Beating Your Competition with Competitive Analysis

Whatever your products or services are, chances are, there are other businesses offering something similar. To make sure that your business performs better and you maintain an edge over the others, use competitive analysis.

Competitive analysis is a strategy that helps you identify and assess your competition. It involves:

• Studying the market.
• Predicting demand and supply.
• Reformulating business strategies.
• Predicting trends and patterns.
• Recognizing opportunities.
• Identifying threats.
• Anticipating your competition’s next move.
• Redefining business goals.

How do you go about it?

1. Create a list of competitors using both online and offline tools.
2. Establish bases for comparison, selecting business features as criteria to focus on.
3. Choose a framework for competitive analysis such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
4. Analyze competitors based on selected criteria.
5. Identify areas that can be improved.

Image-Related Content Marketing Myths

Images have the potential to boost your content, but there are supposed rules about them that need to be debunked. Here are the most common:

1. Use images to improve any content.

   This needs to be qualified. While images help enhance engagement, retention, and conversion, they only work when they’re used in the right place at the right time.

2. Insert an image after every 250 words.

   This is SEO-based advice that should be heeded with common sense. It doesn’t really do much for marketing except give the reader some breathing space. Followed willy-nilly, it only leads to use of filler images and low-quality graphics.

3. Spend money to use great quality photos.

   It’s mainly a warning against posting overused stock images. Fortunately, there are other ways to source good images than just buying them.

Google to Readjust Search Results Design

Google may be the most influential search engine out there, but it is also in hot water facing various antitrust investigations in every state. Following the negative reaction from different sectors on its most recent design that lent ads almost indistinguishable from organic search results, the tech giant backtracked and announced that it would redesign the redesign of its search results.