Do you feel like you’re drowning in a crowded niche or market? Do your competitors seem to grow while you slip backwards? Well, you don’t have to put up with this any longer. A smarter marketing strategy could be all you need to catapult your brand above the rest.
It’s Time to Catch (And Surpass!) Your Competition
Smaller brands often get in the mindset that they’ll always play small ball, while the larger companies will eat up most of the market share and get all of the attention. They become content with having just a small slice of the pie and accept their fate as a secondary player.
But this makes absolutely no sense! Your current size in relation to the competition shouldn’t dictate your future size and success. Every business starts out as a small business. And almost every small business faces larger competition at some point. It’s the ones that discover how to face-off with these bigger brands that ultimately scale up and win.
If you want to catch and surpass your competition, here are some truly simple ways to build momentum:
1. Perform Competitive Research Using Analytics
It’s amazing how much information you can gather about your competitors online. And we’re not only talking about quick Google searches and content analysis. We’re talking about actual data and analytics behind their marketing, website, social media, etc.
Blue Water Marketing has an excellent guide on how to conduct competitive research. They mention some specific tools you can use to spy on the competition and see their traffic statistics, domain rankings, backlinks, keywords ranked for, and much more. These include tools like Spy Fu, Google Trends, Ahrefs, Keyword Spy, Hoovers, and ReferenceUSA.
2. Create Swipe Files
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by everything that your business needs to do, or frustrated by your perceived lack of creativity. However, you don’t need to do everything from scratch. It’s possible to launch a highly effective marketing strategy using principles and frameworks learned from other businesses.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, a “swipe file” is simply a screenshot or bookmark of a marketing resource that’s worked really well for another company. You can swipe landing pages, social media, posts, headlines, visual content…anything!
Swipe files serve as inspiration and building blocks. You can use them as frameworks for developing your own original content. (You aren’t copy-and-pasting what others are using. You’re using it as a model!)
You can keep swipe files on your desktop or in a cloud drive and reference them whenever you need some inspiration. Working with these files can easily cut your time developing marketing creatives in half.
3. One-Up the Competition
You’ll probably notice a theme here. We’re using the competition’s current success as inspiration for how you can be successful. And in keeping with this approach, we’re going to show you how you can one-up your biggest competitor every single time.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re keeping an eye on your competitor using one of the tools mentioned in the first tip and notice that they have a piece of content that’s going absolutely viral. It’s getting hundreds or thousands of shares and the audience – which happens to be your target audience, too – is eating it up.
You’re basically getting a proof of concept. Now imagine what sort of results you could get if you created a similar piece of content, but only better.
If your competitor’s content is a 2,000-word blog post with text and a couple of stock photos, you could create a similar post that’s 4,000 words long, features a dozen custom graphics, and has a free download link embedded in the post.
One-upping the competition works! The key is to only do it if you’re confident you can differentiate your piece enough. Otherwise, you look like a copycat.
4. Outsource for Better Talent
Don’t have the resources to hire the same level of talent that your competition has on staff? In today’s world, you can easily outsource marketing jobs to skilled and experienced freelancers at a fraction of the cost. Try building out your team in this fashion.
Ready, Set, Go
Don’t let anyone tell you that you should settle for being small. You can be thankful for where your current business is without being content. Leverage these secrets to give even your biggest competitors a run for their money.