Your brand is always fighting against the competition.
You must know how you are perceived. Where you are lost. What your competitors excel at. And where are they weak.
Unfortunately, most brands don’t prioritize this data. They don’t collect it because they don’t know what to look for, or they don’t have the right tools to measure it.
Working with our friends at Brandwatch, I set out to help solve this problem in an Effective Competitive Intelligence Webinar Using Social Media Data .
Phillip Agnew Product Marketer at Brandwatch, joined me for this session where we present a five-stage checklist to help you figure out how you’re performing.
You can get an entire session — for free — on demand right now. Just visit this link .
Table of Contents
Why you should keep reading
Today, customer expectations are very lax, which means they move from one type of business to another. Not long ago, customers would say “it was a pretty good experience, for a financial services company.” Or, “it was a pretty good experience, for a B2B company.” No more. The best companies in the world are training your customers what to expect, time. If they can make it easy with one click, offer free two-way shipping, be open 24 hours a day, and send super related emails, why can’t you?
God of customer expectation will never go back to the bottle and what was great in 2015 is “meh” today. You just keep raising the bar. This is what I keep saying about our team at Convince & Convert: yesterday’s wins mean almost nothing now. The scoreboard always resets to 0. How can you get better and better and better, with no end?
Customer experience It’s an escalator, not a staircase.
Your competitors — the smart ones at least — are thinking the same way. Your customers are openly measuring what you offer versus what your competitors offer.
And to stay ahead, you need to know exactly what others are doing, which is where social media data becomes so valuable when you use it consistently and wisely.
Here is a summary of the 5 key takeaways from the Webinar on how to use social data for competitor analysis.
1. Share of Voice
Compared to your competition, how many customers are talking about you?
2. Competitor’s Emotions
Within your competition, are consumers saying positive or negative things about each company? Who stands out? Who is “consumer favorite”?
3. Main topics of competitors
This is where it gets deep. Using social data, you can (and should) create a map of what topics your competitors are posting on social media. This helps to understand their product strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, customer service strategy their , employee advocacy program and many other programs.
Smart analysts use social data to be the cartographers of their business portfolio. Click to post
This example, provided by Brandwatch, shows a social media conversation about competitors Heineken and Guinness. As you can see, the themes in this snapshot have varied greatly over time, even though the products are quite similar.
Social media talk about Heineken and Guinness
4. Benchmark by Product Type
Here, you use social media data to determine how often consumers talk about your brand in a particular product context. For example: in Webinar Phillip gave an example of Burger King tracking how much consumers say about their new veggie burger, compared to vegetarian products from other fast food restaurants.
5. Benchmark by Product Association
I like this. Here, you track how often specific, desirable attributes are associated with your brand (compared to your competitors) by tapping into consumer social media posts. .
Adjectives associated with car brands
In this example, provided by Brandwatch, you’ll notice that Mercedes-Benz dominates the conversation around “comfort”, while BMW has much more social conversation related to “luxury”. .
If you’re trying to figure out your brand positioning, content marketing, social media marketing, and PR approach, this information can be incredibly valuable.
Of course, there are other ways to use social data to gauge competitor behavior and attributes. But those are the five things that we focus on in our session.
I would love it if you took the time to watch the replay . That’s a good thing!
