Study the marketing strategy of your dropshipping competitors: how to proceed?

Whether it is to draw up a business plan or to adopt a new marketing strategy, it is necessary to know a little more about the strategy of your competitors. During this market research, it will be necessary to clearly identify your competitors, collect data on them, etc. How do you do this? 

Conducting a competitive analysis in marketing strategy: why is it important?

Spying on the competition in dropshipping will help you a lot. It will allow you to know a little more about the market environment. You will know better the intensity of the competition. Competitive analysis is one of the most important components of market research and strategic organisational analysis. 

You can easily build a map of the players in the target market. It will be more practical to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses. You will then be able to adopt a differentiating positioning and strategy. With the competitive analysis, it will be easier to see if the market is too saturated with too many offers. 

Conducting a marketing strategy analysis of your competitors: what is the procedure to follow?

To spy on competitors, you'll need an effective plan of action. 

• Define objectives and establish a study framework 

To study the competition and their marketing strategy, it will be necessary to engage in competitive analysis. To do this, it is important to clarify the objective. This should be defined according to the size of your business and your sector of activity. Your goal is to gain market share. You may also want to focus on a particular objective, such as identifying market opportunities, checking the viability and sustainability of a project, etc. Once you have defined your objectives, you will need to identify your main competitors.

• Know your competitors and collect data

You will need to determine : 

• Your direct competitors: these are the players who offer the same thing as you. These are the entities that come to mind when you think of competition. Competition is tough when you share the same geographical area.
• Your indirect competitors: these are companies that meet the same demand, but not in the same way. They will need to be watched closely, as they may gain more market share.
• Your potential competitors: these are potential new entrants. 

It is important to prioritise your competitors and not to mix them up. 

• Establish a list of competitors 

By using spy tools, you can easily find information about your competitors. You will have easy access to factual data such as date of establishment, size, turnover, winning products, etc. Once you have found your potential competitors, all you have to do is gather information about them by searching the web. 

Many companies are present on social networks. Use these networks to get as much information as possible. You will be able to see the marketing strategy of the competition.

Determine the points to analyse in the marketing strategy of competitors 

• Site traffic 

When you study your competitors' marketing strategy, find out about their traffic. How much traffic do they get? Where does the traffic come from? What are the main sources? How long do visitors spend on their sites? 

• SEO 

You should monitor the SEO of your competitors. Try to find out more about the keywords they use, their backlinks strategy, etc. You will have good information that can be useful for your website. You will need to see what keywords they are ranking for. Look for more information about their backlinks. Find out where the backlinks are coming from and how you can get them. This is information that will help you improve your search engine rankings. 

• Advertising 

Keep an eye on your competitors' advertising strategies. You can use it as inspiration to improve your own. Study the platforms they use to advertise. Try to analyze and see if they should be using the same strategy. Using the right tools, you'll be able to see which ads have a high conversion rate. See which landing pages convert best. You'll be able to adapt the strategies at your disposal for your own ad marketing strategy.

• Social networks 

Analyse the popularity of your competitors. Keep an eye on your competitors' activities on social networks. You will need to determine which networks have contributed to their popularity. Find out which social media offer more engagement, more shares, etc. There is no need to copy-paste. Just take inspiration from the type of publication that gets a lot of shares and comments. Don't lose sight of their advertising campaigns. 

Conclusion

Whether you are a beginner or an expert in dropshipping, it is important to study the marketing strategy of your competitors. Once you have the essential information in your possession, you can use it for your online shop. In dropshipping, if you spy on your competitors with a tool like Minea, you will be able to find the winning products and offer them on your online shop.