The Relationship You Should Have with Competitors

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or how far up the food chain you sit, your competitors will always play an impact in defining who you are as a company. The moves they make cause a ripple in your business environment that you’ll have to respond to, and vice-versa. And at the end of the day, their level of success will have a direct impact on yours.

So to what extent should you take into consideration the movements and behavior of those competitors? Follow them too closely and markets will think you’re trying to mimic them. If you don’t follow them close enough you may lose sight of important strategic information. So the distance you should maintain with them should be respectable, but close enough to know when they start burning incense.

Keeping Your Enemies Closer

Keeping an eye on your competitors doesn’t mean moving into the same WeWork as them and stealing their mail. And it’s more than just keeping an eye on their Twitter feed.

Depending on what landscapes your market exists in, you should first consider the different avenues to study your competitor in. For most companies in this day and age, and pretty much all of the digital marketing agencies in Austin, Texas, you can do most of your spying through the internet.

Whether it’s for a client or our own ambitions as one of the many marketing agencies in Austin, our competitor strategy starts with a brand audit of the best-performing agents in the market, the type of messaging they use, and the brand they’re trying to radiate. Once you have a better idea of how competitors are positioning themselves, you’ll be better suited to carve out your own unique personality in the development of your own brand.

After the brand audit is completed, we move on to a full SEO analysis of your organic landscape – who is getting the most space, who is paying for space, what keywords are being searched, and what keywords aren’t. Our system is capable of identifying exact match keyphrases that competitors are ranking for, when they change positions, and all the information about that keyword like cost-per-click and average monthly search. With this information, we start putting together an organic strategy that targets both new keywords and those that your competitors are ranking for.

While all of this is incredibly important, it stands alone from the way you actually interact with your competitors, or lack thereof.

Playing Nice

A majority of the time, there’s no reason to interact with competitors in any way. There is rarely a moment where it’s beneficial, or even necessary to engage them. The same goes for most digital marketing agencies. But something you have to remember is that Rock Candy Media isn’t like most marketing agencies. And when you get locked in a cage with us, we’re going to get scrappy.

As an SEO and SEM specialist, we’ve utilized several different competitor strategies to influence both our own growth and the growth of our clients via keywords. One of our more notorious strategies to uppercut the competition was when we bid on agency names, and trolled them in the meta description so whenever someone searched for them they were met with our perspectives first.

While that was one of our favorite campaigns, it’s one of many. If you’re interested in seeing what other tricks we’ve got up our sleeve, schedule a brand market analysis with our founder, Annie Jones. You’re going to like what you see, your competitors will hate it.