In the competitive business landscape, no matter how niche a product or service may seem, there is probably another company doing the same thing. If something is working for another company but not for yours, it is worth digging into with a marketing competitive analysis.
A marketing competitive analysis involves researching, evaluating, and comparing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to better inform your strategy and provide insight for your company's future decision-making. This investigation enables you to gain a deeper understanding of your company’s strengths and weaknesses and can clarify them more effectively. In the same vein, analyzing a competitor’s weaknesses allows you to see where they are lacking and helps you avoid making those same mistakes.
While you may try to navigate this on your own, a thorough competitive analysis is best handled by a marketing agency with the tools, experience, and strategic planning to turn research into intentional action. Intent and direction through an analysis will ensure you see results. Cork Tree offers expertise in making sense of complex challenges and positioning businesses to outperform their competitors. We have a dedicated marketing team whose mission is to help your business grow and thrive. Learn more about the benefits of a marketing competitive analysis and how you can get started.
A proper, thorough marketing competitive analysis will allow your business to see a variety of opportunities and benefits, such as identifying market gaps, improving customer targeting, tracking competitor campaigns, and maximizing return on investment (ROI). According to recent research, 90% of Fortune 500 companies already use competitive intelligence to gain an advantage. Below, you will find specific reasons why a marketing competitive analysis will benefit your business.
There are many moving parts in identifying market gaps within a competitive analysis. Evaluating a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses allows you to see what is working and what isn’t, which can be helpful in seeing what is clicking within the industry. Looking into their products, services, and pricing helps you determine what would be competitive and potentially offer a unique value proposition that your industry hasn’t seen. Knowing the competition’s customer feedback helps identify unmet needs and potentially leverage them to your advantage. Understanding these factors allows your business to get a holistic approach to what can be improved and what is working.
Improving customer targeting is essential to attracting potential new business, retaining a loyal customer base, and generating new traffic to your website. Understanding potential customers' needs will help them feel heard, understood, and guided towards solutions. According to recent studies, by providing excellent customer service, 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints.
Tracking competitor campaigns and messaging allows you to get a better sense of your competitor’s digital footprint. Are their campaigns performing well? What is their outreach strategy to customers and clients? These are good questions to ask. Looking into the competitor website analysis and strategy allows you to see their voice and can help you better understand what your brand voice is—and isn’t. Analyzing their social media allows you to see what content works best for them and how it could be improved within your business.
Maximizing ROI is crucial in seeing long-term and consistent growth. By setting a specific goal for outreach and campaigns, you ensure your budget is spent on candidates who are likely to respond and interact, leading to higher conversion rates and better returns on your investment. The more efficient you are, the more of an impact you will make.
In a competitive market, understanding your rivals is just as important as understanding your strengths. This is where a solid competitor analysis framework comes in.
An example of a competitor market analysis would be comparing one brand’s service pricing to another’s. If the price is significantly higher, see what they are offering. Additionally, if the services are comparable, you could leverage the price difference and the quality of service or product you offer.
If a rival company has a dynamic online presence, do research into the SEO trends and keywords they’re using and where their strategy can fit into your business.
Companies will analyze competitors’ website traffic using tools such as SEMrush to get an idea of how much traffic their website is receiving. In doing so, it helps better understand how visible a competitor is online and identifies which channels are driving their growth.
A company can have a terrific product, but if its customer perception is lacking, it opens up an opportunity to leverage it and set the business apart due to superior perception from the clientele.
A competitive analysis will only add value if it is turned into a calculated strategy. If you’re wondering how to do a competitor analysis, know that we take pride in turning raw data from market research into intentional, actionable, and practical marketing plans that drive growth and results. We invite you to connect with us, and we will work together with you to create a strategy that works. Our knowledgeable professionals will conduct a thorough analysis that ensures you stay ten steps ahead of your competition, leaving them in your rearview mirror. If you’re ready to turn intentional strategies into actionable results, book a call with our team to learn about how we can help.
With competitors and crowded markets, our marketing efforts must stand out. Unfortunately, it is too easy to hit delete, swipe away, or click into a different app when we find something boring. This has created a highly competitive market and a push toward producing engaging content. Luckily, video marketing is one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention quickly.
According to research, people remember 95% of a message in a video but only 10% of a written message. This makes video one of the most engaging platforms because audio and video stimulate multiple human senses and emotions. Audiences want something personable and relatable, and videos allow businesses to advertise, tell their story, and show their personality all at once. Discover the benefits of using video marketing in your business strategy and how a video marketing agency can help.
Video marketing is a highly influential and powerful tool since it is so prevalent and easily accessible. The average internet user consumes 17 hours of online videos each week, which is projected to rise. To say that video is unnecessary for your business would be a lie. It not only increases sales and revenue, but it also creates trust and loyalty between your customers and your brand. Discover the top four amazing advantages of video marketing that can improve your business's success.
Strategizing to create conversations within your target audience may seem useless, but according to Invesp, word-of-mouth marketing produces over $6 trillion in annual consumer sales and accounts for 13% of consumer sales.
When your brand reaches your customers and makes an emotional connection, they will talk about it. Let your customers advertise and increase your brand awareness. Make sure to end your video with a call to action to make them want to act and stay connected with your brand.
Why do people find video marketing more appealing? 65% of the population are visual learners, so it is easier for most people to stay engaged and retain information presented in a video format. Since visuals are stored in our long-term memory, people are more influenced to act on what the video sells or promotes.
One of the best ways to increase your brand’s visibility and popularity is by incorporating SEO in your marketing video’s caption. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it strategically picks popular keywords and phrases so your content ranks higher on search engines and is more accessible.
Companies that incorporate video on their websites rank 53% higher on search engine results pages. At Cork Tree Creative, we specialize in all SEO services and have the knowledge and expertise to incorporate SEO writing into your business. Hiring a specialized technical SEO agency like Cork Tree Creative will help boost your web traffic.
When your company uses video marketing, it is easier to reach a specific target audience. We customize every video to fit your business's goals and can incorporate targeted ads and language.
Video builds consumer trust and creates emotional connections so your audience continues to buy from you. According to WordStream, brands that incorporated video into their marketing strategy increased their revenue 49% faster than brands that did not.
Working alongside a video marketing agency can take your business to the next level. At Cork Tree Creative, we showcase our clients’ brands by creating successful marketing videos that connect with their target audience and drive revenue.
Our St. Louis video production team has the experience and creativity to create a video to boost your sales and visibility. Contact us to get started on your new marketing video.
At Cork Tree Creative, we consistently try to keep up with the latest trends in marketing. Learning about new ways of doing our jobs can be intimidating, but adapting and incorporating new methods can also be exciting. AI in marketing is changing how people do things, and we're here to unpack it for you.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a tool that has completely changed the way businesses do things. AI uses machines to solve problems strategically, adapting over time to become more intelligent, just like humans. When you apply this technology to marketing, there are no limits to what you can use it for. From understanding clients' wants and needs to catering to messages to consumers, AI marketing is taking off fast and shows no signs of slowing down. Follow along as we dive deeper into how AI marketing can help your business.
By automating and streamlining marketing processes, AI allows marketing to happen with limited human oversight. The technology enables machines to create products and services for customers, strengthen existing products and services, and overall build greater customer satisfaction.
AI is generally very smart and can build on its previous knowledge, which can assist in knowing what products and services a customer is likely to approve. AI pulls ideas from across the internet for social media content creation and uses those that get the most engagement. For example, the chat generative pre-trained transformer (ChatGPT) function, added on websites, allows people to chat with machines about questions or ideas they want feedback on.
Another AI ability is reviewing what a user engages with and, in turn, giving them targeted advertisements or placing products where they are likely to purchase. You can achieve this by accumulating information over time about what users have interacted with in the past and predicting what they are likely to want in the future. AI functions faster than a human can, saving time (and money) for companies in the long run.
At Cork Tree Creative, we have begun experimenting with AI in our various service areas. For example, we have asked ChatGPT questions about how we can further enhance our SEO marketing. We’ve also explored how AI can help overcome writer’s block and provide synopses on complex topics when drafting web content. Additionally, we have tested the AI chatbot’s ability to troubleshoot lines of coding formulas for websites. By exposing ourselves to what AI is doing right now, we can adapt as an agency and create unique marketing items for our clients.
There are three main types of AI marketing: machine learning AI, big data AI, and analytics AI. AI machines use these concepts to create marketing tactics of differing advancement levels, making it easier for companies to choose which ones they want to implement. Machine Learning AI relies on machines to collect all relevant information and enhance the industry they are focused on. On the other hand, big data and analytics AI are used to show the bigger picture behind the numbers, which in marketing can help identify what is working and what isn’t. Creators developed AI marketing tools and platforms to manage the massive amounts of data being collected and to comprehend the information thoroughly.
To understand how to use AI for marketing, we must first understand what the technology can do by itself. The basis behind AI is using machines to understand information better and faster than humans. The rate at which AI machines have been learning has significantly increased in the past 10 years. This is due, in part, to the integration and reading of the data collected. Using four different learning systems, machines can learn differently than humans, and it’s becoming successful.
Putting all the systems’ information together gives a comprehensive picture of marketing data. If you program the machines to learn about your desired data, a company can gain valuable knowledge about their clients.
Cork Tree has experience with successfully managing our clients’ machine learning AI programs. We’ve utilized targeted digital advertisements, which allow us to advertise their company or product to a group of people with similar attributes. By doing this, we are reaching a population that is most likely going to invest in a service or product because it is relevant to them. This, in turn, gets our clients more business leads and a higher chance of people investing in their company, product, or service.
Data is power, and having a lot of it can be overwhelming. When AI machines learn, they understand the data, whereas humans try to understand knowledge. For example, in marketing, you create an outcome that benefits a particular company or business. To understand and use your data correctly, you must set parameters to ensure you read it correctly. If you ask a machine to collect all data, it will have no value since there is nothing to compare it to. However, when used strategically, big data and analytics AI can harness data and provide legible, insightful information that may not have been uncovered by a human alone.
Once the AI machine collects your data, you must find a way to interpret it. Again, using marketing and platform tools will give you the most comprehensive look into your data. Depending on what you are using AI for, the platform tools will create an easy and effective way to understand what it has gathered. For example, three of the top ways marketing AI is used include finding what people say about a product or business, overall market trends, and what competitors are doing.
You can use AI tools for email drafting, copywriting, digital advertising, influencer marketing, and more. The addition of search engine optimization and search engine marketing tools allows for your content to rank high when searched on Google, Bing, and similar platforms so people can find your business and services easily. AI tools can automate most of these tasks by providing suggestions or writing for your specific topic or agenda.
You may not realize it, but many programs available to the public are programmed by AI. Grammarly, a real-time writing assistant, can be relied upon to ensure that a sentence's grammar, structure, and overall flow are clear and concise. The application uses machine learning AI to understand and adapt to the language used in different industries. Grammarly creators programmed their AI system to learn sentence structure and flow to adapt to customers' needs in many languages.
Zapier is software that assists with automating tasks for businesses. It connects with 5,000 website apps to assist you in using its tools. These tools range from scheduling content to adding filters to ensuring the software is used when certain conditions are met. Additionally, the platform creates if-then scenarios so that tasks are fulfilled without oversight.
Olay’s Skin Advisor is an excellent example of an advanced AI system. This system asks customers to take a picture of their faces and answer a few questions. AI marketing will give customers feedback on what products to buy for their skin. Olay accomplishes this by AI viewing the photo and using its knowledge of data from the past to understand each person’s skin type.
We understand that not all of our clients have the time and resources to understand and implement these strategies for their company, which is where we come in. Our comprehensive marketing services and experience with using platforms similar to Zapier, among other AI marketing tools, allow us to implement an individualized plan for every client and track its ROI.
AI marketing may be the industry that is benefiting the most from the technology. Many marketing firms will use AI to generate advertisement placement, add a ChatGPT function on web pages, and perform other smaller tasks. Automating these tasks frees up employees' time to work on other tasks that require manual attention.
When deciding how to design an AI marketing strategy, you should start by finding which kind of AI you want to use. A marketing agency can help you navigate what you need to succeed. To accomplish this, you need to figure out what your goals are for your business or product. There are stand-alone machine-learning apps and integrated machine-learning apps, which many consider to be more advanced since they are an addition to an existing system of AI. Conversely, stand-alone task automation and integrated task automation apps are less developed since they work independently.
If you aim to take tasks off your plate and allow yourself more room for other tasks, using AI to help you automate your tasks is an option. If you’re looking for more intuitive and problem-solving AI, consider using one of many apps to help you with your writing, brand design, and more.
Artificial intelligence may be a step ahead of humans' ability to understand and apply data. AI marketing enhances the industry, but humans may need to assist it in moderation. AI marketing is indispensable for understanding natural language processing, ever-growing machine learning, and overall computer vision. In the future, intelligence will continue to grow and show significant leaps in predictive analysis, personalized content creation, and automated split testing.
A marketing agency can help you create an AI marketing strategy for your unique business. We can use AI to dive into your goals, needs, and desires, identify which AI marketing strategies will fit best, develop the AI marketing plan, implement and optimize the campaign, and analyze how the campaign is working over time. All these techniques can keep you ahead of the marketing game. At Cork Tree Creative, we can help you find the best uses of AI marketing for your business. Get in touch with our marketing agency to hear how we can help.
In a recent design project for our client, Archford®, our graphic designer, Amanda, utilized AI software as a starting point to create a custom avatar character. She manually photoshopped the original AI output image to better resemble the employee's facial features and structure. In the featured image above, we show the various stages of the AI output and Photoshop process to the final product.
As businesses grow and evolve, having a comprehensive marketing plan in place is essential for success. Whether you're launching a new brand, expanding into new markets, or refining your existing strategies, a well-structured marketing plan ensures your business reaches the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Before crafting a new marketing plan, take a step back and analyze what has worked for your business in the past. Evaluate your key successes and challenges, looking at data-driven insights such as customer engagement, conversion rates, and ROI. Additionally, researching your competitors' strategies can provide valuable perspective—while you don’t want to mimic their approach, identifying industry trends and best practices can be beneficial.
A strong marketing plan starts with clear objectives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate more leads, increase online sales, or establish thought leadership in your industry? Defining measurable goals will help guide your strategy and provide benchmarks for success.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is launching new marketing initiatives without first ensuring consistency across existing platforms. Before adding new tactics to your plan, conduct a thorough audit of your branding, messaging, advertising, public relations, and social media channels. Your brand should be visually and tonally consistent, and all marketing efforts should align with your overall business objectives. For example, press releases should be distributed regularly and optimized with relevant keywords to enhance visibility.
Creative marketing ideas can be game-changers, but they require appropriate budgeting. Determine your annual marketing budget, prioritize the tactics that will deliver the highest return on investment (ROI), and allocate resources accordingly. Identify which tasks can be handled in-house and which might require outsourcing to marketing professionals. Mapping out these details in advance will streamline execution and maximize impact.
Once your marketing plan is in motion, it’s crucial to monitor performance and be flexible in adapting strategies as needed. Regularly review analytics, assess customer feedback, and make data-driven decisions to optimize results. Marketing is an ongoing process, and staying agile ensures your efforts remain effective.
Creating a comprehensive marketing strategy can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone. At Cork Tree Creative, we specialize in developing data-driven marketing plans tailored to your business’s unique needs. Contact us today, and let’s create a strategy that drives results.
Marketing is one of the best ways to ensure your business stands out in the saturated sea of competitor products or services that fight for your ideal customer’s attention. When you hire a full-service marketing agency, you’re recruiting a valuable and dedicated team that can expedite this process. Firms have the ability to streamline your business idea into a personalized, actionable plan that will effectively reach your audience. Also, it will get them to do what you want and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
There are countless ways hiring a marketing agency can benefit a business. When considering ROI, a marketing agency can help you be more:
Since marketing is something every business should incorporate into their budget, you may as well pick the cost-effective option. Marketing agencies help cut overhead costs easily racked up from paying the salaries of full-time marketing teams. Therefore, you will only pay for the services and hours that you need by hiring an agency on a project-by-project basis.
Speed through or completely avoid hassles from the learning curve in every new business venture. If you hire a marketing agency, they’ve already been down similar roads and can inform you of potential roadblocks and ways to avoid them. They make things efficient by guiding you through pain points while simultaneously mapping out solutions in a plan of attack curated to your business goals.
Effective firms have a balanced mix of creative and critically thinking minds that flow well together with one primary goal that unites them, to enhance your business idea. The combined reach of an entire marketing agency’s experiences, tools, specialties, and drive opens up the floor to a wealth of new ideas and results that can’t be easily duplicated.
Don’t need an entire marketing team? No problem. Pick and choose the specialized services you want us to focus on. Don’t know specifically what you need to make your business thrive? No big deal. Reliable agency account managers will listen to your hopes and dreams and bundle them into a customized proposal to fit your wants and needs, with no hidden surprises and unneeded add-ons. Full-service marketing firms should have a team of specialists that can help you with:
Experienced agencies have been marketing for long enough to know the characteristics, desires, and subtle nuances of varying target audiences and how best to reach them. The good firms have a range of different clients in their wheelhouse, so you can have confidence in their ability to seamlessly adapt and blend in with different topics and mediums like industry experts. Agencies can help you identify and reach your target audience with flare in a way that truly resonates with them. Also, they will have the data and research to back it up.
When in doubt, you can always consult a Top Digital Marketing Companies list to better vet your options. Stuck in a dense crowd of loud competitors? Hire a reputable marketing agency to amplify your voice, make a lasting impression, and secure that much-needed customer loyalty. You’ll be glad you did in the long run.
As a business owner or marketing exec, you’ve already created a strategic marketing plan for the New Year. You’ve researched future growth opportunities for your organization and spent countless hours discussing processes, programs and pilgrimages that could have been more successful in 2016. What went wrong? What could have we done differently? Looking to the future, how do we make our product or services better, bigger and more impactful for 2017?
Any marketing consultant will tell you “every successful business has a strategic marketing plan.” I mean, most of you have a business plan that does a pretty good job outlining each division of your company, rationalizing resources, engaging clients and so forth. But, what is your strategic marketing plan, a plan used by management, operations and sales? How are you going to communicate all of those great ideas to your clients? If you want a steady flow of business for your organization, it’s imperative that you create a marketing plan and stick to it.
First, set realistic goals. You can figure out what those realistic goals are by mulling over what you may have done wrong in 2016. Did you set unrealistic expectations at this time last year and they were never met? We tell grade school children to “learn from their mistakes”, and with any successful marketing plan, it’s important to start that planning at the most fundamental of levels. For example, you want to improve your social media marketing. Don’t be overwhelmed by all of the social media platforms like Snapchat and Vine. If you aren’t doing a good job managing and maintaining your Facebook page, work on improving your reach there before you jump onto the next, latest craze. Performing on one platform well is much better than having 6 different accounts that are hardly maintained.
Next, it’s time to face reality: the Internet is here to stay. We are sorry if this is news to you. You see, if you don’t have an online presence and you’re still relying on old school marketing tactics, your customer base (and reach) will continue to shrink. People don’t reach for the phone book anymore to find a plumber, dentist or dog groomer. Not only do consumers look for places and businesses online, they reach for their smartphones and tablets. Your website needs to have proper search terms (so customers can find you) as well as responsive web design. Don’t know what that means? Make sure 2017 is the year you find out.
It’s also important to do good things in your community. Make a difference. Support a cause. Know what else? Share that with your followers, your customers, and the community in which you work and live. Sharing doesn’t mean you are “tooting your horn”. Instead, it is another way of adding credentials to your organization and it shows that you do indeed care about the world around you. It also gives you an opportunity to help the cause you support and spread the word about their initiative.
Being successful is not always about new business and making money…it’s also about the employees you hire and inspiring others to contribute to causes that they believe in, whether it’s inside the office walls or beyond. Press releases about what you’re doing, media alerts and event sponsorships are other strategic marketing practices that can optimize your success in the year ahead.
Cork Tree Creative, Inc. is fortunate to have a variety of clients with diverse marketing needs. Some clients come to us to plan an event, others ask us to write blogs for them. We’ve designed more websites than we can count and have successfully managed social media programs for businesses large and small. Many think of us as an extension of their staff, and that’s the way we like it. If you have questions about how you can make 2017 the best year yet, we’d love to help. Give us a call at 618-656-7333. Oh and don’t worry; we’ll help you do it and do it well indeed!
Marketing can be overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be when you have a reliable partner to help. Receive a free assessment to see how your marketing efforts stack up and how you can take your brand to the next level.
© 2024 Cork Tree Creative. All Rights Reserved. Design & Development by Cork Tree Creative.