The 7 best B2B marketing strategies for 2025
Dec 06, 2024
Before going into battle, a good general scouts their opponent. They look at things like equipment, troop deployment, and even the terrain to build a clear picture of the opponent’s strategy and adapt theirs accordingly.
A competitor analysis works on the same principle.
An effective competitor analysis highlights areas to improve, reveals opportunities, and gives you a better understanding of your market. And this, in turn, helps you refine your marketing strategy.
So, how do you run an effective competitor analysis?
This is the first stage of any competitor analysis.
There are several ways to approach this, but we recommend starting on LinkedIn. A quick search of relevant industry groups and hashtags will provide plenty of valuable, high-level insights about your competitors. You can then use more data-led solutions to build a clearer picture of the market.
For example, the Ahrefs Content Gap tool lists all the competitors that have similar pages and rank for the same keywords as your website. While more advanced tools like Similarweb, allow you to gather detailed information about your competitors, including website sessions and content type.
Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s time to dig a little deeper. The more thorough you are, the better. To build a broad picture of your main competitors, focus on these 6 areas.
If you want to know why a competitor’s website is more successful at generating traffic and leads, the first thing to look at is search engine optimisation (SEO) performance.
This begins with a keyword gap analysis. Ahrefs' content gap tool identifies the commercial or informational keywords your competitors rank for, and you don’t (and vice versa). You can then use this information to optimise your website and create content around relevant, high-value keywords.
For deeper insights, run an inbound comparison between you and some of your main competitors. Depending on your market, 3-5 should be enough.
An effective inbound comparison covers:
A content comparison is an integral part of your competitor analysis. It measures the quality and effectiveness of your content relative to your biggest competitors. It considers both quantitative and qualitative metrics, so you can get maximum value from your content marketing efforts.
Quantitative metrics you should consider:
Qualitative metrics tend to be more subjective. They include things like the structure, readability, and accessibility of your content, as well as consistency and tone of voice.
Ahrefs offers a range of content comparison tools, including Site Explorer and Content Explorer.
A social analysis evaluates the performance of your and your competitors’ social media platforms across organic and paid channels.
For organic social, it’s best to adapt your analysis for each platform. Profile views will be more important for LinkedIn than Twitter, for instance.
That said, there are a handful of universal metrics you should track across all your platforms:
A thorough analysis can also reveal opportunities to improve organic social performance.
You might discover that visual content performs better on LinkedIn than standard text posts. This tells you that you should focus more of your efforts on carousels, infographics, and videos. Or perhaps you find that many of your ideal customers use online social forums, like Reddit, in their research.
Paid social analysis covers everything from LinkedIn single image ads and Facebook carousels to PPC.
Spend some time manually reviewing your competitors' ads as part of your research. Focus on:
This treasure trove of information can help you optimise your paid social strategy.
If you want to measure campaign or ad performance over time, consider investing in social monitoring tools like Sprout Social.
As the world’s most popular search engine, most businesses concentrate on Google when it comes to paid search.
This is great news for competitor analysis since the Google ads platform has all the tools you need to measure performance.
The Google Ads Auction Insights report lists the companies that are bidding on the same keywords as you. It also shows you the value of their bids, who they’re targeting, and which landing pages they connect to.
Auction Insights also provides more granular information, such as:
You can learn more about your competitors’ campaign goals by manually entering your target keywords on Google. Click on the top ad and see where it takes you. Is the landing page designed to convert visitors or raise brand awareness?
A manual search will even show you if one of your competitors is bidding on keywords associated with your brand. For example, some companies create a landing page for every competitor to highlight the differences between their products or services.
In addition to Google's suite of tools, Ahrefs recently launched Ads 2.0 in Site Explorer. These new features are great for analysing competitor keywords, SERP ranking, and ad history.
Since Google launched its Core Web Vitals update in 2020, user experience and technical performance have become important ranking factors for websites. It’s simple. The better your website performs, the better the user experience and the higher your website appears on Google.
A thorough technical comparison of your competitors’ websites can reveal what you’re doing right in terms of technical SEO and, crucially, where you can improve. These improvements don’t necessarily have to be huge changes to your site architecture. It’s often the little tweaks that have the biggest impact on your position on search engine results pages (SERP).
If you’re not sure where to start, consider using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Simply enter a domain and Google gives you an overall Core Web Vitals score for both the desktop and mobile versions of the website.
Google calculates the score from a range of factors, including:
To round off your competitor analysis, you need to review your market positioning. How do prospective customers perceive your brand? And how do those perceptions differ from your main competitors?
Answering questions like this can tell you how to differentiate your brand and stay top of mind with your ideal buyers. Focus on these key areas:
You don't need expensive or complex tools to conduct thorough market research. A simple search of your competitors' websites can uncover plenty of useful information. But tools like Google Trends, Buzzsumo, and Mintel can reveal even more powerful insights.
To recap, an effective competitor analysis covers:
That might seem like a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort. A competitor analysis shows you where the biggest opportunities lie and how to capitalise on them.
You can then use all this rich data to create a compelling business case that can drive your future inbound marketing strategy.
