If you understand your audience better, you will be able to engage more meaningfully with it through your marketing and brand promotional efforts. We all know the importance of competitor analysis to SEO strategy development and planning – it helps you to know which techniques are effective with your audience as well as what your target market is currently responsive to.
The same argument can extend to the study of your indirect competition. Your indirect competitors are businesses that target your audience, but selling different products and services from what you offer. For instance, if you’re in the business of selling pet food, you indirect competitors are those selling pet insurance, collars, vet services etc. You share one audience: pet owners, but offer different products.
Importance of indirect competitor analysis
- New ideas and inspiration
By studying your direct competition, you in effect limit yourself given that they offer exactly what you do, which greatly reduces chances of landing new opportunities from your analysis. When you broaden your study to indirect competition, you significantly increase chances of finding gaps in the market, and gaining inspiration to make your products and services better.
- New outreach and link opportunities
Indirect competition targets a different space/framework within your audience, which means that you can gain link opportunities from them much easier than you would direct competition. You can get more ideas that haven’t made it to your direct competition’s purview and create more outreach opportunities. These will significantly contribute to distinguishing you in your niche and creating higher appeal with your audience.
It also contributes to the building of your influencer list. By studying whom your indirect competition is engaging with and sharing about, you can identify relevant influencers with whom you can cultivate relationships.
- New content angles
Having the same audience, the resources that your indirect competitors share will also be beneficial for your target audience to have. By going through their content strategy, you can therefore find new topics to address, questions that their readers have which you can also answer since they will definitely benefit your audience.
It also creates an opportunity for guest blogging about your own products and services in their sites, because you are not in direct competition. You can establish a symbiotic relationship by allowing them to write for your site as well.
