How competitor ads can help improve your marketing efforts
By analysing your competitors, you can learn from their experiences and avoid mistakes. This approach is particularly relevant for social networks, where you can study the audience’s characteristics and assess their sentiments. Competitor ads can also provide helpful information for your promotional strategy.
Studying Facebook and Instagram ads from companies in the same niche has some benefits for businesses:
- It helps you stay on trend. Changes in competitors’ offerings tell you which products are most in demand with consumers.
- User sentiment monitoring. This allows companies to adapt their product to the changing demands of their target audience.
- Marketing strategy adjustment. Studying competitor ads allows one to create a different approach to attract consumers.
Observing competitors is a great way to learn from others’ mistakes. This helps companies avoid failure and remain successful.
How to conduct an analysis
There are several ways to gather information. One free option is to manually search for ads. However, several services offer better approaches.
Facebook provides ad data without restrictions. At the same time, the information is publicly available. You can use your competitor’s business page and the ‘Ads Library’ tab to search for it. For your convenience, you can use various filters.
Another option is the Facebook Ads Library. This function’s advantage is that it displays campaigns from Instagram. You can search by keyword or company.
You can also analyse the target audience. To do this, you need to create a consumer account and use it to subscribe to a competitor’s page.
To get a general picture, you can use hashtag searches. These alone will not allow you to see adverts, but they will show you publications on a particular topic. Hashtags are more informative to analyse on Instagram than on Facebook.
Google search also shows competitors’ ads. All you have to do is enter the company name and the desired social network. Examples of adverts will appear in the rendition. To get the most relevant information, it is better to enter the competitor’s name as it appears on the social network.
In addition to manual searches, companies can use specialised paid services. The most popular ones are BigSpy and AdEspresso. The former works with Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which opens up more opportunities to learn more about your competitors. With AdEspresso, you can also create your ad campaigns.
Each of the above methods will help you improve your promotional approaches based on other companies’ experiences. Monitoring your competitor’s advertising will also give you an idea of the market situation and consumer sentiment.
