How to Monitor Your Competitors to Increase Conversions - Insurance Finances

In 2015 Shareaholic publishes statistics about the state of social media in the market that day. According to the website, social media has become the number one source of referral traffic on the web, surpassing email campaigns and direct advertising. Overall, it was driving 31.24% of the overall traffic on its own.

In 2017, a controversial and heated year in online news and discussion, Search has surpassed social networks . But the social dimension is on the rise again and it is clear that the importance of narrowing the focus to social campaigns cannot be overstated.

The Big Problem with Social Referral Traffic

With the stats above, let's not try to hide the elephant in the room: Social media traffic doesn't convert as well, and for two obvious reasons:

1. Intent !!! This is the biggest one. Social media users aren't there to buy: They're browsing photos or talking to friends. Your offer distracts them rather than giving them what they want. Unlike search traffic where users are there to find what you're looking for, social media traffic doesn't match user expectations


2. Attention span. Somewhat related to #1, social media traffic is mostly lurking. They're in a hurry, vaguely interested in you, always ready to go back to whatever they're doing. It's hard to prompt them to pause and start paying attention.

Difficult doesn't mean impossible. With the right tools and tactics, you can put that traffic to good use.

This article outlines one particular tactic to learn how to convert your social media traffic: tracking your competitors.

1. How to Identify and Monitor Your Competitors

When entering the niche, you can know Main competitor good. A Google search of your target keywords will give you even more ideas. When searching, take notes. Getting organized from the start will save you a lot of time later on.

SproutSocial has neat spreadsheet template to help you align your competitors.

Keeping a spreadsheet makes it more scalable: as your team expands, you'll be able to transfer your data to new team members easily. You can extend the spreadsheet beyond social media and also keep competitors in mind with creative CTAs or link acquisition methods. The more integrated your spreadsheets, the better because no marketing channel is an island. Today, everything from link building to conversion optimization can help or destroy your bottom line.

When adding more accounts to your spreadsheet, add the names of your competitors to your social media monitoring tool. Awario is a branded surveillance solution that you might find useful here as it makes monitoring very well -organized:

• You can organize mentions into alerts while keeping the “big picture” view of your dashboard


• You can choose your data sources and keep them all (including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit, news/blogs and web)


• You can add mentions to “favorites” (this is my favorite feature because it keeps my team organized) to keep track of what matters most.

Once you have your spreadsheet and set up the -up dashboard, you can proceed to dig into the data:

2. Follow your bigger competitors and build your social media editorial calendar around them

Tactics: Research your competitors' navigational queries and build your social ads based on your findings.

That giant brand is dominating the majority of the market share? That's probably not someone you should be looking to take down. Their customers aren't as likely to be looking for a smaller alternative, and anyway, the company has enough money, reputation, and influence to shut you down.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention. What your giant competitors can do for you is provide data, a LOT of it.

While using your own data may not be as easy (if you're just starting out, there's not much to analyze), your larger, older competitors are on the lookout. and discuss every minute.

Use your biggest competitor's name as your keyword: Research the context, question, and sentiment around it. Find angles you can use for your own marketing:

See my posts on Keyword research here where i describe how i use Serpstat to research my navigation and niche queries (those that contain your or your competitors' brand names). First, copy-paste your competitors' brand names and export the list:

Now take this list and order it Serpstat's clustering feature :

Grouping your competitors' navigational queries gives you an outline of topics to build your social media ads around. Do you want to know what your competitors' customers want most? See what they're searching for on Google.

This type of research is the perfect first step to building social media strategy . All you need to do now is start addressing your competitors' customer struggles and questions on your social media channels and you'll get their attention!

3. Track Your Competitor's Dissatisfied Customers and Help!

Tactic: Track your competitors' unhappy customers and steal them by helping them (and using them to improve your website and products!)

Here's one of the most underused, but most effective (from experience) tactics: Don't just follow your own brand and your own customers. Including your competitors' customers!

Twitter is the perfect vehicle for this tactic for two reasons:

• It's open, public, and searchable


• It aids in finding negative sentiments

If you don't know about the following tip, try the following search:

• Keep space between brand name and


• Use “” if the brand name consists of more than one word


• Add -from: @yourcompetitor to filter out your own competitor's tweets:

Now enter this search into your Twitter engagement platform and encourage your team to interact with each of them. No need to actually go ahead and offer your business as an alternative. Do not sell too! Be helpful instead, and you'll get much better results.

I use Tweetdeck for this because it allows me to set up desktop alerts, so I'm on the spot, much faster than the competition. Timing is everything!

Who knows—you might even find some tweets to use for your testimonials or social media campaigns. How do you look? Gillette is noted for their brand (Disclaimer: Use this particular tactic and do it at your own risk!)

4. Identify your competitors' most successful tactics on Facebook

Tactic: Investigate your competitors' Facebook business and see what works best for them.

Last but not least: use your competitors' social media marketing successfully for your own inspiration. There's nothing wrong with using other people's successful strategies—that's what power advances.

An easy tool to track your competitors facebook tactics and analyze them is Buzzsumo's Facebook Analytics Tool . This tool will help you identify your competitors' hottest Facebook updates. You can use these to build your own page engagement and then use remarketing to get more out of your Facebook ads.

Enter your competitor's Facebook username, wait for the generator to update, and then experiment with different sorting and filtering options:

1. You can sort by overall engagement to see the most successful updates at the top


2. You can filter by content type to see your competitors' videos, giveaways, images, links, questions, etc.


3. Filter by date for successful, recent updates

Now, use these ideas to brainstorm your own updates and include them in your own social media editorial calendar. These are just a few examples. I am sure that using these ideas you can come up with many other ideas.

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