Who are your competitors and how can you use their marketing strategies to build your online business

Transcription:

Hi and welcome. Today we’re going to talk about competitors. If you run your Ecommerce business, who are your competitors? How can you find that out?

Hi and welcome. My name is Harold F. Rich, and as I mentioned, I want to talk about competitors today. It’s critically important that you know who your competitors are, not just because you should base your decisions a little on that, it will be very different how much money you have to spend on every channel, really depending on your competitor. If you look at Google AdWords, for example, and you see that competitors are spending thousands and thousands of dollars, or euros or dirhams whatever, then it’s getting very hard for you if you’re just getting started. Of course, you can’t compete with them. It’s important to know who are your competitors.

The interesting thing is that many people or many business owners are not aware of, is competitors are defined on the keyword you want to target. It’s not like in real life. There is a lot of funny stories I can tell you. For example, if I come into business meetings, or sometimes I meet with the owners, and one day it happened I was just together with the owner, and he was an older guy in his 70s, and we have been sitting together, he didn’t use the internet. He didn’t have a smartphone. He used his computer to type some stuff in Word, but I’m not sure how often he used the internet or Google. We talked about the competitors. I printed some competitor analysis, and we went through some charts together, and I showed him the competitors, and suddenly he told me, “Yes, but this competitor, they just have two people working for them, and the other guy is like,” he said, “He’s not even from this country.” There was another one where he said, “They’re not doing it professionally.” For him, he still saw it as it would be, let’s say, like real life.

People would have seen it before the internet, probably, because then they would have known that this guy, they just have two employees, and the other guy’s not even from the location. But these days it’s not important anymore. Your competitor is not your competitor in real life. Your competitor is the other guys that are ranking for that keyword that you want to rank for. This was quite interesting to see that he didn’t realize that until that day, and I’m not sure if he is realizing it not, because for him it’s still all about the, so to say the offline world. Your competitor is everybody that is ranking for your keyword. That could be very different locally, international, national, and states, depending sometimes where the people are searching for.

Let’s say if you are trying to sell in the States, and people are searching from New York, or people are searching from California, or from any other location, they could see different results, because Google is trying to give your users the most, or the best result for their area, of course. If your service is somehow location related, then you will probably not show up that high in a location that is far away from your business location. But this depends on your product, because some products are not location based, or not. There’s no difference if there’s a different location. But keep that in mind. Your keyword is defining your competitors.

If you pick a money keyword, so just a single keyword, then it’s going to get very hard to compete. If you go for long tail keywords, it’ going to be easier. In every market you go in, you probably will have different competitors. Also, if you look at the keywords, if you find that some of the competitors will be the same, they will be your competitors for not just one keyword, they will be the competitors for a lot of keywords because they rule the market somehow.

It’s important to know who your competitors are, and if there are competitors that you see, they’re doing a lot of advertising, they’re doing a lot of things on the internet, and it seems like they have ads running for months and years, the same ad copy and so on, this is actually a very clear indicator for you that this should be, or must be working. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it for such a long time.

There are tools out there where you can look at your competitor’s data. You can see what kind of ads they are putting out, you can see how much money they approximately spend on their ads, you can see which channels they are using, so you could just go ahead and copy their marketing strategy, and use it in your business. This is a great thing. This is why it’s some important, first of all, to know who your competitors are and what they do. You can just copy of a lot of things. Just imagine the big companies already spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of testing on this ad, so you just go ahead and copy it. I don’t recommend you to copy it one by one, but at least you will find out what product sells well for them and what kind of ad copy works for you.

I hope that was useful, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, or if you watched it on our website, subscribe to our newsletter. I wish you a nice day. We have 41 degrees today in Dubai. It’s quite hot, so I’m not sure if I’m going outside today. My son and my wife went swimming already; I’m probably going to do some more videos for you and look at some strategies for our online store. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye bye. See you