Reverse Engineering Your Competitor's Marketing Strategy

Unsure about your current growth strategy?

A quick way to learn what potential growth opportunities that are out there is to look at competitors.

The goal is to see what is working for your competitors.

And find ways to do better than them in their strategy.

Important: We don't want to steal. We want to reverse engineer. This means we still have to be original with our marketing. And definitely ethical about our approach.

So today I'm going to show you how to leverage your competitors to accelerate your growth.

In 2 just mins.

Using Similarweb for Competitive Analysis

To start off with, we are going to go to Similarweb.

Similarweb is a data insights company that IPO'd for $1.6Billion in 2021. They're a great example of a successful product-led SaaS company.

Today, we're not going to break down their product growth. You can read this article by Kyle Poyar for that. Instead, we're going to be one of the free users to learn more about our competitors.

1) Pick a competitor to research

Let's look at the project management space and Notion.

Firstly, go to the site and enter the URL of one of your competitors (Free)

Once, we enter the site, we can see the revenue (est.) they make: $25M - $50M.

Interesting insight.

We also see how popular their site is compared to others in the space.

2) See their Traffic & Engagement

Next, we can quickly see they get:

• Total Monthly Visits 156.3M

• Bounce Rate: 31.17%

• Pages per Visit 7.5

• Avg Visit Duration: 7:33 seconds

Seeing how much traffic a competitor gets can quickly give you a benchmark to compare against.

You can also see if their traffic is trending upwards or downwards.

Is yours going in the same direction?

Why not?

3) See Traffic Locations

Notion are most popular in the US, Japan and then Brazil.

So a pretty even spread across countries.

This data shows where these kinds of tools are popular in these regions.

Think about this in the context of your business. You may find a competitor thriving in a particular region.

Is there a reason why you haven't been as successful? Is that a potential market for you?

4) See What Channels They Use

Direct Traffic

Most of their traffic comes from Direct (going direct to the site)- 87%.

This is likely returning visitors and users who want to use their tool daily.

But it also shows us Notion has a strong brand and word of mouth is very strong.

The market you are working in may be brand driven. Are you focused enough on building brand equity in the space?

Referral Traffic

We also see they get a small amount from referrals - people sharing their Notion templates or links to their sites.

Perhaps you could create types of content that are more shareable.

5) See What Search traffic they get

8% of their traffic also comes from search. Branded keywords mainly.

We can also see their approx paid vs organic split:

• Organic: 93.74%

• Paid: 6.26%

This may indicate that investing in SEO may have value. Notion is driving millions of organic visitors to their site.

Looking at the keywords gives an insight into their SEO approach.

We can see that templates are a big reason people search.

Allowing their community to create templates & having people search for them is a great growth driver for them.

You can go deeper on search by looking at tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush (Paid).

6) See What Social Media Platforms they get traffic from

Most of their "Social Media Traffic" traffic comes from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Likely communities and learning videos from Youtube.

Places where people are passionate and engaged.

Communities are a great place to get a targeted set of users and so exploring their groups may be a potential source of future customers.

7) See More Competitors

You can also then find more competitors to go and reserve engineer.

Other places you can find competitors is by using sites such AngelList, Producthunt.

That was quick.

In just minutes, we're able to get tons of insights into competitors that can help us to ask key questions about our growth strategy.

And uncover opportunities we may have missed.

Need help with your growth strategy?

I'm offering free strategy sessions (30 mins) for 5 people.

Just reply "Strategy" to this email.

🛠 Tool of the week

Ahrefs Keyword Generator

This is a great way to do competitive analysis. You can use it to see how much traffic a keyword gets and if it's hard to rank for or not.

It's the free tool from Ahrefs (the paid version is worth it if investing in SEO)

🤓 Resource of the week

Came across this thread this week. It's packed with value about building and growing great products. Plenty of gems in there.

That's all for now.

How I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Cheers,

Theo