Now, you may have been taught that it’s rude to eavesdrop, but when it comes to the ad industry, those niceties don’t apply. In fact, don’t be surprised if your opponents have their own eyes and ears on
your brand.
If you’ve ever wondered how your competitors are always one step ahead — or even if they’re psychic, because they somehow
always seem to know what you’ve been planning — then here’s your answer:
Advert monitoring.
This service helps you to gather insights about
all kinds of competing brands as well as their media and social platforms. Most importantly, it’s there to give you the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of your competitors' ads, which gives you all the information you need to up your advertising game.
With that said, here are three reasons why advertisers should monitor their competitors:
1. Unveil their marketing and ad strategies
One of the greatest things about ad monitoring is that you can see exactly what your competitors are up to, meaning that you get a private glimpse into their strategies. For example, if your brand’s rival recently decided to take to a social media platform that you’re not on, and they placed an ad there, you can see how the ad performs and how the target audience perceives it.
Depending on how your competitor performs on this social platform, you may even create a business account and post ads there going forward — if it did well, that is. If not, then you’ll know where to avoid placing your ads going forward.
2. Generate leads from their traffic
When your competitor creates an ad for one of its products or services and it’s not well-received, you can learn from
their mistakes — and then reap the rewards. And by rewards, we mean you can pick up the audience that may have left their brand.
For example, let’s say your brand and your competitor both supply toothbrushes, and your competitor just released an ad for a new type of toothbrush with hard bristles. However, it made no mention of catering to individuals that require soft or medium bristles. If your brand offers a variety of bristle types, it is the time for
your business to shine!
In this example, you would then advertise your own product that does cater to this need. Perhaps you have a toothbrush with similar features to your competitor and that caters to all kinds of individuals — let the audience know with a new ad! Their loss is
your gain.
3. Get a clear view of consumer insights
It’s easy to scan through your competitors’ website and social media pages to get an idea of who their audience is, but if you
really want to get an in-depth look, you’ll need to enlist the services of an
ad monitoring tool. This tool lets you see
exactly where your rivals are placing their adverts.
How does this give you consumer insights? Well, if your competitor is placing an ad outside your regular geographic location (for instance, outside South Africa), and you see how well the audience in that location is responding, you might consider altering some of your own marketing strategies to attract that particular audience as well.
Additionally, you can also see where there are gaps in your competitor's advertising. If there is a particular geographic location or demographic audience that your competitor is not targeting, why not be the first one to try it? Who knows, you might make a breakthrough and hit gold!
Ad monitoring helps you reap the fruits of your advert’s return on investment and create a strategic marketing plan. Learn more in our blog that explains the Three benefits of ad monitoring.