Sales and marketing knowledge
If you don't monitor your competitors, you won't know what they're saying or how your potential audience is reacting. " Social listening " or "social monitoring" is a standard marketing practice that allows you to see what your competitors are doing online. Competitor tracking also gives you insight into how your audience is reacting, allowing you to gauge how your audience would react if you tailored your campaigns accordingly.
There are other areas you might consider monitoring about your competitioncambodia whatsapp number traffic patterns on their website, traffic and comments on their blog , and overall market share, to name a few. Today we’re going to focus on social media monitoring, as it’s a quick and easy way to gain valuable insights into the targeting of your top competitors. We’re going to go over a handful of the most important lessons this type of listening can teach you and a few ways tools like Hubspot make it even easier to gain this insight from your account dashboard.
Which platforms are dominating?
Is your main competitor taking Instagram by storm, leaving your presence in the dust? It’s time to dig deeper. What type of content do they post? How often? Do they use this channel for a primary type of engagement? What’s their LinkedIn marketing like ? These questions can give you the insights you need to fine-tune your presence .
You can attack them head on by posting the same content but better. Or you can take them up a notch by posting different types of good content on social media but aimed directly at their audience. If you know how your competition uses a certain platform, you can find a way to draw some of their audience's attention to your high-quality content.
What content is resonating?
Does your competitor’s Facebook presence seem to engender a devoted group of customers who look forward to each new post? Are their Stories getting solid engagement numbers? Once again, it’s time to look at the metrics. Check out what their Stories are about; what are they talking about to their audience? Recent successes? A day in the life of a software developer? Or are they using these mediums to teach their audience how to overcome a pain point they have in common?
Use what you discover to tailor your presence. If they're using Stories to help people overcome a problem, find a topic that relates to your own Stories posts. Make sure to script your videos and put them through a specific post-production process so the overall feel is polished and shines brighter than the others. Then, promote your version by targeting their audience and yours.
Do you use hashtags or other specific content?
Industry-specific hashtags are a great way to expand your organic reach on social media. Is your competitor using one that you aren’t? We’re not talking about branded hashtags, as they’re too company-specific. We’re talking about general-use tags for your industry, sector, or audience segment. Check out which of their posts are being found through hashtag searches or which tags appear in the most engaged posts, and look for ways to incorporate these tags into your posts.
You may also like
Aspiration Marketing – Make the most of your HubSpot investment
Optimize your investment with the HubSpot Accelerator management
Are you getting the most value from your HubSpot subscription? The HubSpot Admin Accelerator program is designed to optimize your investment in HubSpot.
Where do you spend your advertising dollars?
Find out which posts are being boosted for organic reach. This can help you redirect your ad spend. Maybe they're boosting their long-form posts about industry trends. Or their videos documenting a recent client's success.
Now you know that it may be worthwhile to steer your campaign in a similar direction to compete for those same views and clicks. Again, you can go head-to-head and boost similar content, or you can go in the opposite direction and exploit a topic they're ignoring. Either way, you'll benefit from their research to boost your content.
How Hubspot can help with social monitoring
The aforementioned competitor metrics, engagement numbers, rates, views, and even the basics like follower count are all available in tools like HubSpot ’s new Social Competitor Tracking module . This module allows you to track the social presence of your top three competitor companies, and all you have to know to get started is their main URL.
This tool gives you a cross-platform list of your social media posts that can be sorted by two main metrics: total engagement and engagement rate. The latter is simply the former divided by the number of followers. Each post includes the “$ Likely Boosted” tag on any post that appears to be reaching a non-organic audience.
For example, if you're looking at what Facebook content resonates the most, sort your feeds by total engagement. Now, look at the content that appears in the top 10 posts. Are they videos? Funny stories about coworkers? Or user -generated success stories submitted by happy customers?
The amount of useful information you can extract is immense. Do you need to change the focus of your content on this platform? Is your competitor missing a segment of their audience by not talking about something you know a lot about? Put time and effort into this module and you’ll get better insights for segmentation, a better list of topics, and an idea of what type of media to use to present each topic.
This means you have a single dashboard where you can find and research your competitors’ social media presence, reach and engagement. That will give you everything you need to come up with your response campaign, crafting the content that will not only boost your engagement numbers, but also help your content reach your competitor’s audience – the more eyes on your posts, the more clicks and ultimately, the more conversions.