Whilst it’s important to set your own path as a brand developing a marketing strategy there is still a lot you can learn from evaluating your competitors. Reviewing competitor activity and consistently benchmarking yourself in relevant ways is crucial to a well-informed marketing strategy. Today Digital PR Manager James Lavery shares his advice for effective competitor analysis in digital PR.

What are the biggest missed opportunities where brands or PRs may not be using competitor research effectively?

Brands often look at what their competitors are doing from a product and services point of view, but don’t look into what they’re saying and how they’re communicating it.

If a brand’s business goal was to drive more media attention and website traffic to specific products/product pages, then it might be tempting to just pitch the product to the media. But rather than just relying on the obvious tactic, assess what topics and talking points there are around the product/service. How are competitors contributing to relevant publications who cover these types of stories?

Make a note of how competitors are pitching information, too. Are they creating bespoke creative pieces on-site? Are they sharing internal news? Are they launching surveys? What styles of outreach work best for this particular industry?

What makes good competitor research analysis?

I don’t think there’s any uniform, one-size fits all approach as the business goals of our brand will dictate what types of things we include. But a solid foundation would be to split your competitor analysis into what competitors are doing well, and could be doing better.

You might also want to include insights from organic competitors, rather than just market competitors, as market competitors are not necessarily always competing with our brand in Google rankings.

Remember that the brand you’re working with may not have as thorough an understanding of PR or SEO as you, so simplify complex language in a way that allows them to understand how competitors are/aren’t executing the correct PR strategy, and how our brand could use these learnings to achieve goals.

How can you use PR competitor learnings to pivot a strategy?

When a PR strategy hasn’t gone the way I want it to, my first action is to try and repurpose existing information to secure quick wins.

Looking at where competitors have secured placements can allow us to find examples of publications or contacts missing from our media lists that we can easily pitch to. 

You might also want to look at stories your competitors have contributed to before. Is there anything new that your brand already has available (in the form of a blog post, a pre-written comment, data, etc.) that could provide additional value to these stories? If you know a topic already has media interest, then it’s fine to look into it again so long as you’re contributing a fresh take.

If your brand is B2C/ecommerce, then it’s likely that you’ll want to appear in ‘best of’ or ‘top 10 top products’ listicle type articles. If you can spot any articles that get republished every year, it can be a good idea to reach out to the writers and try to get your brand featured ahead of time. This will be particularly effective if you spot that your competitors aren’t doing this proactively.

Remember that not all competitors will be incorporating SEO strategy into their PR, so spot opportunities for where you might be able to outperform them here if traditional PR tactics aren’t working:

• Flag broken backlinks to key commercial pages
• Chase journalists for unlinked brand mentions within coverage
• Approach charities, organisations, accreditation bodies or partnerships that your brand is part of and ask them to link back to your brand if they aren’t already 

What types of things should PRs look for in competitor analysis?

PRs should look for examples of:

• Where competitors have made use of expert insights and commentary to add value to trending topics
• On-site content with newsworthy hooks
• Fresh data that has wide appeal
• Influencer or blogger collaborations
• Product placements
• Promotion of events and internal news

However, don’t just look at things competitors are doing well. We can often get inspiration by looking at missed opportunities from competitors. For instance, some analysis might show a competitor is getting placements on relevant sites but not reaching out to journalists to get a link, meaning they lose out on added SEO impact. Or they could be creating useful, informative content that has potential to get news coverage, but they might be hiding it within downloadable PDFs instead of visualising it on a piece of shareable on-site content. 

Reviewing what doesn’t work can often inspire ideas of how to repurpose something a competitor has done but improve upon it for stronger performance.

How can PR competitor analysis be communicated to clients or brands better?

It’s really important to set client expectations and discuss main KPIs very early on in your working relationship so you can fully understand business goals. This will help to inform what parts of your competitor analysis to share.

For example, if you’ve agreed to do proactive outreach of on-site content alongside off-site opportunities like product outreach or reactive expert comments, then you’ll need to make it clear to clients that your competitor analysis will look at different metrics. This is because results vary depending on the approach of outreach you take. 

Product outreach tends to result in affiliate links, so we might just be looking at the number of placements here. If we can spot a more data-driven campaign launched by competitors, there is likely more granular detail necessary for us to communicate to clients. How many links did it get? What types of websites covered and were they relevant? What datasets did it use and can we repurpose this data for any other campaigns? What is the readership estimates of the publication covering the campaign?

What are your top tips for competitor analysis?

The world of PR is going increasingly more digital, so it’s important that we hone our more technical methods of research:

• Make use of SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to quickly pull lists of top-ranking content and link opportunities for your brand
• Use Google search operators as a cheat sheet to quickly find campaigns and content focused around specific topic areas
• Sign up to competitor newsletters and PR newsletters to get regular industry campaign insights
• Where possible, work with content and SEO teams to collaboratively audit competitors’ websites. Look for opportunities to improve or create new content on your own brand’s website based on findings that you could then pitch to the media.

How often should PRs be looking at their brands’ key competitors?

Competitor analysis is always more effective when it’s taken with a more holistic approach that takes into account activity over a longer period of time. This is because it gives us a more clear idea of what a competitor’s actual strategy might be. If we spend time looking at competitors every month, it might be harder to see the bigger picture.

I would recommend doing competitor analysis every 3-6 months, depending on the brand’s needs. 

In a tougher economic climate, is there anything for brands to consider to keep a competitive edge for PR?

Understandably, many brands are hesitant to invest in high-risk campaigns. The market is becoming saturated with similar ideas and products, and it can be daunting to spend the money on something that might not cut through the noise.

But not every campaign has to break the bank. Staying reactive and being able to quickly provide comment or data with minimal sign-off or turnaround time is by far the best way of being able to keep a competitive edge. Brands should prioritise improving their ways of working to ensure they can quickly respond to media requests.

My personal experience is that comments or data that I can turn around within 24 hours is significantly more likely to secure a relevant placement.

One top tip is to audit journalist requests relevant to your brand’s expertise and compare these with competitor coverage – you might spot that competitors aren’t contributing to a lot of potential opportunities. This allows you to prepare responses far in advance on repeatedly appearing topics that you know competitors likely aren’t responding to. 

What is important to consider when comparing brands to other brands?

Some brands have such a huge market presence that they don’t need to throw themselves into reactive newsjacking and disruptive creative campaigns, as they can still remain visible. However, smaller brands should view this as an opportunity to invest into tactics overlooked by their larger rivals, as it can help them reach audiences and acquire online visibility that their competitors miss out on.

On the flip side of this, some bigger competitors have a very robust PR strategy and launch impressive campaigns that have clear performance goals. While it can be tempting to mimic these, we have to be realistic about budgets. Communicate clearly what is going to be realistic for your brand – how can we use elements of high-investment campaigns to achieve our own goals without needing to exceed resources?

Any other advice you have on competitor analysis in digital PR?

Where possible, provide additional insights into campaigns being launched within your brand’s industry space that are relevant to your client’s expertise. These won’t necessarily be campaigns launched by competitors, but the coverage and media exposure they get will still be worth looking at and sometimes can actually provide more useful than studying competitors with no clear PR strategy in place.

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.