CEO at RightMetric, a marketing research & insights provider that helps marketers look outside their own four walls to be more effective.
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Steve Jobs once famously quoted (or misquoted) Pablo Picasso when he said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” While he was talking about design rather than marketing, the principle holds true for both. In my opinion, marketers who are willing to study the strategies and tactics of competitors, and then make them into something similar but different, are often the most successful marketers in the industry.
Unfortunately, this reality seems to go against conventional wisdom, at least when it comes to competitive research. It’s common advice to not copy from your competition, to not “steal” good ideas from industry leaders. Instead, the thinking is that a company needs to be a trailblazer in order to really disrupt the market and achieve exceptional success.
I couldn’t disagree more.
The truth is, marketers waste an incredible amount of time and money by not researching their audience and/or their competition before executing their strategy. Going back to the art analogy, consider this: If Leonardo da Vinci lived next door to you, wouldn’t you try to pick up some tips for your next painting class? Many marketers are so obsessed with reinventing the wheel (and so infected with the “not invented here” syndrome) that they become blind to the lessons that can be learned—free of charge—from their industry peers.
In a nutshell: It’s a mistake to build your marketing strategy from the ground up when you can obtain valuable building blocks from competitive research at minimal cost to your brand.
An Important Caveat
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Now, when I say that not copying the competition is a big mistake, I’m not saying that you should make an identical copy of what another company is doing. I’m just saying that you should research what works for another business in your sector, and then apply those principles to your own initiatives. For instance, is your competitor finding a high audience engagement rate on a specific social platform? Are they using particular content formats to drive growth? If so, you can apply those learnings to your own marketing mix.
Really, marketing strategies don’t need to be complex or groundbreaking in order to be effective. They just need to work. In other words, they need to deliver meaningful results—more traffic to your website, more leads generated, more sales, a higher customer retention rate and so forth.
How Can You Avoid Making This Mistake?
There’s a simple answer to this question: Don’t be afraid to cherry-pick good ideas from the competition. In the vast majority of cases, there’s really no need to brainstorm winning strategies that have never been tested before. And if you only draw lessons from what’s worked in the past for your brand, then you’re really shortchanging yourself since you likely have the victories and missteps of several brands available for analysis.
Instead, why not start researching your competition today? Look for those best practices, strategies and tactics from your industry (or even an adjacent one) that can take your marketing game to another level. Use marketing intelligence tools like Semrush, Tubular Labs, SparkToro, etc., to better understand the behaviors of your target audience, and how your competitors are reaching those people online.
The Benefits Of Learning From The Competition
You really can gain a ton of benefits by diving into audience and competitive research. These include opportunities in the following areas, to name just a few:
• Enhanced clarity with regard to channel selection and focus: Which marketing channels should you be focusing on? Which ones should you de-prioritize? The “sweet spot” for your business is when your target audience demonstrates a high level of attention on a particular platform, but the competition there is relatively low. Those are the channels you need to emphasize in your marketing plan. Of course, if the opposite is true for a certain channel (audience attention is low and competitive saturation is high), then you’ll know it’s time to allocate your resources elsewhere.
• More targeted content creation: By researching which content themes are currently resonating with your consumer base, and which content types and formats your competitors are using to grow their business, you can glean valuable insights that will inform your own content creation strategy. And as you analyze each social platform that’s relevant to your brand, you’ll likely find “whitespace opportunities,” or content generation gaps, that your competitors haven’t yet exploited. As a result, you can jump on those opportunities and strengthen your brand’s position on the platforms in question.
• Clear identification of key growth drivers: You can also leverage competitive research to uncover key marketing tactics and techniques that contribute to your competitors’ growth. By monitoring the marketing activities and KPIs of other companies across multiple social channels, and then identifying any “outlier” growth spikes that a single company experiences (as opposed to seasonal growth spikes that many companies may experience simultaneously), you can determine whether one of your competitors has found a winning strategy. Then, through meticulous analysis, you can discern what the driving tactic or technique behind their growth is and emulate it in your own marketing plan.
Why Is It Important To Avoid This Mistake?
In summary, by taking inspiration from your competitors, you’ll save precious time, money and resources that can now be spent on executing an effective marketing strategy. On the other hand, ignoring the lessons that can be learned from other businesses in your sector will result in a lot of unnecessary waste.
It’s true, there’s no shortage of “shiny objects” in the marketing world that can distract us from what’s right in front of our eyes. However, if we as marketers have the tools available to help inform our intuition with relevant data, then why not use them? Copying, implementing and even refining good ideas that come from an outside source may not be the most glamorous path to take, but the fact is, it works.
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Author: Charlie Grinnell, Forbes Councils Member
