**ZERO TO HERO** #3. Competitor Analysis

(or back to Zero haha)


Hey guys,Hope everybody is doing fine. I’m also doing fine, sitting quietly in my room and drinking my hot tea.

It’s becoming my ritual I guess… to set myself up to write this blog.

It’s been 4 days since I started my ecom project, and although I wish I’ve had given more time to it, I’ve managed to clock in exactly 15.75 hours of work so far (not counting the blog, I do blog to clear my thought, reflect on things, and to provide value to you guys)

Soooo
In this post, I’m gonna tell you about the competitor analysis I’ve done and share some tools I’ve used.
Most people most of the time get overwhelmed by the multitude of things that need to be done to run a business. As my sister says when you run a business you are a CEO (Chief Everything Officer). What I’m trying to say is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel and come up with breakthrough ideas, processes, or methods.

It’s important to learn from others.

As a noob in marketing, I have been thinking hard about how to market my product/s once I finish building my store.

So,

I started to look for companies that we’re selling the same or similar products, the ones who were doing it successfully, bigger players but not so big that they would not relate to my business.
I started searching on Google and Facebook trying different combinations of keywords.
And found a company that was doing pretty well.
I checked out their website, and they have successfully white-labeled AliExpress products so well that lots of people were loving them.
But the most important thing for me was to find out if they were doing well and what their marketing was like.
There are a bunch of ad spy tools, some of them are free, and others are paid.
You can just google them.
The one I used is bigspy com, they come with a 3-day trial for a buck.

Long story short,
what I found out is that the company I was analyzing seems to be crushing it.
Some of their ads have been running for a year.

Can you imagine that?
Yeah, 300+, many ads have been run for 200+ days, 100+ days.

What does it say to me?
Only the crazy would run ads that were not profitable.
I’ve seen their ads, and to be honest, they are so good I’m afraid I won’t be able to do something like this… by myself.
I guess ill have to look for a freelance video editor or filmmaker to shoot something like that.
But that’s for another day.

Speaking of the competitor’s website.
It’s a sleek, modern, easy-to-use website. It was built on Shopify as well, however, with a premium theme.
And they are using lots of apps and analytics tools(half of which I haven’t heard of).

You might be wondering how I know that.
Well, there is a website called builtwith.com.
They give you all the information about how a website is built, any apps or plugins used, languages, analytics tools, etc. Check it out btw.

Now,

we have dissected our competitor’s website, social media presence, and marketing it’s time to bring our own store, social media accounts, and creatives on par with those of the bigger players.

What specifically am I gonna do?

I’m gonna create an Excel file and make a list of all the creative my competitors has.
Rank them in order of the length of time the ads have run. Will analyze the copies and creatives. Will think about the structure of their copies and creatives and why they were effective.

And for the website,

I will look into the tools they are using and will incorporate the ones I might need in my store.

That’s all for today.

If you read it all till the end, congrats, you’ve got some patience.

You might also check and analize traffic of your competitor , for that you can use similarweb trial version .

RichardLI said:

You might also check and analize traffic of your competitor , for that you can use similarweb trial version .

Click to expand...

Thank you buddy, I've used the website a couple of times but it would not even have come to my mind to analyze competitors' traffic! Many thanks for your reply and help!!

Great insight!

What's up with your journey, @anvar12? Ad acta?

RichardLI said:

You might also check and analize traffic of your competitor , for that you can use similarweb trial version .

Click to expand...

I like to verify organic traffic via the Semrush tool. For verification of the traffic from different sources, I use Alexa and Similarweb. This solution work the best for me

I think you're on the right track, but here's the thing: before you focus so much on the creatives that your competitors are using to get their results, I need you to step back.

Look at their website .

Can you find their landing pages? Can you find their sitemap XML?

What do you need to figure out is how their Shopify site is set up.

Since they're running the same ads for an extended period, they're obviously making money.

What is it about their website that converts that traffic?

It's important to ensure that you also focus on the product mix and the descriptions for them.

Focus on these instead of getting sucked into ad campaign analysis.

That's going to come later, and it has a time and place.

But if you can't figure out how your competitor is turning traffic into cold hard cash, then you're going to have a tough time later on.