Monitoring your competition’s social media strategy can provide insights into what services and products they are paying to promote, reveal their current marketing priorities, and serve as a rich source of creative inspiration for your future campaigns. It is also enlightening to review their followers’ comments on their posts.
In short: evaluating your competition’s marketing strategy can give important insight into their social media game plan.
Where to start
Begin by reviewing what messages and topics your competition is paying to promote.
Search the name of your competitors’ Facebook pages and Instagram accounts in the Facebook Ads Library.
This resource will show you the approximate number of paid ads the page is running, what Meta-owned platforms they are running the ads on (Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Facebook’s audience network), the ads’ wording, creative material (picture, video, carousel, etc.), and what webpage the ad is sending people to.
You can visit the webpage to see what your competitor has on offer. LinkedIn and Google also have searchable ad libraries displaying messages that advertisers are currently running.
Review their software and social media pixels
Do your competitors have the Meta Pixel installed on their website?
The “Pixel” is a piece of code installed on their webpage which tracks people who visit their website and places them inside an audience on Facebook. A business with a Meta Pixel on its website can run paid ads exclusively to people who have visited it. Social media companies including LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Pinterest all have pixels that advertisers can put on their websites to monitor and build audiences of people for future advertising campaigns.
Additionally, check what software your competition used to build their website. If it is WordPress, are they using an SEO optimization plugin like Yoast SEO? Compare their tools to yours and see if they are better equipped.
Compare their email newsletter content with their social media messages
Sign up to receive your competition’s promotional emails.
Do their emails align with their social media posts, or do they send different messages on different channels? How often does your competition send marketing emails? Does the frequency vary by the time of year, or is it consistent throughout the year? The answers to these questions can reveal a lot about their strategy and inform your own.
Do they send promotional text messages?
If the business asks for a mobile number in the newsletter signup form on their website, provide a phone number to see if you receive promotional text messages. Do those text messages align with their social media posts? Are they long or short? Do they include a link or phone number to call? What do they ask the recipient to do? The answers to those questions can reveal how your competition uses their leads’ phone numbers.
Review who has tagged your competition on social media.
I have a client in the orthodontics industry who sponsors in-person events in their community. The event organizers and the town government’s Instagram account tagged my client to thank them for their continued support and sponsorship of the in-person event. Sometimes those messages are genuine, but there are other possibilities.
Do you see other pages tagging your competition? If so, what are they saying about them? They may have formed a paid sponsorship agreement. This information becomes food for thought for your business. Do you want to do something similar?
Don’t reinvent the wheel!
If you observe a marketing strategy that works well for someone in your industry, consider implementing a similar approach for your business. The key is to make it your own and customize it to fit your unique brand and audience.
Have questions about marketing? Email michael@michaelguberti.com to get your questions answered by Michael during one of the upcoming episodes of his Marketing That Clicks podcast!
