Competitive Analysis for Creative Strategists
- Kevin Ringpis
- Dec 7, 2022
- 5 min read
Competitive analysis in the context of creative strategy is when you evaluate the ads of your top competitors to know the ins and outs of how your competition works. This allows you to find possible opportunities where you can outperform those ads.
In the advertising world, those who hold good data and have lots of it, tend to win. But experienced creative strategists know that the process doesn’t stop at collecting and then analyzing consumer information. The creative process culminates with action. And if not founded on a careful analysis of your competition’s advertising, it’s action that lacks intention.
Creative strategists use competitive analysis to leverage data found after deconstructing the ads of competitors. Because the competition’s data isn’t handed out in the open, competitive strategists must use research and ideation skills to uncover more.
What is Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis in the context of creative strategy is when you evaluate the ads of your top competitors to know the ins and outs of how your competition works. This allows you to find possible opportunities where you can outperform those ads.
And this doesn’t mean you have to snatch your competitor’s idea by copying their ads. Instead, a skilled creative strategist breaks down those ads to find “nuggets”—bits and pieces of things they’re doing right, and areas where you think you can do better at.
Writing for HubSpot, Christine White who is a veteran in web strategy provides five benefits of conducting a competitive analysis:
Know what makes your product different from your competitor.
What’s your value proposition?
Identify what your competitor is doing right.
Are you staying relevant? Are you keeping up with industry standards?
See where your competitor is falling short.
What strategies have your competitors not taken advantage of?
Learn what’s missing in your competitor’s product.
What features can you add to your product or service to meet those?
Create a benchmark against which you can measure your growth.
How much is the gap between you and your competition?
By knowing these benefits, not only can you take full advantage of your analysis, but you’re also able to motivate the rest of your creative team to participate. And from these five benefits, you can boil it down to four core objectives when you do the analysis:
To identify gaps in the market
To develop new products and services
To uncover market trends
To market and sell more effectively
Competitive analysis might sound laborious and something that would require a lot of discipline. But when you break it down into distinct steps, you’re able to focus on each task and appreciate each step’s importance.
How to do Basic Competitive Analysis
Dara Denney, who is the Senior Director of Performance Creative at Thesis, approaches competitive analysis by following these five steps:
Look closely at how the brand is representing itself organically.
Dive deep into your competitor’s organic social media channels. Scan their website, and sign up for their email list if you can. When you’re doing this labor-intensive step, Denney says to look for answers to the following questions:
What content and messaging can you borrow? What benefits are commonly represented?
How does the brand respond to comments on its organic channels, compared to how it responds on ads?
What kind of content tends to drive the most engagement?
Make Google searches on customer testimonials.
Think like a customer who is “ready to convert” and perform Google searches on common keywords and phrases like “*brand name*” and “*brand name review*”. Separate bona fide press hits (earned and paid) from review sites to form a picture of how the public perceives the brand’s reputation. Pull out key phrases around benefits that you can start testing in your ads.
Conduct competitor research by using Meta and TikTok Ad Libraries.
Since you don’t have any ad access to your competitors (why would you), looking through the Meta Ad Library and the TikTok Top Ads Library should be on your research repertoire.
In Meta Ad Library, Denney’s tip is to look at how long the ad has been running—the longer the ad has been running in the account, the better the performance it has. And in TikTok’s Top Ads, she suggests to look at conversion-based campaigns and segmenting to the customers’ specific industries.
Sifting through both libraries, try to answer these questions:
What trends and treatments are they using?
Are there any repeated treatments you should test?
What hooks are they using?
Which platforms are they mainly developing content for?
What are the obvious gaps in their creative strategies?
Check keywords associated with your brand on Google Trends.
Aside from studying your competitor, Google Trends can also be leveraged in determining the type of content you should put out. “To close out our external research,” Denney says, “we’ll also check out keywords associated with our client on Google Trends.” To learn more about using this tool to generate content, see How to Use Google Trends to Boost Your Brand Presence.
Document your findings.
Competitor research documentation is where you’ll appreciate the wealth of knowledge you’ve gained. From your data and insights, you can now take the appropriate action or adjust your creative strategy.
Creative Ideas When Analyzing Your Competitor’s Ads
You need not constrain yourself into following a pattern or playbook every time you analyze your competition’s advertising. If creative strategy had only one or two ways in which to do competitive analysis, then the word creative would sound inappropriate. Here are a few ideas of how some creative strategists do their competitive analysis.
Clicking “Info and Ads”
You can still click “Info and Ads” in the left-hand column to gain insights, but this is a more primitive trick in competitive analysis compared to taking full advantage of Meta’s Ad Library.
Keeping a Regular Log
This should probably be incorporated as a step under the entire analysis, but doing this alone can itself be considered as covering the whole process. The American Marketing Association (AMA) suggests to make a log of what you find as you review your competitor’s ads.
Create a table for each competitor. Organize your logs by the ads they’re running, add your observations, and comment what you want to test for your ads. “Keeping a log like this takes time, but you don’t have to have a table for every competitor. And if you set aside even one hour a week to do a review like this, you’ll have all the new ideas you can handle.”
Following Ads of Non-Competitive Advertisers
AMA also suggests to follow ads of a few non-competitive advertisers whose work you admire. “Sometimes, really great ideas can come from outside your niche.” This is especially useful when you have time to spare. When you’re facing deadlines, it’s common to miss out on great ideas that fall outside your brand’s niche.
Using Third-Party Tools
Since you won’t be able to collect performance data through a resource like the Meta Ad Library, you might consider using third-party tools. But expect these to run at a price point though:
Some third-party tools work well for specific niches, so choose wisely.
The Key Takeaway for Creative Strategists
We’ve covered what competitive analysis is, seen how it’s done in a few steps, and thrown a few simple ideas you can try. A crucial point to remember as a creative strategist though, is to understand that competitive analysis is an iterative process. It’s never really over.
And I suppose that’s one of the reasons why it’s easy to become passionate about creative strategy—like in tech, you just never know if tomorrow, something entirely new and exciting will come to life.
A radical creative team might just produce an ad that rewrites the playbook on creative advertising. We’ve seen this with Chiat\Day in 1984, and we’re likely to see more marketing innovation today with all the data that’s out there for the taking. But that’s only if you use the data to actually do something with your ads.
To learn more about how to use your data to improve your ad strategy, reach out to me at kevinringpis@gmail.com.
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