RS072: 8 Sneaky Ways to Spy on Your Competitors' Marketing Practices

Rogue Startups Podcast

For those of you in the US I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. A great time of year to begin reflecting back on the year, what we've achieved and what we're all thankful for. Certainly a lot for us all to be proud of and to cherish.

This week Dave and I are catching up on some of the ways that we aggregate the best practices from our competitors to create a highly optimized marketing plan. There are 8 ways that we observe from and improve upon our competitors marketing practices:

• Follow your competitors on Twitter.
• Paid keyword analysis with SEMRush
• Talking to friendly competitors about things that are working for them
• Targeting developers/influencers of a tech to promote/get feedback your product (e.g. WordPress, Shopify)
• Forr paid advertising, see who's ads are showing up on your google searches or facebook ads, and mimic those. for copy, demographic targeting, etc.
• Pricing - this may seem obvious, but can you do something a little different (one time vs. recurring, setup fee vs. ongoing charge)
• Sign up for your competitors' email lists - get autoresponder copy, frequency, 'deals', cosponsorship opportunities
• SimilarWeb - Great snapshot of your competitors traffic, ad dynamics, social media engagement, and other sites that are "similar" to theirs. Good for building a portfolio of Doppelgängers.

So how are you observing your competitors and picking out the best practices to create a more optimized marketing plan for your business? Drop a comment in below and we'll highlight it on the show next week.