Difficult times offer opportunities to find great new business partners
Firstly a very Happy New Year to you. I feel 2012 will be far better than 2011 no matter what the negative attitude of our press and politicians may be.
In the good times the best people in their industries are always busy. They generally get new business only by recommendation and unless you can connect with them through this route it’s very hard to become one of their clients. The benefit of dealing with a great business partner is huge, but you don’t realise this until you find the real deal.
In difficult times even the best companies often have some spare capacity so it’s an ideal time to approach people you would really like on your side.
The problem many of us have is that once we’ve committed to a supplier we often never have the means to make a comparative performance evaluation to check we’ve made the best decision for our business.
Most of us stay with the same business partners or suppliers because we feel we’re getting a good service, the price is fair, and our relationship is strong. Some stay because it’s just too hard to look for another partner and the one they have is OK.
What if we could run a detailed competitive analysis on the results of our partners work against our top 5 competitors? We could then evaluate their performance and ensure we are getting the best advice and work possible.
In most industries this is very hard to do but NOT in Internet Marketing. Online we can measure success and a competitive analysis of you against your top 5 most irritating competitors can include:
- Web site performance: Accessibility, Marketing, Content, Technology.
- Search: PPC campaign data, The keywords your competitors are using, Pages indexed on their site, Inbound links, Scores for PPC, Top 20 performing pages, Content quality and Links.
- Social score: Blog posts, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, LinkedIn connections, YouTube subscribers and views.
- Ranking scores: for Search, Social impact, and Content
This is a lot of data but when presented in graphs and charts as an executive overview it offers incredible insights and the ability to see you and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
You can drill down into the data to understand fully the underlying reasons for the observations and start to use this to attack your competitors where their weaknesses have been exposed.
What if all this was available now for far less money than you are probably thinking. Take a deeper look and a comprehensive competitor analysis. At worst it shows your internet marketing partners you’re keeping an eye on them, but it may expose the fact you’re not dealing with the best business partner possible.
