4 Marketing Secrets Revealed That Your Competitor’s Are Perfecting

Are you looking level-up your marketing game? If you’ve been wondering what the pros are capable of doing, the answer could be in your competitor’s marketing secrets. Here are four pro tips to uncover what they know and apply it to your own marketing.

Not all of us are born marketers, and when I was first starting out, I certainly wasn’t. For a few years, I tried various marketing tactics without any real guidance until eventually learning through research and trial-and-error which ones were effective.

Along the way, I discovered the secrets to uncovering the competition’s marketing tactics. Which has been a huge help in identifying their successful strategies, content creation, website plugins, ads and more. Free marketing ideas for the taking my friends!

I wish I knew these secrets sooner! So that’s why I’m sharing them with you today.

First off, have you checked out your competition? Don’t be shy about this! Everyone does it, and if you don’t, you should be! It’s an important part of doing a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Analysis (more on this another day!).

But isn’t this copying the competition? No.

Let me be clear. We should NEVER copy another company’s logos, branding, or copy-don’t go there! It’s not worth the risk. 

We are simply having a look at what kind of ads your competition is running, what platform they use for their e-commerce and newsletter, what lead magnet plugins they use, how much content they have on their website, and what keywords perform well for them.

Now, the tactics they are using do not necessarily mean they are successful. Companies will switch marketing tactics if something isn’t working. But if you do find that several company’s are say, using Mailchimp, for their newsletter this may signal to you to investigate Mailchimp’s services.

Here are five pro tips to help you reveal your competitor’s marketing secrets:

1. Source Code: Newsletter, Ecommerce, Plugins & Website Theme

There’s a lot you can glean by viewing the HTML and CSS source code behind web content. This skill is a great way to start building your knowledge base on what works in the marketplace, and help you decide if a similar plugin, theme,newsletter platform or ecommerce may be right for you.

Say you like the look of a website – you can go to the source code and see what theme it is. Or perhaps you would like to know what ecommerce platform they use.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand how to read this code, you are just looking for the names of brands, plugins or website themes in the code.

Steps to View Source Code

1. Visit the domain you would like to look at
2. Right click on the screen and select “Show Page Source” on Safari or “Inspect” in Chrome. Alternatively, you can right click on the specific element on the webpage (such as a newsletter subscribe box) and click “Inspect Element”
3. Scroll through the code OR use the find function (COMMAND + F for Mac or CONTROL + F for PC)

Here are some terms you can look for:

Ecommerce: Shopify, Woocommerce

Newsletter: Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit

Plugins: Yoast, All In One SEO, PushEngage, RafflePress, Pretty Links Pro

2. Digital Ads

Looking to generate some creativity for your next marketing campaign? A great way is to see what kind of ads your competitors are running. This will give you a better idea of how to aim YOUR ads so they’re more effective in reaching your target audience.

Here are ways you can view Facebook ads, Google ads, and Digital Display Ads:

Meta (Facebook) Ads

Did you know Meta (Facebook) has an ads library where you can view all the ads that are been published? You can filter by country and ad category such as (1) issues, elections or politics, (2) housing, (3) employment, (4) credit, or (5) all ads. Most people will filter for the country they are targeting and ALL ADS. You can then search by keyword or advertiser by typing in the search bar below.

Steps to View Meta Facebook Ads

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
2. Select the country
3. Select the ads category
4. Type the keyword OR advertisers name in the search bar

Alternatively, you can visit a company’s facebook page and visit the section labelled “Page Transparency” –> See all –> Ads from this Page –> Go to Ad Library

Google Ads

Seeing what Google Ads your competitors are running may seem as easy as typing their name into the search engine. However, this can be unreliable for a few reasons. They may have configured their ad to target specific regions, only run during certain times of the day, or they may have exhausted their budget for the day.

Steps to View Google Ads

1. Go to google.com
2. Type a keyword, brand or company name in the search bar
3. Look for ads at the very top or bottom of the page that interest you
4. Click on the small down arrow to the right of the URL to open “My Ad Center

5. Click on “See more ads” in the section labelled “About this advertiser”

6. Scroll through the ads and be inspired! Here is an example below that shows what ads Semrush is running on Facebook and Instagram.

Digital Display Ads

There are digital marketing agencies that handle advertising across multiple channels. A great way to get an insight into what’s working in the market is to go to https://moat.com/advertiser

Type a keyword, brand or company name in the search bar and it will display all the ads that have been served by this advertiser. This can be a helpful way to brainstorm creative ideas for your next marketing campaign or get inspiration for different types of ads or placements that worked well in the market.

Steps To View Digital Display Ads

1. Go to https://moat.com/advertiser
2. Type a keyword, brand or company name into the search bar.
3. Scroll to browse the various ads

Marketing secrets are hidden in plain site when you check what ads your competitors or favourite brands are running. Have a look and see if any of their strategies would be worth trying out!

3. Discover Their Special Offers (& How Much Blog Content They Have)

Checking out the sitemap of a website is easy, FREE, and it can provide a wealth of information. 

You’ll be able to see how many posts and pages are written. And before we dive into that, know that posts are blog posts and pages are where you display content such as your home page and about us page.

Scroll through and view the names of these posts and pages, along with the dates they were last modified. Sometimes you can find trends for how often they are modifying posts and old posts they don’t find value in updating.

Have a look through their pages. Sometimes you can find landing pages you wouldn’t otherwise find by navigating their website. You may stumble upon special offers like discounts or freebies to sign up for their newsletter. 

How do you find a sitemap? It’s easy!

1. Simply type in their domain name into the search bar followed by one of these 3:

/sitemap

/sitemap.xml

/sitemap_index.xml

You’ll have to try each one to see what works.

2. Select /post-sitemap.xml to view blog posts or /page-sitemap.xml to view web pages.

3. In the list, click the url’s that interest you to discover strategies!

In the above image, you’ll see a sitemap for blog posts containing 11 urls. What’s interesting is these blog posts are not found in the website navigation even though they appear to contain valuable information. Why would anyone do this? Don’t you want people to find and read these posts?

The reason being is that Mike’s primary goal is to sell his course (and if you’ve already found his website it is leading you to make a purchase). It would be backtracking in the sales funnel to then send you to these posts.

However, these posts are still bringing in traffic through SEO, so it’s important for Mike to keep them updated in his sitemap. He could also use them as a link he sends to his newsletter subscribers or sends traffic from ads.

Above are all the pages on Mike’s website. You’ll notice classic pages that most sites have including contact us, email list, refund policy and more. You can even have a look at special pages he has set up for Facebook offers and more.

What if I can’t find the sitemap?

Sitemaps can be blocked by their owners so if it’s not coming up they might have decided not to share it with anyone but Google.

We hope this helps explain how to use a sitemap to gain insight into a website’s content and offers. Give it a try and follow the above steps to view and explore their posts, pages, special offers and more. Keep reading for more marketing secrets!

4.    Keyword Research Tools

Another way to monitor your competitor’s online presence is through keyword research. Using a tool like SEMrush, you can enter the domain of your competitor and get an overview of their organic search visibility. This will give you insights into the keywords they are ranking for in organic search as well as where their website ranks in comparison to yours.

Here are a few tools you can use for keyword research:

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Moz Pro
• Google Ads Keyword Planner
• KeySearch

In the above image, you can see that Neil Patel ranks number 1 in the SERP’s for keywords like “ubbersuggest”, “uber suggest”, “Neil Patel backlink checker”, and more.

These tools will not only help you analyze your competitors’ keyword rankings, but they can also provide you with the opportunity to discover new keywords and topics that they are targeting which could open up potential opportunities for your business.  

Bonus Tip

Here’s another little tip for you! Your competitors are spending a good amount of time crafting the perfect headline for their blog posts. Follow our 5 Steps to Write More Compelling Headlines to increase your click-through-rate!

Conclusion

We hope you’ve learned some valuable pointers to monitor your competitor’s online presence (and discover their marketing secrets!). With these methods, you can discover content, offers and keywords that will help you stand out in the online landscape. Now give them a try and let us know what your favourite methods are!