Competition is something desirable, no matter the industry in which you activate in. However, you’d want to use your competitors as lessons and means to grow to become better than them.
For most, the question is “how to do this” without wasting too many resources. But are you really wasting yourself or gaining a wider perspective on what path your business needs to follow?
Conducting a LinkedIn competitor analysis helps you take the pulse of the entire niche on this social media platform, learning how they managed to thrive in the digital marketing world.
Ready to find out everything you need to know about competitive analysis on LinkedIn? We’ll take a look at the “how” and the “what”, and everything in between.
How to research your LinkedIn competitors?
- Establish the purpose of your research
- Gather data
- Look at competitors’ content
- Analyze their interactions with customers and prospectives
- Analyze their demographics
- See what hashtags they use
1. What is a competitive analysis?
When thinking about the mind-bending term “competitive analysis”, the first thought that comes to mind is “this must be hard since it sounds so complex”.
Luckily, a LinkedIn competitor analysis is not as difficult as it may seem.
Competitors are all those who sale similar products and services like you or offer solutions to the problems your customers encounter.
A competitive analysis is a means through which you look at your competitors and understand their strategy, campaigns, products, strengths and weaknesses compared to your own.
To keep your success in check and make sure your brand is on the right path, you should consider running a competitive analysis on LinkedIn every quarter and every year.
These insights will help you develop a better marketing strategy for your brand and better understand the requirements of your clients.
2. How to conduct a LinkedIn competitive analysis
Now that we have broadly defined what a competitive analysis on LinkedIn means, we need to follow a step-by-step guide on how to conduct this type of competitors’ research.
By performing a LinkedIn competitor analysis, you manage to understand the market better, getting a grip of all the changes that may occur due to updates.
Wondering how can you build a complete LinkedIn marketing strategy for your business?
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Establish the purpose of your research
First things first, you need to give your analysis a purpose to establish exactly what insights you want to retrieve at the end of your research.
After you find out who your competitors are, you should consider writting down the reasons why you need a competitive analysis on LinkedIn and what are your expectations.
Maybe you want to see what patterns your rivals follow when posting content or maybe you want to debunk their marketing strategy based on their behavior.
You should also overlook the way they interact with their clients and community online to learn some new tactics.
A LinkedIn competitor analysis also helps you be aware of the latest trends in your industry. You’d surely want to get one step ahead of your competition. This will help you with the “how”.
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Gather data
To obtain infos about your competitor’s followers, their new campaign, posting time and more metrics, you could use a LinkedIn analytics tool like Socialinsider that offers you plenty of data.
Via this third-party tool, you can get useful insights, mostly analytics data, about your post evolution, key metrics, engagement evolution and many more.
All you have to do is to equip yourself with lots of patience to analyze the data. The tool will do the rest for you. At the end of the day, you will be able to comprise a report by using all these insights.
If you decide that you are going to do this without a LinkedIn analytics tool, pick up a pen and paper. You will need them, even if you have your excel at hand.
First, you need to collect all the data from your competitors’ LinkedIn page. If they have a high number of followers, it means they are very popular and they have already built brand recognition across the platform.
Then check how many of their followers actually interact with their content. Now is the point for you to calculate the engagement rate.
Engagement Rate = (Reactions + Comments) / Followers * 100
Next, pay attention to how your competitors respond and interact with their followers.
Use all the data to develop a report that you will manually complete, using the insights you’ve discovered.
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Look at competitors’ content
Once you’ve established who are your LinkedIn competitors, you need to prepare for thorough research. To get an idea about their types of posts, you should access their LinkedIn page and scroll through their posts.
Pay attention to the hours they post, the way they formulate their content, the type of content they use the most. This data could inspire you to alter your brand’s strategy.
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Analyze their interactions with customers and prospectives
Besides looking at everything regarding content and metrics, you should analyze the way your competitors interact with their prospectives and customers.
The way your rivals are interacting with their followers says a lot about their brand.
Try to learn from their mistakes and initiatives. Pay attention to the tone of voice and how fast they manage to answer customers’ queries.
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Analyze their demographics
You can also look at LinkedIn demographics, but you will have to do this on your own, by looking at their followers’ profile to try to develop a buyer persona.
This way, it is possible to discover that they may be targeting a different age group than yours.
Paying attention to details will certainly help you understand how their strategy works on LinkedIn.
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See what hashtags they use
Another key aspect you should look at is related to hashtags. The hashtags they use for their content says a lot about the kind of users they manage to attract.
Via those hashtags that work as keywords, a lot of LinkedIn users get to their content and, if they like it, they even interact with it.
Maybe you should explore the way hashtags work on LinkedIn too and learn how to efficiently use them for a constant evolution.
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Look at your competitors’ ads performance
By milking all the possible features of LinkedIn to develop a competitive analysis, you reach the ad section. Now is the time to go to the ads section and access paid campaigns.
When you look at your rivals’ paid content, you find out what your focus should be. Targeting your audience through your ads, based on their interests, will bring you a higher engagement rate.
Try to see whether their paid posts reach more people than organic content. Depending on your conclusion, you may have some changes to make to your LinkedIn strategy.
3. Why is a LinkedIn competitor analysis so important
Even if at first you might not have been convinced that you really need to perform a competitive analysis on LinkedIn, hopefully by this point you understand that is imperative.
If you are asking why, we are here to provide you with a few reasons. Linkedin competitor analysis helps you evolve by learning more about the latest trends and what are the notable differences between you and what your rivals do.
Through this type of analysis, you will find out what practices give the best results: yours or your competitors’.
Here is a list of reasons why you should consider conducting a LinkedIn competitive analysis.
- You manage to keep up with the latest trends and practices in your industry.
2. You can use competitors’ weaknesses to your advantage and “steal” their clients if you have better solutions.
3. You can connect with your rivals’ followers and pitch your products and services to them, for a special price.
4. You can improve your existing products and services based on the defects underlined by your competitors’ followers.
5. You can combine competitive analysis with social listening to find out more insights from users’ online conversations.
4. The benefits of competitor analysis on LinkedIn
Developing a competitive analysis on LinkedIn can bring a lot of advantages to your marketing strategy, with new insights that could be implemented to obtain better results.
Let’s take a look at some of the advantages you can enjoy after a thorough analysis of your LinkedIn competitors.
- Learn from competitors
Even if they may make mistakes or have success stories to tell, pay attention to the things that are different from your marketing strategy.
Take a look at the types of content they use and how users are engaging with it. You should also check how they interact with their audience and learn from them.
Make sure your content strategy has a stronger baseline than your competitors to have greater chances to attract more leads and increase brand awareness.
- Get more insights about your industry
Taking a look at what your competitors do helps you get the broader picture about your niche and industry, understanding how fast and how much things changed.
Keeping up with the latest trends and updates in your industry might feel like a burden, but this process is definitely the spark that lights up the fire of success.
The sooner you learn what’s new, the faster you can implement the changes in your strategy and make a profit.
You need to make sure that you also pay attention to the audience’s reactions at all the changes you implement. This will help you understand whether they can keep up with your pace.
Marketing is not a space where you should try your best to look like your competitors or be as good as they are.
Even if you work on the same thing, your purpose should be to become better than them.
Otherwise, you won’t stand out. Perform a periodic research about your industry and keep an eye on how other brands smoothly introduce new trends.
Study the reaction of the users to newness and reform your content and business strategy.
If you find some patterns in your competitors’ strategies, it means that you’ve just discovered the recipe for success.
- Discover new trends
A LinkedIn competitive analysis is not just about implementing the newest trends that everyone uses in your marketing strategy, but also about discovering and starting new trends.
You should explore new opportunities to create trends in your niche. Testing at least a new idea will help you find out what is your audience’s response.
This will help you learn more about the latest hashtags used in your market and seasonal content ideas that could change your community’s perspective about your brand.
When people see how up to date your brand is, they will be sure that your services and products follow the latest trends.
- Establish KPI benchmarks
Analyze your competitors KPIs by taking a look at the values of the most important metrics.
This way, you will learn how much you’ll have to work to keep up with them and even surpass their success.
Looking at numbers might offer you insights about how you should improve your strategy, finding new opportunities to not only get work done, but get work done right.
The first things you should check are their audience, number of followers and engagement and compare the numbers to yours.
5. Best LinkedIn analytics tools
- Socialinsider
Socialinsider is one of the best social media analytics tools that also offers LinkedIn analytics, helping you develop a competitive analysis.
You can use this tool to evaluate your brand’s metrics while also tracking your performance on LinkedIn so far. For this tool, the starting price is $99.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an already famous social media analytics tool which also includes LinkedIn analytics. It also has a scheduling service that comes in handy for their users.
This tool also provides features for ad campaigns and social media messages’ managing. The first plan for using Hootsuite starts at $49/ month.
- Social Pilot
SocialPilot is yet another LinkedIn analytics tool which also offers features like scheduling and publishing.
This app helps you develop a brand new marketing strategy based on what your competitors are doing.
The starting price for SocialPilot is $170/month, but you have several other plans accustomed depending on your needs.
- Klipfolio
If you are trying to find an app to help you develop a competitive analysis on LinkedIn, you should try this one.
Klipfolio is a cross-forward analytics tool which also includes data for LinkedIn. The app firstly analyzes your LinkedIn metrics to help you understand what priorities to set.
The advantage is that you can compare your progress month by month, if you need to see your evolution. The starting price for this tool is $99/ month.
- Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a LinkedIn analytics tool meant to make your competitive analysis a little easier to develop. This tool offers you insights based on social listening and social monitoring.
To find out the starting plan for Talkwalker, you need to fill in a form to get custom pricing, depending on your needs.
- Inlytics
Inlytics is another analytics tool for LinkedIn that offers you recommendations on profile improving and performance tracking.
Inlytics offers accustomed plans for their clients. That is why you need to fill in a form and tell them about your needs and expectations.
- Databox
In case you are in search of a tool that could help you perform a competitive analysis on LinkedIn, you’ve come to the right place.
Databox is a great LinkedIn analytics tool that could help you with lots of data arranged in customizable dashboards. The app allows you to connect up to three data sources for free.
If you want to analyze more competitors, you will need to pay for the service. The paid plans for Databox start at $72/month.
- Agorapulse
If you are in search of a tool that could help you with your competitive analysis on LinkedIn, AgoraPulse can come in handy.
This app offers you data on how your competitors are handling their marketing campaigns.
When you start to compare their results with yours, you will be able to adapt your strategy based on the research.
For this tool, the starting price is $79/ month.
- Iconosquare
Iconosquare is yet another LinkedIn analytics tool which can offer you a lot of useful data to develop an analysis about your competitors’ performance while comparing it with yours.
The pricing for this app starts at $49/ month.
- Emplifi.io
Emplifi is another social media analytics tool that you should try, which also features LinkedIn analytics.
This app comes with a lot of useful insights that can help you build your competitive analysis after analyzing your rivals’ LinkedIn performance. For this LinkedIn analytics tool, the starting price is $200 per month.
Final thoughts
A LinkedIn competitive analysis will have you winning not only a lot of experience with this social media platform, but also winning at the marketing game.
Learning what your competitors are doing and how they are handling their business is an opportunity for you to develop better content, better marketing strategies and better products to be one step ahead of them.
Hopefully this article on competitive analysis on LinkedIn is helpful enough for you to determine you to become better than the rest of the brands in your industry.
In case you have any questions, remember that I am only a few clicks away. I’d be curious to find out what you think about this topic.
