One question we receive quite a bit from clients is which digital marketing platforms they should be using to attract new clients or customers to their business. Inevitably clients ask us: Should I use Google Ads? In this article, we will review the main differences between promoting your company on Google Ads and some things to consider before deciding what direction you should go.

How Do Google Ads Work?

With Google Ads, your prospective customer or client is seeking YOU out vs. you seeking them out. If someone goes to Google to search for a kitchen remodeling company, that person has already pre-qualified themself. They are “actively” searching for a kitchen remodeling company – which could be you (or your competitors).

Why Google Ads Are Worth It

We all know that Google is the most popular and widely used search engine. With 1.2 trillion queries per year, 3.5 billion users daily, and 40,000 searches per second, it’s safe to say Google Ads offers a virtually unlimited number of opportunities for marketers looking to increase brand awareness and sales. Google search provides an unparalleled potential audience who is actively looking for your products, services, and content. And, results are split across three networks… search, display, and video.

Google Ads are worth it because they provide a cost-effective way for businesses of all sizes to reach a virtually unlimited, targeted audience. They’re extremely flexible and you can start, stop, pause, or even adjust your bids at any time.

The pay-per-performance pricing model is a tremendous advantage for small businesses with a tight marketing budget. And, having the ability to focus on long-tail, niche, and local keywords allows you to avoid competing with big brands that have huge advertising budgets.

Although these niche and local keywords may not receive as many clicks as broader terms, they’re much more effective for driving conversions, and that’s what really matters at the end of the day.

When to Use Google Ads - Defined Search Demand

If your business or the products or services you provide have a definitive search volume on Google, then Google Ads is typically a very good option for you. Meaning, there is search demand for your product or service. You can then purchase ads at the top of the search results to drive targeted traffic for users that are seeking you out already. Sign me up, right?!

The key with Google Ads is to conduct your research and find out if people are in fact searching for your product or service online. Conduct keyword research to determine the types of phrases being used and the associated volume of searches being done. This will help you understand the potential audience you can get in front of today. If there isn’t much search volume being done for your product or service, then Google Ads may not be a good fit for you.

Most times this happens when a company has a new product or service that the general public isn’t aware of yet. We’ve worked with many clients that innovate and come up with a new product or service line that no one is aware of yet. If no one is searching for it, then Google Ads are typically not a good fit and you should look to other platforms like paid social media platforms – think Facebook/Instagram Ads or even LinkedIn Ads. 

Bottom Line: Use Google Ads for search demand for your products/services and to seek out people actively searching for you, not you searching for them. 

At Onya, online advertising must be meticulously managed and maintained in order to see the results you need and expect. Looking for more guidance on how to leverage Google Ads for your business? Give us a call today! We would love to chat more about the difference they’ve made for others and the difference they can make for you.

What They Have in Common, How They Differ, and Which One You Need

Whether you’re just getting started with your social media accounts, or want to evolve your strategy, it’s important to know how and when to implement paid and organic social media. After all, you want to get the most bang for your buck.

So what’s the difference between paid and organic social?

Paid Social Media

This is when you pay money to have your brand appear more on social media, whether it’s boosting or advertising. Boosting is when you put money behind an existing post so that it is seen by more people, and is a quick and easy way to extend your reach. Paid social advertising is paying money to run ads on social media, separate from what’s on your actual feed.

There are two things paid social media always has behind it: money and an objective. Social Advertising allows you to track the return on your investment, which is key for performance and growth.

It’s able to unlock a level of engagement and response you would never achieve otherwise. We’ve had some clients so inundated with responses to paid social we had to turn off the ad so they could catch up!

Organic Social Media

This is when a business uses the free tools of social media to reach its audience in a natural, cost-free way. A brand might share a photo or a special offer, and the Social Media post will simply reach who it reaches, however, the algorithm chooses to prioritize it. Unfortunately for businesses, this is happening less and less.

Organic social media is your feed, which means it needs to be looking its absolute best. This is how most people will uncover more about your business—by scrolling through your posts. Having a consistent, engaging, on-brand feed positions your business as premium and trustworthy.

Using some social media planning tools can help manage your future posts and plan your organic strategy. There are many things to consider to have your organic social media up to scratch, including responding to comments and the times you post.

You can grow your business quite substantially purely through organic social. Lots of content, over time, will mean you attract followers and engagement.

The Comparison

The obvious thing that paid and organic social media have in common is that they both appear in social media feeds.

Generally, organic is about brand awareness, and paid is about performing, although of course, both can do both.

Unlike paid social, with organic, you’ll never reach a point of knowing “if I do X, I will achieve X”.

Which Should I Use?

If you’re going to put effort into your social media strategy, why wouldn’t you go in armed with all the information you can get?

Some businesses simply cannot afford high social spending. Although perhaps they would make room in the budget if they understood just how true the saying is, “you have to spend money to make money”. This isn’t just in relation to conversions but also tracking data to evolve your strategy. In short, paid social is absolutely worth it.

Large followings are important for a brand, so frequent high-quality organic content is integral. Often hiring an expert to manage this side of it is the way to go as it can be time-consuming and you don’t want to be lost in the algorithm.

It’s important to remember you can mix it up. It might be a good idea to invest more money in your social media when you’re running a promotion or ramping up your marketing before the festive season.

Ultimately, both are necessary. We won’t deny that managing both can be time-consuming and requires a strategy to gain the best results.

That’s why we recommend leaving both organic and paid to the people who know how to make the most of it: the people at Onya! Reach out today to talk and learn more!

In a previous post, Facebook Lookalike Audiences is a sophisticated matchmaker between your brand and new fans — and a powerful advertising tool. It allows you to tailor content and ads directly to the people who will be most likely to consume it. 

As a reminder, a Facebook Lookalike Audience is a custom advertising audience that can be used to reach people similar to your current customers.

We spent last time looking at the practical side of how to set these audiences up on Facebook. Now, let’s take some time to focus on optimization!

1. Choose high-quality sources

It can be tempting to put every customer you have into your source audience. Larger audiences are the best, right? Not really.

Lookalike Audiences are more similar to their source audience tend to be more valuable. However, the results can vary dramatically depending on the quality of your audience.

For example, you may want to put your entire email subscriber list to find a Lookalike Audience. But it won’t necessarily translate into sales if most of your email subscribers don’t purchase or even open your emails. Instead, you would create a higher quality Lookalike Audience if you only put active email subscribers as your source audience.

2. Optimize bids with A/B testing

You can create multiple Lookalike Audiences with ranging similarities to your source audience. This is a strategic method to find your most effective audience.

To begin, you should do A/B testing. Target the same ad to each of your Lookalike Audiences with initial bids. You can evaluate how well the ad did based on metrics like revenue per conversion or the lifetime value of each audience.

Once you’ve analyzed what is your best-performing Lookalike Audience, you can modify your bids for each audience. You can start bidding more for valuable audiences and less for lower-performing audiences.

It’s a win-win because you can stretch your social media ad budget for your more effective audiences while ensuring you are reaching your ideal customer.

3. Use Lookalike Audiences in combination with other parameters

Enhance your lookalike audience targeting by adding more targeting parameters such as age, gender, or interests. Fairly straightforward tip, but can yield many different results! 

4. Get creative with your source audience

You can create custom audiences around a variety of parameters. Start by evaluating your campaign goals, and then drill down to the most relevant audience options.

Ideas for source audience include:

Video audience: If you’re launching a video-based campaign, create an audience based on people who have engaged with your videos in the past.

Recent website visitors: All website visitors may be too broad of a list, especially if conversions are your objective. Target people who have visited your website in the past 30 days, or visitors who have put something in their cart.

Email audience: Newsletter subscribers are interested in receiving news and deals about your business. Use this audience to get more subscribers, or if you’re planning a campaign with similar content.

Common FAQs on Lookalike Audiences

What is the difference between a custom audience and a lookalike audience?

The difference between a Custom Audience and a Lookalike Audience is based on if there is a pre-existing relationship or not. A Custom Audience is based on people who already have a relationship with your business, while Lookalike Audiences are people who share characteristics with your Custom Audience but don’t know about your brand.

How many people do you need for a lookalike audience?

You need at least 100 people for a Lookalike Audience as long as they are all from the same country. If your source audience is based in multiple countries, you need at least 100 people from the same country to use it as a Lookalike Audience. Facebook generally recommends a source audience between 1,000-5,000 people.

How long does it take a lookalike audience to populate?

It takes between six and 24 hours for your Lookalike Audience to populate. Once your lookalike audience is created, it will appear as Ready in the Availability column. As long as your target ads with that specific lookalike audience, it will refresh every 3-7 days.

Looking to dedicate some time to working with lookalike audiences but don’t know where to start? Book a consultation with Onya today!

Facebook Lookalike Audiences is a sophisticated matchmaker between your brand and new fans — and a powerful advertising tool. You tell Facebook the characteristics of your favorite customers, and Facebook recommends a new target audience filled with prospects that meet your criteria.

Ready to find the audience of your dreams? Read on to learn how to create a Lookalike Audience for your Facebook ads, plus Optimizing Facebook tips that will help you find the best match.

What is a lookalike audience on Facebook?

A Facebook Lookalike Audience is a custom advertising audience that can be used to reach people similar to your current customers.

How are Facebook Lookalike Audiences created?

Facebook’s advertising system takes an existing audience, identifies its key characteristics (like behavior and interests), and then finds similar audiences sharing those traits.

You can pair Lookalike Audiences with other ad targeting parameters, such as age and gender or interests and behaviors.

Benefits of Facebook Lookalike Audiences

People in a Lookalike Audience are more likely to engage with your content than the general public, which makes this type of ad targeting particularly valuable. Here are other reasons to choose Lookalike Audiences over other types of ad targeting on Facebook:

• Easier to find high-quality leads. You can reach new people outside of your customer list with Lookalike Audiences. But not just any person on Facebook – you are specifically targeting people who share similar characteristics to your top customers. This means they are more likely to be interested in your ad.

• More value on ad spend. Experimentation is necessary for social media ads, but no one wants to spend more money to find their top-performing ad. With Lookalike Audiences, you can test multiple audiences at once without needing to create several campaigns.

• Saves you time. Lookalike Audiences make it easy to find audiences interested in your ad without additional work on your end. If you already have an existing audience, then you can use it to find Lookalike Audiences.

How to use Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Before you even begin creating a Facebook Lookalike Audience, you’ll need to create a Custom Audience first. Then Facebook will use the Custom Audience to create your personalized Lookalike Audience. These are the basic steps to create a Custom Audience:

1. Prepare your customer list in advance by creating a CSV or TXT file. You may also want to install Meta Pixel on your website to track visitors.
2. Go to Audiences within your Ad Manager.
3. Choose a Custom Audience source. Your options include website, app activity, catalog, customer list, and offline activity.
4. Follow the instructions to create your Custom Audience based on the source you chose in Step 3.

Once you’ve created your Custom Audience, you can use it to set up a Lookalike Audience. Here are the steps to create a Facebook Lookalike Audience:

1. Select Create a Lookalike Audience within the Ad Manager.
2. Choose your source. Remember, this will be a custom audience you’ve created from customer information, Pixel or app data, or fans of your page. You can also create a new source at this point.

Note: Your source audiences need to contain at least 100 people from the same country. Facebook also generally recommends a source audience that has between 1,000-5,000 people, but high-quality sources take priority.

3. Select the countries or regions you would like to find a similar group of people. The areas you choose will determine where people in your Lookalike Audience are based, essentially adding a geo-filter onto your Lookalike Audience.

Note: You don’t have to have anyone from the country you want to target in your source.

4. Choose your desired audience size with the slide. Size is expressed on a scale of 1-10. Smaller numbers have a high similarity to your source audience. Meanwhile, larger numbers have higher reach but less similar characteristics. Facebook will provide you with an estimated reach for the size you choose. You can also create multiple Lookalike Audiences with different levels of similarity to your source.
5. Click Create Audience. And you’re all set! It can take between six and 24 hours for your Lookalike Audience to be finished.

Looking for ways to then optimize these lookalike audiences? Stay tuned for our next email soon on 4 ways to optimize lookalike audiences! 

Don’t want to wait that long? Onya has a team of experts who know these processes well and can provide you with proof of immense success for others like you. Give us a call today to learn more!

Advertising used to be a series of educated guesses and assumptions. While that still plays a role within the industry, it is not as prevalent as it once was. This is in no small part due to the effectiveness of online ad channels. And, there is no online advertising platform like Google Ads.

Google Ads allows businesses to directly advertise to their target market. It is appropriate for all objectives from awareness to consideration to conversions. It works across Google properties including search, Gmail, YouTube, and affiliated websites. Despite this scope and influence, many businesses struggle to get the most out of Google Ads. Here are the most common mistakes businesses make.

#1 Putting The Wrong Keywords Together In An Ad Group

You wouldn’t pair a lovely Shiraz with a piece of grilled cheese, as the end result may be lackluster. In very much the same way you wouldn’t group together irrelevant keywords, as your results will be less than ideal. All the keywords in an ad group should be closely related to a specific theme. We often see things like “men’s hoodies” and “blue t-shirts” put together in the same ad group, instead of having two separate respective ad groups.

The proper approach allows your keywords, ad copy, and destination page on your website to align as much as possible. For the above example, you should have blue t-shirt keywords triggering ads that promote your blue t-shirts. Then, send users to the blue t-shirts page on your website. This will give your keywords a higher quality score from Google and leads to better performance.

#2 Ignoring The Search Terms Report

The search terms report is a source of valuable info for your search ads. It shows what people actually searched for to make your ads appear. It can reveal both where money is being wasted, and where there are opportunities to amplify what’s working.

The search terms report could reveal that your ads for drinking glasses are getting clicks from people searching for eyeglasses. This is when you need to add negative keywords. It could also reveal that there are search terms that are leading to great results but haven’t been added as a keyword.

#3 Misunderstanding Broad Match Keywords

Broad-match keywords match searches that are related to the keyword. This means there might only be a weak link between what you’re offering and what the user is searching for. This might have led to an aversion to using them, but they are worth trialing under the right circumstances. When paired with one of Google’s Smart bidding strategies, broad match keywords can increase conversions. All the while still being efficient, and uncovering new keywords you should target.

We see accounts that use broad keywords excessively or with the wrong bidding strategy. This can lead to an excessive amount of wasted spending. This should be avoided at all costs.

#4 Settling For Poor Data Quality In Your Products Feed

A good feed for a product is vital for success on Google Shopping. It lets Google know exactly what you’re selling so your ads can be served at the right moments. It can be difficult to set up and update your product feed, so it can be tempting to leave it alone once your Shopping ads are running.

We often see data quality issues with feeds. Things like the incorrect brand being listed on products, barcode numbers being left out, or product size not being included. Even though they seem like small changes, fixing up details like the above can improve your Shopping performance significantly over time.

#5 Using Last Click Conversion Attribution

The conversion attribution model you use is important for understanding which ads and targeting led to the conversions you’ve recorded. The last-click attribution model is commonly used. It gives all the credit to the ads and targeting that led to the final click before the user converted, potentially ignoring several earlier clicks that helped that user convert.

This means that some keywords, for example, could be bringing you business but are showing zero conversions. There are other attribution models that can be chosen to give credit differently, such as equality among all the clicks involved on the path to a conversion. The best option is data-driven attribution, which uses your account’s conversion history to determine how the credit for a particular conversion should be distributed.

#6 Confusing Google About Which Conversions To Aim For

Google’s Smart bidding options can help you generate more conversions compared to manual bidding. But Smart bidding will be ineffective if Google’s machine learning technology is looking for the wrong type of conversion.

We’ve seen Smart bidding be derailed by incorrect conversion settings. For example, a Smart Shopping campaign will perform better if it is only trying to generate eCommerce sales, rather than newsletter sign-ups and app downloads as well.

Make sure your campaigns’ goal settings and your account’s conversion action settings are in order so you can make the most of Smart bidding. This can be a bit of a challenge though.

This is why we have a dedicated team of experts to ensure you get ongoing powerful results on your Google Ads to spend. Let us help get you started on the right foot by booking a consultation today!

Have you ever asked yourself "should I Facebook Ads run for my business" or something along those lines? As an experienced online marketer, I get this question a lot from new and experienced online business owners. If you're one of these people searching for answers, you're in the right place.

You’re ready to run Facebook Ads if you want to increase business exposure.

When you use Facebook Ads, you have access to one of the biggest audiences in the world. Publishing your ads on Facebook will help your target audience become more aware of your business and your offer.

You reach about 6% of your organic audience when posting on social media, advertising changes that.

You’re ready to run Facebook Ads if you're not satisfied with the results you get from boosting posts.

Facebook Ads ≠ Boosting Posts

Boosting posts is the most expensive way to advertise. In contrast to creating a Facebook Ad Campaign, the targeting, retargeting and other capabilities are not the same.

You WILL see better results from Facebook Ads. 

You’re ready to run Facebook Ads if you want to give yourself the gift of TIME.

When you put together your Facebook Ad Campaign, there is work up front, but after you hit "publish," the hard work is over.

Instead of posting frequently online to get business exposure, you can let your ads run on autopilot, doing the hard work for you.

Of course, checking in on your campaign is important, but I guarantee it'll cost a fraction of the time as planning & creating organic social media content.

You’re ready to run Facebook Ads if you want to see measurable results from your marketing efforts.

You're able to choose what you want your campaign to achieve (sales, leads, etc.) and target your ideal audience. Your ads are published with a CTA button, which means people don't have to click on the link in your bio to take action. Check out the key elements of a sales page to make sure your ads convert once people land there.

The way ads are set up allows for results to come quicker, and you don't have to work as hard to get results.

There is always an ROI if you apply the right strategy.

The real question is, are you ready to level up?

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful and effective ways to network in our digital age. Networking with successful individuals with similar interests as you is always well worth the time and engagement. This is true for all industries.

However, many LinkedIn users overlook some of the incredibly useful tools and resources of the platform.

Thankfully, the LinkedIn platform has been designed to hasten the way we connect and receive information from others. Making it a prime tool for when you need to check tasks off the list in a jiffy.

Utilize Polls for Feedback

Your time is valuable. Therefore, using quick and effective tools is an absolute necessity when it comes to optimizing your productivity. We recognize that research and development are crucial for the advancement of any business. This is where LinkedIn Polls comes to the rescue. Polls have gained popularity since their reintroduction to the platform in May 2020. Additionally, polls are shown to be used interchangeably across all industries.

Whatever feedback you receive from knowledgeable people within your industry is a treasure that should be used to your advantage. Using a poll on a topic that seems undecipherable to your team could save time on your problem-solving efforts. Asking meaningful and intentional questions is also important. Think about how it would benefit your overall strategic efforts.

A Surface-Level Look at LinkedIn Polls:

• Polls can have 2, 3, or 4 answer options
• Answers can be no longer than 30 characters
• Polls can run for 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, or 2 weeks
• The content or duration of a poll cannot be edited after posting

Looking for an opinion? Maybe an answer to a tough question? Trying to boost your company's exposure? Polls are a convenient route to follow.

Join and Create Your Own Groups

LinkedIn Groups make connecting with people who share your same pursuits and passions effortless. With the number of groups reaching well over 2 million, it’s safe to say you’ll be able to find a few that coincide with your industry and interests.

Benefits of Joining Groups

• Being that Groups are generally focused on a singular topic, they can save you the time and headache of scrolling through a newsfeed full of discussions, links, and posts. The ability to narrow in on a matter of interest is perhaps one of the most appealing and useful components of conducting your research via LinkedIn Groups.
• Once you find some great groups within your niche that you enjoy visiting frequently, it can work to that as a learning resource for not just you, but your team as well. A large majority of the content you’ll find LinkedIn users posting within groups are links to useful articles and tools, commentary on their ideologies concerning their business tactics and strategy, and really anything that they feel could be applicable to others’ success.
• Perhaps most importantly, you’ll be able to network and increase the exposure of you and your business to a large number of people within your field that you may not have been able to reach otherwise. These valuable connections can lead to conversions and help lengthen your prospect list.

Now that you know how advantageous Groups are, you’ll probably want to eventually join the ranks and build a group of your very own.

Quick tips for constructing your first LinkedIn Group:

• Name your group something that is easily searchable.
• Spend some time writing a quality about section, this could very well be the deciding factor that entices potential members to join.
• Ensure that your privacy settings are set to standard, so you’ll be visible in searches.
• After posting some content on LinkedIn, start inviting your connections to join, and be sure to promote your group elsewhere to gain even more traction.

Build Your Email List

• Don’t be afraid to send messages and start conversations with people in your network, although this is a more manual option, people tend to respond more positively when they are asked personally to be added to your email listings.
• Develop and promote an incentive for joining your email list. The incentive you choose could be as simple as a special offer or discount code, free template or checklist downloads, or even case studies, just to name a few. Anything that could be of some value to your target audience would be suitable here.
• Target users within groups of similar interests or encourage those within your own group to join.

It’s important for us to note here that it is highly recommended you ask for permission when adding anyone to your email list, as well as being mindful that you are only adding those with pertinent interest in your industry/business.

Recruit Your Employees

The contributions that your employees put forth each day to keep your business alive and well are truly invaluable. Not to mention, their ability to spread the good word of your business with their connections and beyond. Employee brand advocacy is excellent for expanding your brand’s overall reach and exposure to ideal audiences.

Tips for Starting Your Employee Brand Advocacy Program

• Set in place specific and measurable goals. Not only will these provide great pillars to work towards but will help tremendously in calculating your program’s ROI and determining how to successfully strategize moving forward.
• Ensure the longevity of your program. Design a loose framework for your employees to follow to help guide them and keep them motivated well into the future.

Not sure how to get your employees on board with advocating for your brand online? LinkedIn’s Official Guide to Employee Advocacy provides brilliant techniques for empowering your employees to grow their networks and advocate for your brand!

Now that you have the know-how necessary to boost your success on the LinkedIn platform, start exercising your new skills and figure out how you can best tailor your LinkedIn experience to benefit yourself and your business! Looking for more tips on working with Social Media Management and advertising? Give Onya a call today!

Social media marketing is continuously evolving. Brands must make it a point to adapt and not get lost in the crowd. Audiences have increasingly become more reliant on using social platforms as a means of discovering potential product/service solutions.

Therefore, it is important to understand that your audience is using social media beyond its networking capabilities. Social media is now approached as a resourceful search engine as well.

In order to help your brand stay ahead of the curve, here are 5 tips to boost your social searchability.

1. Optimize Social Profiles

Ensuring your social media profiles are fully optimized and complete is an essential first step in getting your business seen for who you truly are. Although this may seem like a no-brainer, the accuracy of simple profile features such as your

• business address
• contact information
• services
• company info

can often be overlooked. As you revamp your profiles, take time to review these fields and edit accordingly if needed.Making your profile as easy to search as possible should be your core goal, therefore:

• use plenty of keywords in your description
• make your username obvious to your brand
• inject profile content that is compelling enough to attract your ideal customer.

2. Publish Shareable/Savable Content

Raising within the search inquiry ranks can be a breeze for businesses that receive a lot of engagement on the posts they share. How does one provoke more engagement on their social media posts? A great way to start is by publishing more shareable and savable content for your followers.

Shareable content can prompt your audience to put in the work for you when it comes to placing your brand in front of similar audiences. According to Infographic World, “Most people want to share content that is useful or helpful to others, so the data must be valuable to the viewer and easily digested to be worthy of sharing.”

3. Publish Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is search-optimized content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time. This form of content creation can be pivotal when trying to climb up the search engine rankings due to its long lifespan. Key audience groups can discover and refer back to evergreen content that is months, or maybe even more, old.

Evergreen content can share many of the same characteristics as shareable or savable content, but is most commonly created in the following formats:

• Blogs
• Testimonials
• Tutorials
• Checklists
• Educational Resources

4. Use Keywords in your Social Media Content Writing

Including keywords that speak to your brand and services not only increases your chances of appearing in front of the right audiences via search but can mean all the difference in making a good marketing strategy, a great one.

Per SEO Design Chicago, “keywords are the words or phrases that describe what a piece of content is about.” When potential customers are searching for solutions to their pain points, the words and phrases you include with your profile and post content play a major role in determining where your brand appears in search listings.

5. Share Video Content

Social search engines heavily favor and prioritize fresh, short-form video content. Consistently uploading videos to your pages can be huge for boosting your searchability quickly and effectively. In a 2022 survey conducted by Wyzowl, it was uncovered that 86% of video marketers say video has been effective for generating leads and 87% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI.

These wildly significant statistics prove just how advantageous video marketing on social media can be.

Make your audience aware that your business is the prime solution to their pain points when you boost your searchability factor on social media.

Looking to attract even more business? Give Onya a call today to create a strategy that weaves these elements together seamlessly in 2023

Never underestimate your competition.

In marketing, it’s vital to stay competitive, and that means monitoring what others are up to in your market. Competitor monitoring provides you with an opportunity to observe trends, see what works and adjust your strategy to help ensure success for your business. But what is the best approach for analyzing your competition’s marketing campaigns?

Understanding Competitor monitoring

While keeping a close watch on the competition can feel like spying or cheating, it’s an effective way of improving your marketing campaigns. Competitor monitoring allows you to look at the methods your competitors are using to help spark new and exciting ideas for your campaigns. Marketing spending is on the rise, but it’s still important that your business uses its resources wisely.

To monitor your competition effectively, you will need a strategy. Even if your monitoring is light-touch, it’s essential to understand what you’re tracking and why. Monitoring can be a fun process, especially if you have a keen interest in the industry.

Choosing Who to Watch

To get the best results from your competitive monitoring, you need to think about the types of companies you want to monitor. It can be your direct competition, companies that target the same audiences as you, and companies of similar size and marketing budgets to your own. As part of your strategy, keep a record of the businesses you will monitor and renew the list periodically. You can then prioritize which companies to monitor daily or weekly, and others monthly and annually.

What Are You Monitoring?

When businesses analyze the competition, they take an interest in all kinds of things, from their annual accounts down to the suppliers they’re using. But in terms of marketing, there are several areas you’ll want to monitor, including:

Marketing campaigns

Monitoring marketing campaigns helps you see the approaches that others are taking with their work. Conducting this kind of competitor analysis will help you understand which campaigns performed effectively, their reach, and what impact they had on social media. You could also conduct a sentiment analysis. It will help you understand more about how the campaign was received and what people’s feelings towards it were.

Social media analysis

Social media analysis is ideal for up-to-date, real-time monitoring of your competition. By monitoring the content they publish and the responses and the platforms they are using, you can make smarter decisions about your social media activity.

Content analysis

What content is your competition putting out, and how does it compare to your own? From the content on their website to blog content, you can learn a lot about others’ activities to help you strengthen your offering.

Ways of Monitoring Marketing Campaigns

There are several methods you can adopt to monitor marketing campaigns effectively. Some useful ideas for competitive monitoring include:

Signing up for newsletters

By signing up to the newsletters, you can receive updates about new products and promotions as soon as they’re announced. Email marketing remains an effective medium for generating sales, and you could learn from your competition’s newsletters when they land in your inbox.

Using competitor analysis tools

There are tools available that can help you track the progress of your campaigns against others. They can also provide an overview of the various marketing activities of different businesses. Some top competitor analysis tools include Pi Datametrics, SpyFu and QuickSprout. Using these tools can provide you with some easy-to-read statistics to populate your monitoring without manual effort.

Analyzing their social media

Your rivals will be most active on social media. Monitoring their activity is an excellent way for you to see what they’re doing and how they’re being received. While you can look at the quantitative data for social media, you should also look at the qualitative data and see how users are responding. Review the comments and the sentiment related to different posts. It’s also worth inspecting the social media of the audiences you want to attract. Influencers, in particular, can provide some fascinating insight into how different audiences feel about specific brands and products.

Keyword analysis

Using the right keywords significantly boosts search engine optimization (SEO). By conducting keyword analysis, you can figure out which keywords are proving the most effective for your competition and use them for your content. There could also be opportunities for you to identify keywords being used in searches that are being ignored by businesses. You can then use them to edge out your competition.

Competitive monitoring helps your business to stay on top. The data you gather can provide some valuable insights for your marketing campaigns, keeping them innovative and cutting-edge. These insights offer useful audience data, helping you make smarter, more straightforward decisions while saving you money by focusing your energies in the right place.

To help you understand how competitive monitoring can work for your business, contact Onya today. We can provide you with a variety of marketing services to help your business create the right impact.

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