Let’s
think about how to track your own scores in social media. How many mentions has your company got? What about visitors? Is there any traffic in your website and where are all the visitors coming from? Is it possible to compare your results
with your competitors' ?
It
is very essential to see how your company is doing its digital marketing, since there are a lot of new users in the internet every day and it is a very powerful marketing tool, if it is used right.
It is very important to detect who are your main competitors. Nowadays, it is easy to spot your own weaknesses and improve them. You can also see what your competitors do better than you and learn from them.
Marketing Grader
Marketing
Grader monitors, how many mentions has your company got. It gives you and each
of your competitors an overall score on activity in digital marketing. It is
based on blogging, social media, SEO (=Search Engine Optimization), lead
generation and mobile.
For instance,
I searched our school Haaga-University of Applied Sciences results. It got 73
points out of 100. You can compare it to other schools or companies just by
searching them by their website. I searched Metropolia University of Applied
Sciences and it got 84 points out of 100. The difference was based on their
social media activity.
If
you dig in deeper, you can see a lot of different measurements and facts, for
example, how many blog posts are there about your company and how much time has
there been on average between those posts. With these measurements, you can easily see what is
there to improve in your company’s digital marketing and how to be better than
your competitors.
Unfortunately, Marketing Grader does not work when trying to find information about small companies' websites and digital marketing.
Semrush
Semrush
is a webpage, which I find extremely useful. It gives a lot of information, about
different facts such as, competitors, rankings, keywords and traffic.
Everything is shown in graphic format and it’s very clear.
Semrush
shows from where the traffic is coming from: links and countries. It tells you
the referring domain names. It shows you the competitors and the keywords
that are used the most when searching the webpage of your company. Everything is
divided into four parts: Organic Search Traffic, Paid Search Traffic, Backlinks
and Display Advertising.
This
webpage is also focused on the company’s own performance, but you can easily check
the competitor’s performance as well. This might be one of the best tools to
see how well your company is doing its digital marketing.
Semrush is suitable for analysing big as well as small companies' digital marketing.
SimilarWeb
I
would say that SimilarWeb is the best tool to do digital marketing competitor
analysis. First of all, you don’t have to sign up at all, it doesn’t even ask
your e-mail address. Secondly, you can add the competitor’s rankings there to
the same page and compare them at the same time. It suggests you the main
competitors already when typing its name. I chose Haaga-Helia University of
Applied Sciences and it suggested its main competitor, Metropolia University of
Applied Sciences.
First,
it tells you the companies’ global rank, then the country rank and then the
rank inside the business field the companies are working in. Then it gives the
traffic overview. Inside that category there are estimated monthly visits (last
six months), visitors’ engagement and traffic sources (last three months).
I
think this one is the best, since it gives you the chance to check the rankings
with the competitor’s side to side. It might not give as much detailed
information as Semrush does, but its design is way much better. In the PRO
version there might be much more information and you can compare even more
competitors at the same time, but then again, it is not free. I would only use this tool for big companies, since there are some problems in finding small companies' websites.
