9 Ways to Outsmart the Competition

How can you stand out from the crowd and outsmart your competition to win the digital marketing game? We’ve got your complete guide to doing that right here.

Digital Marketing Overview

So what is digital marketing, exactly? The term has come to encompass so many tactics and strategies that it can seem meaningless, but there is a clear definition.

Digital marketing is any form of marketing that uses digital channels to market your products or services to customers. It can include channels like email, social media, paid ads, SEO, and much more.

How Competition Interferes with Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is popular because it’s extremely effective. You’re reaching your customers and prospects where they spend a lot of their time – online. But competition has gotten quite fierce in the past few years as almost every business looks to reap the rewards.

This increased competition means you need to be more thoughtful and strategic to stand out in the digital world. What worked for you in the past might not yield the same results, and that’s likely because your competitors have taken notice and started to use the same channels and tactics.

Consumers are bombarded with more and more digital marketing content, so they learn to tune out the noise. This is another factor that makes digital marketing success more difficult these days: there’s more competition for consumers, and their attention spans are reduced.

9 Strategies to Deal with Competition in Digital Marketing

So how can you beat your competition in the digital marketing space? Here are nine strategies you can use to ensure your company is successful in your digital marketing plan.

1. Run A Competitor Analysis Audit

It’s hard to stand out from the competition if you don’t know what the competition is doing. Running a competitor analysis audit helps you determine what your competitors are doing and how successfully they’re doing it.

A competitor analysis audit identifies the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, determines where your company stands in relation to them and indicates where the gaps are and how your business can fill them.

Performing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) can help you determine where your business stands in its digital marketing efforts relative to your competitors. Once you know your current state, you can make a plan to improve it.

2. Differentiate Yourself

In an effort to take advantage of the benefits of digital marketing, many businesses copy what’s working well for their competitors. But that leads to a sea of the same kinds of content and ads cluttering up your industry’s digital space.

To stand out, you need to determine how to differentiate yourself. After conducting your competitor analysis, spend some time figuring out where the gaps are that you can fill. For example, are your competitors all pumping out low-quality SEO content for their blogs? Your company can focus on creating fewer but better-written posts that show deep expertise in your industry.

3. Use Different Marketing Channels

Many businesses stick to the same few marketing channels where they feel comfortable, even though the channels available have expanded vastly in the past decade. Don’t be afraid to use different channels where the competition isn’t as stiff.

Be sure that your target customer uses your channels of choice, however, because simply getting lots of exposure and views isn’t the end goal – increasing purchases and revenue is.

For example, if your industry isn’t using TikTok much, but your research shows that your potential customers are, you can be one of the first in the space and grow a larger following than by using a crowded space like Instagram.

4. Outspend Where Appropriate

Digital marketing can be quite inexpensive these days, thanks to a whole suite of tools and guides to help you succeed on a low budget. But in order to see more significant results or compete at a higher level, you will need to invest much more into your digital marketing budget.

Outspending can mean investing more into your paid ad budget to increase your reach or hiring high-quality freelance copywriting or graphic design help to improve your content.

Another option is to hire a top-notch digital marketing company to get you better results faster. If you outspend the competition wisely, you can reap even bigger rewards that make the expenditure well worth it.

5. Focus On Retention

Once you’ve acquired a customer through your digital marketing efforts, what are you doing to keep them? Gaining a new customer costs 5-25 times as much as retaining an existing one, so focusing on retention and acquisition is smart.

Retaining more customers means maximizing the value of each customer acquired through your digital marketing, so you can justify spending more because the customer lifetime value is higher. There are many ways to increase customer retention, like adding loyalty programs, offering referral bonuses, and improving customer support.

6. Marketing Strategies To Get Ahead Of The Competition