Can I ask you a juicy question? How many times in the last week have you checked what your competitors are up to? It’s sad to see A LOT of business owners running their marketing strategies based on what their competition is doing and this is one of the biggest mistakes that’s costing them growth, sales, and revenue.
When I started my journey as a digital marketer at a corporate job, one of the first things I learned and that became part of my daily tasks was to check out what our main competitors were doing. How their website looked, what collections they had, the price of the items. I subscribed to all their emails and kept track of the campaigns they were running. I followed them on social media and even saved their ads for “inspiration”. I tried to find out what app they were using in Shopify and what other software they used.
At the same time, I was working really hard to help grow the business. Some campaigns worked well and some didn’t, but the growth wasn’t as big as the effort we were putting in. Customers weren’t as loyal as we wanted them to be, and sales weren’t always steady.
Thankfully, I started getting coached on data analysis and was pushed to look at the business differently. So I decided to take a digital marketing course through Duke University with Avinash Kaushik. That course completely changed the way I looked at planning and digital marketing. It taught me about data planning, setting KPI, increasing ROI, and getting obsessed with the customer journey and what their true needs were.
After this, we started planning our website and marketing campaigns based on what the data was telling us and keeping an eye on our competition was a thing in the past.. From that point forward, we started seeing sales growing faster, customers becoming more loyal and consistently achieving year after year growth.
My goal is to help you run a business that is proactive instead of reactive, attract customers who can’t stop talking about your brand and take your business to the next level. So here are a couple of tips that will help you start optimizing your online business today.
- Stop comparing your business with your competitors. Your products and your margins are different!
- Launch promotional campaigns based on your inventory and margins and not based on the percentage your competitors are giving off.
- Set up 3 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business and up to 6 KPIs for your marketing campaigns. You must have a plan to know where you are going. Examples of business KPIs could be Customer Lifetime Value, ROI, or Cost per Customer Acquisition. Some KPIs for marketing could be Cost per Conversion, CPC, CTR or ROAS.
- Use heatmap apps such as Luckyorange to see where customers are engaging, scrolling and clicking. Optimize accordingly.
- Always a/b test your email and paid campaigns such as Facebook ads and Google Search.
- Keep track of what collections have the highest page value, optimize them and make them visible on the site (you can do this in GA).
- Set up automated emails with questionnaires for new, loyal and past customers so you know what their needs are.
- Segment your marketing campaigns based on your customers’ behaviors.
Ana Katz Digital 