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B2B Competitive Analysis – An Overview

Even if you’ve never done a formal competitive analysis, you probably have at least taken a look at the competition by strolling past their booth at a trade show or picking up their brochures. How important is competitive analysis to your b2b website and what tools are available to get a view of the competitive landscape online?

Where to start? The best way to start is just to take a look at your competitor’s website. What types of content do they have on the site? Do they have a blog, a board, videos, podcasts, case studies, etc.? How often does it look like they update the site? Take a look at the design and layout of the site. Is it is pleasing to the eye? Is it easy to find everything?

Don’t know who your competitors are? A simple google search for keywords in your industry (that you would use to describe your own business) can give you a good list of competitors. Also, take a look at google local for geographically close competitors. Even if you do know your major competitors, taking a look at a couple of searches every few months can keep new ones from sneaking up on you.

Now what? Obviously you should look at your competitor’s products and services to know what they are offering. As far as their website design and content, these will give you an idea of the type of customer support they are giving. Websites with more content (useful content), that is updated frequently, are typically more customer-centric. Customers are more likely to visit their website to solve problems and keep up with what’s new. The more times a customer visits a website, the more likely they are to become repeat customers. In order to become the destination for information within your industry, you will need to invest some time and effort into useful information for your customers and potential customers.

Next we’ll take a look at a couple of tools to use in your competitive analysis.

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Measuring Effectiveness of B2B eNewsletters – B2B eNewsletter Statistics

B2B enewsletters are a great way to promote your company and website, by periodically sending valuable information to your customers and potential customers. Valuable information will help you provide good customer support and keep your products and brand top-of-mind. There are two important parts to measuring the effectiveness of your B2B enewsletters: who your audience is, and what they’re reading and looking at within your enewsletter.

Audience

Hopefully you’re only sending your enewsletter to people who have requested that information be sent to them (current customers are usually safe). This is termed opt-in. Whether they have or not, you need to make sure there is always a link in your enewsletter for people to unsubscribe or you may be accused of sending out spam email (which can have legal repercussions). If you require your audience to confirm their request to be added to your email list, that is termed double opt-in. How much of your audience falls into these two categories is especially important if you have outside sponsorships or advertisers so they know that your readers really want to get your message. This is also important if you’re looking for an outside enewsletter to advertise in.

Interaction

Now that you have your enewsletter written and sent, how many people are actually looking at it? What are people reading and how do I tell if it is sending any traffic to my website? There are three basic stats to be aware of: number sent (or released), number of opens, and number of clicks. Number of sent/released will show you how many people the enewsletter is going out to (sometimes referred to as the circulation). Number of opens is typically measured by putting a small invisible image within the enewsletter (this is often done automatically by the enewsletter vendor), which triggers a count to a server. This should only be used for a general idea of how many times the enewsletter has been read, because this count is not triggered if a person’s email is not downloading images (either because they have it set to do it, or for some programs the reader has to click a button to request the images). If a reader does have images turned on, this can also be triggered if they happen to click on the email while going through their inbox. Number of clicks is where all the action is. The reader actually had to click on a link (and your vendor should be able to tell you what they clicked on). For links to your site a good web analytics program should be able to track these coming in from your enewsletter.

Next we’ll dive into more detail about the content you should consider for your enewsletters.

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B2B Website Usability – Does It Work? Update

It’s now been 2.5 months since the redesign of our flagship publication website. In B2B Website Usability – Does It Work? I reported:

The average weekly visits have increased 34%, average weekly page views have increased 23% and average weekly visitors have increased 36%.

Traffic has been continuing to grow every week since the launch. The publication staff posts a new issue every week, plus web-only content in blogs, video and web-exclusive articles. Since launch there has been a 80% increase in weekly visits, 40% increase in weekly page views, and 90% increase in weekly visitors. The numbers for monthly stats are very similar: 75% increase in visits, 45% increase in page views, and 85% increase in visitors. The publication is continuing to promote their new online content, and we’ve started running Google AdSense ads to promote specific parts of the site.

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