kissing your competitors’ asses?

“Me too” marketing doesn’t say much for your point of difference. If you’re taking queues from your competitors on how you should communicate with your customers, that begs an important question: do you really know your customers?

Take queues from your customers, not your competitors

Remember your customers? Those people you work for? The ones who pay your bills? Yeah, they’re important.

They’re probably even important enough that you should spend most of your time thinking about how to provide them better value or communicate with them more effectively.

Here’s a head smacker: talk to your customers. Instead of silently spying on your competitors, pick up the phone and call someone who’s bought from you already. Ask them about the experience. Listen carefully.

Your marketing strategy roles out of that relationship – not the A.C. Slater vs. Zach Morris rivalry you’ve got going with your competition.

Adopting someone else’s work means adopting their screw-ups

Your competitor might be kicking your ass all over the place, making more money, expanding while you’re struggling and otherwise showing you what’s up.

But they’re not doing everything right.

So how can you tell which tactics are working for them and which aren’t?

You can’t, unless you’re going to hack their analytics or spend an absurd amount of time monitoring and analyzing their every move (time you can spend more constructively).

If you start carbon copying what your competitors are doing prepare to end up with a functional, picture-perfect replica of a turd.

Don’t Frankenstein your brand

“Brand” is one of those words that gets kicked around a lot and jammed in where it doesn’t quite belong, and everyone who uses it seems to have their own definition.

For the sake of discussion, let’s say brand means the following: all of the associations your market (audience/customers) has in mind when they think of your company.

That means the things you do, the things you say and how you look, all the things that can be witnessed and remembered by the people who matter to you, are all factors in framing that identity.

So if you’ve got an even somewhat-established brand in your space, and in the minds of your audience and customers, what happens when you adopt a strategy because you saw a competitor do it first?

You dillute your brand. You muddy your vision (or you show that maybe you don’t really have one).

You can’t bolt-on a message that doesn’t fit your personality. It stinks – and people have better noses than we get credit for.

Monitor, don’t mimic

There’s nothing wrong with monitoring competitors. In fact, knowing your market and who else is playing in it is makes good business sense.

Sometimes you’ll have to reexamine your strategy when a new or existing competitor raises the bar. That’s how the market works. That’s how competitors force us to be better.

But when someone raises the bar you don’t do exactly what they did; you’ve got to do something better. At the very least, you’ve got to understand why they did it – and copying skips understanding.

Beating your competitors means leveraging assets they don’t have in ways they’ve overooked (or are completely blind to). It means taking a new angle on an existing problem and approaching business in a remarkable way.

Aiming to do exactly what your competitors have already done is a forfeit – you can’t beat them at their own game.

But maybe you can reinvent the rules.

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