Need Content Inspiration? Here’s A Solution

One of the best ways you can determine a marketing strategy that will work for your business is to complete a competitor analysis. As a small to medium-sized business owner, this process will look different than it would if you were a large business or a corporation. There are two reasons for this.

First, as a small business owner, you are likely doing all or most of the marketing for your business yourself. Even a medium-sized business with a marketing professional on staff is going to struggle with doing the sort of competitor analysis that a corporation can do because their focus is on all the company’s marketing, not just social media. So unless you have the funds to hire a full-time social media marketing specialist, you need to be able to do a competitor analysis that doesn’t take hours to complete.

Second, as a smaller business, it is likely that your competition isn’t utilizing social media the way that the competitor of a large corporation would be. Since large companies likely have a full-time social media marketing person on staff, they have a more robust presence to analyze. As a small business owner, you may find that most of your competitors aren’t even on social media, or if they are, they aren’t consistent. This makes it much harder to analyze what they are doing.

A lot of small businesses, if they even know what a competitor analysis is, do not take this step before creating social media content. However, a competitor analysis provides crucial insights that will help you improve your social media marketing efforts. Interested in learning more? Here’s a step-by-step process that you can use to do a competitor analysis on your own.

Step One: Identify the Competitors You Want to Analyze

It’s recommended to identify three competitors to analyze to start. Choose two competitors that are direct competition, and then one larger company that is in your industry that you aspire to be like.

The smaller or more direct competitors may not be doing much on social media or other forms of digital marketing. This will make it very easy for you to analyze what they are doing, and what they are not doing without a lot of effort. This makes it easy to discover opportunities. It will also give you more confidence in your own…