Regardless of how much you focus on growing your business, you have to understand the context in which your company operates. This will constantly affect the direction of your business, so it is essential to know your competitors in order to keep your marketing strategy and actions relevant to the current context.
Competitors often make sure not to provide their business and marketing plans to you, but with the right information you can learn a lot about their resources and strategies.
Focusing on the marketing mix itself, i.e. the four P's (product, price, placement and promotion), would be a good idea.
In terms of product/service, you can investigate their variety, what they include, what their strengths are and where a few improvements would be helpful. You can find plenty of useful information in reviews of companies on social media or Google.
Price is usually a main criteria in the purchase decision. What pricing strategy do your competitors use? Do they offer attractive low prices that barely cover the cost of production and bring minimal profit, or do they practice higher prices that denote quality? How does price affect the quality of the product or service?
Promotion is essential. Identify the communication channels they use to promote themselves, see what are the main USPs (Unique Selling Proposition) they communicate and how they portray their brand identity.
Placement (or distribution) depends from business to business. If this can be an important decision factor for customers, and the competition benefits from better placements, you'll need to find creative ways to make up for it. For example, better pricing or quality services/products.
Competitor analysis is a complex process of identifying your company's competitors and analysing their strategy to create a comparison between them and your company. In this way, you will see what the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats of your products and services are in comparison to the market.
This analysis is fundamental when your company is just starting out, but it is important to analyse your competitors at every phase of your business. A periodic competitor analysis can identify new competitors or new trends in your market. To keep your business relevant, it is important to update your business and marketing strategy as often as possible.
When you analyse your competitors' business, you can discover new insights you may not have thought of before. A competitor analysis puts you in the context of the current market and gives you valuable insights:
Once you know what your company's strengths are, you can better position your business through targeted communication. You also need to know your weaknesses in comparison to your competitors to determine what improvements and investments are needed. Find out your competitors' strengths and implement them in your business at a superior standard.
- Direct competitor: competitors with similar products and a similar target audience (e.g. McDonalds' direct competitors are KFC or Burger King)
- Indirect competition: competitors that sell a different product but have a similar target audience (e.g. McDonalds' indirect competitors are Pizza Hut or Domino's)
- Replacement competitors: competitors offering different solutions for the same need (For McDonalds, a replacement competitor would be frozen food vendors because they are a fast way to prepare food, similar to a fast food restaurant)
Now that you know who your business's competitors are, you can start to analyse each competitor in depth. The information you need varies from business to business. For example, if you have an event venue, it's important to know the competitors' locations because the area can be a main criteria for customers. If you have a marketing agency, the location is not as important, but the variety of services offered might matter.
You need to tailor your research according to the key parameters relevant to your business. In general, you can include information about company history, location and size of the company, differentiators, pricing strategy, online marketing actions such as Google Ads campaigns, Facebook campaigns, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Youtube, offline marketing actions, marketing budget and many other parameters from which you can draw relevant conclusions for scaling your business.
You can find marketing-related information easily: you can track campaigns, their social media communication and their media appearances. By doing so, you can outline your competition's target audience and compare it to yours. The more detailed your competitive analysis is, the more effective your conclusions will be.
Now that you know what the competitors offer, you can get a better understanding of your company's strengths and weaknesses. Highlight the benefits your business can bring to a customer and try to find solutions for the weaknesses.
Regardless of the current state of your company, it's good to compare it to your competitors when creating a relevant strategy.
The Remote Marketing team can be your trusted partner and contribute directly to the success of your business.
I. Marketing plan, strategy and project management
The marketing plan is an x-ray of your company's growth potential and is represented by a PDF/PowerPoint document that includes the following sections in order to implement marketing actions correctly and efficiently.
1. Brand identity and correct market positioning of the company
- Evaluation and interpretation of design elements, communication structure, brand values and differentiators
- Market size and competition on the same segment - if there are public figures, otherwise we can make estimates based on specific criteria
2. Target group - strategy for identifying and defining the target group. Various associations are made in order to attract the target group in an efficient way.
3. Strategic definition of USPs
4. Defining tangible objectives for 2022
5. SWOT analysis
6. Defining actions needed to turn weaknesses into strengths
7. Defining actions needed to avoid threats
8. Customer journey through the purchasing process (interaction points)
9. Assessing the competitors according to certain criteria - can be done partly with your help.
10. Content strategy
11. Promotional strategy - action plan and budget allocation
12. Subsequently, all promotional actions will be carried out in accordance with the marketing plan
13. The marketing plan may be subject to change, following the results delivered by the campaigns. Conclusions are drawn after 3, 4 months (when we reach a reach of min. 2.000.000 users and/or min. 10.000 clicks on the website)
II. Campaigns
Visibility campaigns have a positioning and trust generation role. These actions are set up to reach as many online users as possible and are designed to bring medium and long-term results.
Conversion campaigns have an immediate sales objective, so the approach is geared towards those looking for the solutions you offer. In theory, we can only stick to conversion actions, but when these actions stop, the results stop too, unlike visibility campaigns that generate long-term awareness.
The bigger the budgets, the better the results and the lower the cost per sale is. The better the strategy, the more effective the promotion budget will be
We will track the following metrics:
Based on these metrics, the strategy can be updated day by day so that we keep the cost under control while delivering results.
1. Monthly visibility campaigns/posts
Photo/video content can be made by you or our partners. If we have a clear direction and strategy, we can get back to you with a price quote for making photo/video content. You may already have a piece of content that can cover a certain period of time.
2. Conversion campaigns
f. The conversion rate can only be established after the first month of actions implemented according to the structure presented
III. Website
- Custom UI/UX Design
- PHP, HTML/CSS, JavaScrip programming
IV. Monthly subscriptions
- Strategy and project management
- Visibility campaigns
- Conversion campaigns
- SEO - We recommend SEO actions because we can never know how much the cost/click from Google Ads can reach. It is currently averaging x € for relevant searches, but has already increased 500% since 2019.
The greater the marketing budgets allocated, the better the results and the higher the profit margin are.
Indicators and metrics tracked by the Remote Marketing team:
- Cost/lead - exactly how much you pay for an enquiry (preferably online)
- Cost/sales - For example: to generate 100 requests of offer we paid 500 € and sold 10 products. This results in a cost per sale of 50 €. The important thing is that the product generates a net profit of at least 10%.
- Conversion rate - How many sales did you make from the number of online requests (%)
- Monthly and/or annual customer retention rate
- Average value of packages purchased
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is the return on online advertising spend. Specifically, how much revenue is generated for every euro spent. E.g.: we paid 100 € for Google advertising and generated sales of 1000 € => ROAS indicator 10 €. Interpretation: each euro spent on promotion generates a revenue of 10 €. This indicator is used to optimise campaigns and promotion channels.
- ROI - the difference between the investment in promotion and the gross profit generated (only from promotion actions)
- Website traffic (monthly average)
- Derivatives - Cost per click and Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM - Google Display)
Business Indicators:
- EBITDA
- ROI - if recent investments have been made in order to generate profit in the near future (1 - 5 years)
- RIR - to make an estimate of free cashflow in the future
- Net profit per package sold
- Net profit from recurring monthly subscriptions
- Unit net profit per customer - To be segmented if services differ from customer to customer
- Forecast 2022 - 2023 - 2024
- Defining concrete targets for scaling the business
For example:
