Why You Should Spy Your Competitors

For me, online marketing is like playing a computer game, you need to know not only your position but also your competitor’s position. I am not suggesting doing James Bond lever spying, it is just to know how they market their services and products online. 

Why You Should Spy Your Competitors

Who is your competitor?

For me, your competitor is a person or a company that is marketing products to the same audience as you. Remember, I did not say the same product or services, I said the same audience, in my experience demographic, buys certain types of products, the idea is to figure out how the demographics respond to different types of ads and content.

Why You Should Spy Your Competitors

Seeing how your competitors are marketing themselves across social media, the web, and even in search engines can give you great insights as to how they’re positioning themselves.

What they’re saying to their audiences, and who that audience is. It can also be a great starting point for one-upping their efforts and carving out your own piece of the pie.

How to do it:

  1. Follow them on social 
    Create dummy accounts (or use your own personal account) and follow competitors on social media. Sign up for their newsletters and blogs. Make note of the kind of content they’re sharing, how often, and what gets the most engagement.
  2. Google them
    Search for competitor names and common industry keywords on Google. What keywords are they using in their copy? Which competitors show up for specific keywords? And what do their landing pages look like? Also, be sure to keep an eye out for remarketing ads that follow you around the internet after.
  3. Use SEMrush and Ahrefs to find out which keywords your competitors are bidding on—and which ones they aren’t. This can help you reach the coveted top position in Google (even if it is an ad). 
  4. Interact with their content. This may sound wild but you need to build some kind of relationship with your competitors, you need to interact with their content, comment on their social media, Youtube or blogs, you need to know everything they’re up to, especially if they have a larger audience than you.

Final wolds

That is it, now you know why you spy on your competitors. Spying on your competitors will give you a slight edge when it comes to marketing.

Also remember that if your competitors have a large audience than you, most of the time they will not have time to answer all questions on their platform, here is where you can go on and help your audience, and this audience will start to follow you.

Words That Make Others Feel Inferior

Whether you’re talking to someone personally, whether in person, over email, in a letter, or an audience in a blog post, article, or book, there are some words that you might be using that may make members of your audience feel inferior.

On a personal level, this is a bad thing because if you don’t notice that you use these words you may be using them all the time, which can be harmful in personal relationships.

In written content meant for a larger audience, using words that make the audience feel inferior may shrink your audience.

No one wants to be talked down to and if you are making your audience feel inferior they may find someone who doesn’t.

This article will talk about words that we use that make other people feel inferior, as well as why not to use them and some potential alternatives.

“Obviously”

There are a few reasons not to use the word “obviously” toward your reading or listening audience. The first of which is that something that is obvious to you may not be obvious to your audience.

Calling new information “obvious” to an audience that didn’t know it can make them feel inferior. On the other hand, if something is obvious to you and to your audience and you still preface it with “obviously” and say it anyway, it can come off as condescending.

The second reason not to use the word “obvious” when presenting information is that if the information is so obvious you probably needn’t bother including it.

“Clearly”

This word is often used similarly to obviously but where “obviously” is followed by facts, “clearly” is usually followed by opinion.

Using “clearly” to introduce an opinion or an observation suggests that from the information provided there can be no other alternative, and this may make your audience feel inferior in a number of ways.

The first of which is that if your audience had not yet come to their own conclusion, they may feel that they are slower than the average reader or at least slower than the writer or speaker and that they must take the writer or speaker’s word for it.

The other way that using “clearly” to introduce opinions or theories is that, again, the use of the word “clearly” implies that there is no other alternative conclusion from the given information and if your audience had come upon a different conclusion, using the word “clearly” implies that they are wrong.

You may be thinking that using the word “clearly” to present theories or opinions in your writing may be a good way to present your theory or opinion as to the only valid option.

Indeed, some forms of communication aim to get the audience on your side and some people do use words like “clearly” to imply that their conclusion is the only one available.

In addition to being an irresponsible method of argument, however, this is only likely to alienate members of your audience with their own ideas and win over members of your audience who already agreed with you.

Age signifiers

This one is usually for people who are writing and assume the age of their audience. Actual age signifiers (implying that your readers are of a certain age by calling them “boys and girls” &c.) are most common in content targeted at youths.

When we address youths as youths, however, we are often, deliberately or otherwise, laying out a power-dynamic that places us (the writers) as the gatekeepers of information and the audience as receivers who only get the content that we feel is appropriate for them to see.

This also alienates older readers who may be interested in the content but who may feel silly if they determine that they are reading content intended solely for children.

Age is a big deal to us, so one of the ways in which we self-restrict readership is by using it to establish context for an event, usually by referring to our own life experiences.

This is done when writers, or even speakers, set something up with “you were probably at work when Princess Diana died,” or “You were probably at school when the World Trade Center was hit.” This kind of language helps to establish context for your assumed or target audience, but it completely alienates members of any other age group.

(Hopefully) we seldom deliberately use language to make others feel inferior. Words and sentence structures that make others feel less important, however, can creep into our reading and writing where it can alienate readers and lose audience members.

Hopefully, this article helped you to think a little more about how your word or phrase choices can impact some members of your audience and why you should avoid them.