To run a successful online business it is very important to master your marketing and sales skills. Therefore, beside running an easy-to-handle website, it is important to have a competition analysis and buyer persona. Of course, everything is up to you, if you have time and energy to do it. Anyway, most of the online businesses decide to do it since they need these concepts for the business’s growth and a development plan. Don’t forget to take a look at our section 4 from our guide: back-office operations to give you a helping hand about insights on how your online journey should be going.
The reason for combining these two analyses is to better define your online business’s purpose. It’s about enabling the impact of knowing your customers and competitors all together. The connection lies in the following of the reactions of them both. Analyzing your competitor’s email strategy system is a way to identify your appropriate brand voice. It’s unbelievable how much these interactions between these analyses could help better lead your online business.
Also, researching all the demographics as well as psychographics of your potential customers is a way to learn about their buying habits. Buyer personas can truly help you understand your ideal customers and find ways to attract them to your online business. A solid understanding of who your customers include building a brand they’ll love. Knowing your audience is a win-win situation for you. Then you’ll know how to create content that will be specially made for your targeted segment. If you create a detailed buyer persona research, you’ll eventually know where to direct your marketing efforts and easily reach out to your audience.
Another good point for your online business is creating a competition analysis. It is simply a way of understanding who your competitors are. Businesses with whom you share your market. Often, the research about competitors can help you create a clear definition of your brand as well as better differentiate your products and services. Performing this analysis is a good opportunity for you to give you insights to be up to date about the products and services in your industry. It can help you discover some information about how your competition does their marketing, the prices of their offering as well as figuring out what they do to make their branding work.
Creating a buyer persona for your online business
Before we dive in, to create a profile for the perfect customer, we need to know what a buyer persona is. According to Hubspot, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data from your existing customers and market research. Your business’s persona is your marketing segment and that’s why performing one can mean:
- Better customize your content
- Better customize your messaging
- Better product or service development
- Identify appropriate brand voice
- Better marketing efforts
- Better email-strategy system
These are some key points to consider why developing a buyer persona is so important for your online business.
Therefore, the basic things you need to include when creating a buyer persona are:
- Personal characteristics (creating the profile of your buyer-persona, including his name, a photo, his age, and his profession)
- Experience (information about his work experience, where is he currently employed, projects he has worked on)
- Purchasing power (what can your buyer persona afford buying, as well as including the information about his buying habits)
- Lifestyle (what does he want to achieve and what identifies his lifestyle)
- Interests (information about skills he wants to master and what does he in his free time
- Engagement in social networks (what are the social media his mostly uses)
- Professional information (personality type)
As we said, this is the basic information you need to craft a buyer persona. The perfect buyer persona is more detailed and structured and in fact, can give you more insights about what can make your customers mark your brand.
When creating a detailed buyer persona you should include information about:
- What are their goals?
- What are their motivation and inspiration?
- What are their challenges?
- Which websites do they visit?
So, how can you provide all the information you need to create your buyer persona profile?
Well, you can start with your market research process. You can start by reading our article about simple ways to do market research online. This is a way how you can form the answers to your questions. In this case, most of the online businesses are just starting and don’t have lots of data about any existing customers. Also, you can find some people that you can interview. Simply, give them something to stimulate them to give you honest questions. It can be a free consultation call.
Another way is to start digging into the information about your existing customers. Eventually, you can organize it and create an in-depth understanding of the people you’ve already targeted before.
Creating competition analysis for your online business
Competition analysis can be defined as a strategy to identify your major competitors, research their offers, their marketing strategies, and sales. Starting in a certain industry means you have a certain number of competitors to compete with. Researching them is a necessity for your online business in the first place. You need to know everything about them so you can direct your efforts in the right place and at the right moment.
The importance of the competition analysis is looking for the biggest picture. The benefits of creating this analysis for your online business are:
- Set yourself apart
- Better marketing strategy
- Develop new offers
- Stay-up-to date
- Offer better value
However, from my personal experience, I use to make three different types of competition analysis, one that is regular( direct and indirect competitors combined in one), direct competition analysis, and indirect competition analysis.
Certainly, the one that is the most important is the direct competition analysis because it’s the one that has the closest look at the competitors and it’s the most detailed.
The direct competition analysis includes information about:
- Who are your competitors (their business name and their website)
- Their offering types (what are their products or services)
- What is their offering about (detailed description about their offering)
- Their marketing efforts for their offering (how do they attract their audience)
- The time range of their offerings (how long are their offers, for example, if the offer is a course)
- The price for the offer (how can be paid, one time, monthly, yearly)
- Interest by region for their offers (where is their audience from mostly)
- Their traffic station (SEO, LinkedIn, Instagram)
In the same way, the indirect competition analysis is about nailing down some fewer details. They’re also providing similar products or services but they don’t satisfy the same marketing target.
Going even further, I’ve learned that many online businesses are demanding even more specific competition analysis. They need to craft analysis for the different social media platforms. As a consequence, Instagram can be taken as a good example of specific competition analysis. If an online business wants to perform an Instagram direct competition analysis it should provide information about:
- Their competitor’s Instagram account
- Number of followers
- Number of posts
- Weekly posts
- Engagement rate
- Website/ Landing page
- What it’s about
- CTA offer and its details
- Instagram strategy
This is just an example for Instagram, but it can be done for any social platform indeed.
Eventually, when creating this analysis you can use a bunch of tools that can help you perform one. Some of the best tools are:
- Google Trends (search trends feature)
- Google Analytics (measure your advertising ROI)
- Google Keyword Planner ( find the right keywords for your Google Ads)
- Ubersuggest (make your keywords search easier)
- Ahrefs (toolset for backlinks and SEO analytics)
- MozBar ( link’s metrics and SEO analytics)
Carrying out these concepts (Buyer Persona and Competition Analysis) can help you create a better vision for your online business. These are both research analysis, but for different types of information. It’s about competitors or customers. Once you’ve done the competition analysis you can think out which threats and which opportunities exist in your niche. What could you perform better to capitalize on the opportunities and what could you do to avoid the threats ? Online entrepreneurs are bound to learn everything and discover every information about their competitors because their existence depends on it. On the other hand, they need to create a solid buyer persona because they need to use it to create successful marketing and email campaigns.
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Sources:
The Importance Of Competitor Analysis
The Importance of a Buyer Persona
