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4 Steps to Conduct Successful Competitive Research

IH Digital Marketing Team
competitive research

Competitive research refers to the collection and review of information about business rivals. The process involves identifying your competitors, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and discovering the business opportunities to surpass them.

Whatever business you run, it is almost certain that there are other companies out there offering a similar product or service like yours. You need to keep tabs on them to gain an edge over your competitors.

Understanding what your competitors are doing will help you position yourself, and your product or service, within the market.

Although performing a competitor’s analysis isn’t rocket science, it does go beyond the simple Google searches. Let’s delve into how to accomplish a competitor analysis in a systematic way to yield the most insights. 

How to conduct competitive research?

1. Identify your competitors 

First, you’ll need to figure out who are your competitors so you can compare the data accurately. There are two types of competitor to identify: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors are targeting the same audience as you. They sell the same product or service and trying to solve the same problem. 

Indirect competitors sell a product or service that is slightly different from yours to the same audience, or they may sell a similar product or service to a different audience.

Being able to identify these two type of competitors is important for two reasons. It enables you to see the growth opportunities for your business, and it could highlight a threat to your business of which you are unaware. 

Your ultimate goal at this stage would be to cast a wide net for businesses who are competing with you and have a thorough understanding of the competitive landscape.

2. Analyze competitors’ online presence

Once you have identified your main competitors, you would have to know how they are attracting the customers through their website, blogs and their social media presence.

You can start by exploring your competitor’s digital footprint by looking into:

  • Website content and blog articles
  • Newsletters
  • Social media posts 
  • Online communities

Once you’ve located their content, you can take notice on are they doing anything that you are not doing. If your competitors are consistently publishing four times a week compared to your one article per week. That could be a part of the reason why you have lower website traffic than your competitors.

This insight helps you to get a grasp of where you should be focusing your attention and resources.

3. Examine competitors’ marketing strategy

Looking at your competitor’s positioning strategy will give you a good sense of your market’s demands and expectations.

This is where you start gathering ideas for your marketing plan, by discovering what the customers buying from them, how they differentiate their products or services from the competition and what benefits do they emphasize in their marketing copy.

These insights help you to determine who your competitors are communicating with and how they position themselves within the market, which pays dividends when you work on how you will position yourself in the market.

The best way to collect information about your competitors is by pretending to be their customers. Subscribe to their blogs so you can know what types of content they are publishing.

You can also consider shopping in their stores so you can know what makes their product or service unique and what the brand experience is from a customer perspective.

4. Check online reviews 

After gaining insights into how they position themselves in the market, it’s the time to start evaluating the strength and weakness of their strategies. Try to read through the reviews of your competitors, there could be an opportunity for you to stand out. 

Reviews tell what’s good and what’s bad about them. If they are selling a product similar to yours, this is a good way to find out if the audience is interested. Not only can you learn best practices from competitors, but you can also identify key areas where you can improve your product or service.

Want to outpace your competitors? Work with IH Digital.

After performing a competitive analysis, you now have a better idea and understanding of what your competitors are doing. It is time to think critically about how you can use this information to devise a strategy that can improve your business results.

Research does not always have to be a complicated and time-consuming process when you have IH Digital that does the work for you.

We offer APAC market research for businesses in the region by combining all market research, audience research and competitor research in one package – Market Readiness Research (MRR).

IH Digital | Asia-Focused Digital Marketing Agency

IH Digital is an Asia-focused digital marketing agency providing Consultancy, Strategy, Content, Social Media, Media Buy, Web Development, SEM & SEO.

Interested to work with us and conduct competitive research? Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our Market Research team soon. 

Account Management

Lead Conversion: How to Turn Leads into Customers

IH Digital Marketing Team
Featured Image Template

Lead conversion is the process of turning a lead into your customer. Generating leads is not the whole, it is a fundamental point in a buyer’s journey, where a potential customer gets into your sales pipeline, gaining interest on your product or service and finally becoming a delighted customer.

Effective Lead Conversion Process

1. Acquire Lead

To acquire lead, you have to create a solid opt-in campaign by creating appealing contents to attract your target audience. Getting audience insights is important here as it sets a direction for your content planning.

Content marketing, is a popular lead generating strategies, it’s all about connecting problems with solutions for your customers. A company can find out their pain points and needs through audience research. Once you determined what solutions you can provide them, it’s time to figure out what lead magnets you’re going to use.

Lead magnets are some kind of content or promotion that’s used to entice people to opt into your call to action (CTA), by offering them something of value in exchange.  In content marketing, that most often means one of them – an e-book, long-form article, template or a signup form for an event or webinar.

When a content piece is ready, promote them on various platforms, such as your website, blog, or social media page, or anywhere else you interact with your audience. It can substantially increases your chances of getting more prospects onto your contact list.

2. Nurture Existing Lead

Getting leads into your pipeline is not the end. The company have to nurture leads to uncover solutions that may further address their pain points.

Lead nurturing refers to the process of keeping contact with your potential customers throughout the buyer’s journey. The goal is to guide them through different stages of your sales funnel and eventually convert them into your customers. This means you need to continue sharing them the relevant assistance, information, content, and offers push them further along the funnel.

This is critical because 80% of non-nurtured leads will never result in a sale, but nurtured leads are 50% more sales-ready. In other words, nurturing your leads will improve the odds of converting them.

3. Score Each Lead

While this process is going on, marketers work with sales teams to rank prospects against a scale that denotes the perceived value each lead represents to the organization, we call this step as lead scoring.

It means to ascertain a lead’s current level of interest in your business and use that information to drive sharper, more relevant engagement. The criteria for the ranking is completely up to you, it can be based on actions they’ve taken, information they’ve provided, their level of engagement with your brand, or any actions that would signify this person is interested in your product.

The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL), which is only a step away from turning them into a customer.

4. Pass Along Lead to Sales

This is where sales activities like trials, demos, sales calls, on-site visits take place to persuade leads to purchase your product. When they’re ready to buy, leads turn into customers.

Convert leads into new customers

The process of lead conversion is actually very easy, but, it will take some time to understand your audience and to create lead generating contents and other details until you start getting the qualified leads you want.

If you’d rather not mess with this yourself — let us help.

IH Digital | Asia-Focused Digital Marketing Agency

IH Digital is an Asia-focused digital marketing agency providing Consultancy, Strategy, Content, Social Media, Media Buy, Web Development, SEM & SEO.

Want to drive qualified leads and generate revenue for your business? Contact us today for a consultation soon.

Account Management

The Importance of Lead Generation

IH Digital Marketing Team
Featured Image Template

Lead Generation: Generate more potential customers 

Lead generation is the process of turning a prospect into a potential customer for your business. It is basically creating the interest of a person in your product or service in exchange for their contact details.  

Getting leads is just the first step of the sales process. You should then be nurturing these leads with constant engagement or communication to lead them through the sales funnel to increase conversion rate at the end. 

Why is B2B Lead Generation important? 

Business expansion is associated with finding new customers to generate more sales. In that sense, your first thing to do is to gain qualified leads that you can convert into customers. Lead generation brings in leads by turning a prospect into a potential customer, a potential customer can ultimately become your customers if you play your cards right.  

A well-built lead generation program allows you to quickly determine the customer is at which stage of the sales funnel and what content you should provide to forward them to the next stage. If you are able to determine the quality of leads immediately, you can save your team from wasting time pushing irrelevant content. 

Through a lead generation form, you can easily filter and allocate your leads to different systems. Once you identify the highest quality leads, you can direct them to the right conversion process to shorten the sales cycle. 

New leads set the stage to build a rapport with potential customers by constantly sharing valuable content either through email or social media platforms. By showing them your professionalism in a particular field, they will eventually develop trust on you. Subsequently, it improves conversion rates once trust is established between both parties.   

Lead Generation trends for 2020 

1. Email marketing

Email marketing remains as the keystone of B2B lead generation. According to Chief Marketer’s 2020 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey, email has been the top channel to generate B2B leads with the highest return on investment (ROI).  

According to HubSpot, 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters, they send 3-5 emails to their customers per week. By looking at how 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email, email newsletters has become one of most effective way to nurture leads with the increasing engagement rate on email in 2019. 

 2. Video marketing 

The trend of video marketing has skyrocketed in last year. It has become an important lead generation strategy with its great potential to increase reach, engagement, and traffic.  

According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey, 87% of video marketers said that video has increased traffic to their website. In 2019, we can see the webinars, demos, live streams and short informational videos on websites and social media are sweeping the Internet. And 83% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads. 

The fact of the matter is, the majority of consumers prefer video content to learn about a product or service and they spent average of 16 hours watching online video per week. For this reason, you’re much more likely to attract, impress and generate leads through videos that tap into human psychology. 

3. SEO-focused content marketing  

In an attempt to search for products and services, people are becoming increasingly dependent on Google, and SEO has evolved as an exceptional strategy for lead generation.  

Content is a crucial for SEO factor. By incorporating SEO strategies in your content, it helps to optimize your website visibility and rankings, consequently, to drive qualify leads. Content Marketing Institute‘s most recent survey revealed that 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a lead generation tactic.  

SEO-focused content marketing will be helpful for generating B2B leads if the content you provided is relevant and valuable for visitors. Therefore, to create contents that fuel leads, it is important for content marketer to identify and address the search intent of his audience. 

Generate leads to expand your business

The process of lead generation is actually very easy, but it will take some time to create lead generating contents, email copy, and other details until you start getting the qualified leads you want. 

If you’d rather not mess with this yourself – let us help. 

IH Digital | Asia-Focused Digital Marketing Agency

IH Digital is an Asia-focused digital marketing agency providing Consultancy, Strategy, Content, Social Media, Media Buy, Web Development, SEM & SEO.

Want to drive qualified leads and generate revenue for your business? Contact us today for a consultation soon. 

Account ManagementSocial Media Marketing

Augustinus Bader SG Launches FB & IG Page

IH Digital Marketing Team
augustinus bader sg launch social media page facebook instagram

Augustinus Bader has landed in the Singapore market this August with the launch of social media accounts and their official e-commerce store for Singapore.

The award-winning skincare brand has kicked off its official Facebook and Instagram account for Singapore. Fans from the city-state can now interact with the brand on social media, as well as get updated on the latest product launches and promotions.

the cream that works augustinus bader now in singapore
Photo source; Augustinus Bader Singapore

Singaporeans also get to enjoy free shipping on all deliveries within the island.

Augustinus Bader – a revolutionary beauty brand

Augustinus Bader is a beauty brand developed by Professor Augustinus Bader – a German biomedical scientist. The Trigger Factor Complex or TFC8® is Professor Bader’s revolutionary patented skincare technology that powers its bestselling face creams: The Cream and The Rich Cream.

professor augustinus bader founder tcf8
Photo source: Augustinus Bader Singapore

This luxuriously hydrating formula helps to activate and orchestrate the body’s innate renewal processes to repair and regenerate your skin, giving you smooth, radiant, and healthy skin.

premium anti aging face and body creams by augustinus bader singapore
Photo source: Augustinus Bader Singapore
 
The Cream acts as a daytime hydrator to leave your skin feeling refreshed and soothed in humid climates.
 

On the other hand, The Rich Cream offers the ultimate protective shield against dry climates in the night time. The simultaneous use of these two products can activate the skin’s natural processes of rejuvenation to dramatically improve the complexion’s appearance.

Apart from face creams, Augustinus Bader also offers a body cream that was highly commended by international celebrity Victoria Beckham. The Body Cream is a multiple award-winner that intensely hydrates and renews, while visibly improving skin tone and texture. The Body Cream also provides you with the perfect head-to-toe hydrating experience.

For more information about Augustinus Bader, visit their official online store at https://www.augustinusbader.com.sg/.

Be sure to follow them on Facebook (Augustinus Bader SG) and Instagram (@augustinusbadersg) as well so as not to miss good deals.

Engage with your customers through social media

With the rise of similar products in the market, how close you are with your audiences is an important factor to help you stand out among competitors. If you are interested to build a strong presence on social media, IH Digital is the right agency to help you achieve your goals. As a 360 social media agency in Asia, we can provide you with full social media marketing services you need for your business’ growth.

About IH Digital

IH Digital is a B2B agency in Asia that provides social media marketing services, including account setup, page management, and content marketing on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more!

Interested to work with us and boost your brand’s social media marketing strategy? Contact us today for a consultation soon.

Account ManagementAnalyticsB2B

Gain Customer Insights Through Social Listening

IH Digital Marketing Team
Gain Customer Insights Through Social Listening

Insights like social listening are crucial to a successful marketing strategy. Researching and understanding your market, audiences, and the sentiment behind your brand, are all essential efforts to achieve an optimal business strategy. And the best way to collect these insights is through social listening. It’s not simply monitoring the discussions and mentions of your product and brand, but it’s also understanding the customers’ response and feelings towards your brand.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening, also known as social media listening, is part of the market research to analyse conversations on social media channels. Its primary goal is to gain consumer insights and observe trends and general sentiment about your brand, products, competitors or industry. It also helps you understand why, where, and how these conversations are happening, as well as what people think—not just when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand.

Rather than doing all the guesswork about what your customers want or think, you can know exactly what they want. With social listening, you can devise future campaigns, create a killer content strategy, and even surpass your competitors. By using social listening to direct your business strategy, your company will surely save both time and money.

ih digital - asia 360 digital marketing agency in singapore

Why your business needs Social Media Listening?

1.    You can keep track of your brand’s performance

One of the greatest benefits of social media listening is that you are able to identify and analyse customer comments, complaints, and sentiments around your brand in real time. You’ll uncover insights about the positive or negative feelings people associate with your brand, and the specific features that they concern about.

Understanding the public perception of your brand is an essential starting point to take your strategy to the next level. If you are getting positive sentiment, find out the reasons behind it as those information can guide your marketing strategies. If sentiment is negative, look for the problems and make changes right away.

2.      You can discover new opportunities

Social listening helps you to perceive the upcoming industry trends. By knowing the popular hashtags or emerging topics within your industry, you can get a better sense of where your market is moving to. This information can help you to reposition your brand’s product, content, and general messaging and become a trendy discussion point.

When people are complaining about a competitor’s product or customer service, you can grab the opportunity to step in and ask them to explain what shortcomings they found. If you engage with them, they will give you meaningful feedbacks or ideas which help to find your sweet spot.

If you can modify your products to address the concerns people are talking about, you can satisfy more of your customers and hopefully, outpace your competitors.

3.      You can increase customer acquisition by optimising content

Simply being on social is not enough. Content is equally important to drive engagement and conversion, so you want to get it right. Social listening helps you to discover what topics and hashtags your audiences are interested in. Through it, you will then know exactly what you need to talk about or what type of content to deliver in order to reach as many people as possible.

Social media holds many opportunities for broadening your reach to prospects. Rather than just capturing inactive followers, you convert them into your customers. After all, your followers aren’t simply your loyal customers sticking to your brand; they’re also people who enjoy your content or willing to share ideas with you.

More importantly, it is much easier to convert your active followers into leads and, eventually, customers – compared to random strangers, hoping they can magically turn into loyal customers.

Enhance your market research or strategy with social listening

If you’ve been struggling to keep abreast of the industry trends, it’s high time you listen to your customers on social media. Get to know them better to create a winning and up-to-date strategy with social listening.

At IH Digital, we use Digimind – a global social media monitoring and marketing intelligence platform that provides comprehensive enterprise tools and resources for social listening, social analytics, and competitive intelligence.  

IH Digital is a B2B marketing agency in Asia that provides full marketing services, including market research, social listening and more that works across the region. 

We offer APAC market research for Asia businesses using the 3-Step Market Research Method. We combined all essential marketing research steps in one package known as the Market Readiness Research (MRR), aimed to help you understand your target market  from competitors to audience.

Interested to work with us and conduct Asia market research? Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our Market Research team soon. 

Account ManagementNew Client Announcement

Bayer Crop Science Thailand – New IH Digital Client

IH Digital Marketing Team
Bayer Crop Science Thailand – New IH Digital ClientPhoto source: Bayer Thai

IH Digital is proud to announce that Bayer Crop Science Thailand is now our client for digital marketing services.

— View our digital marketing services

From July, the IH Digital Thailand team will aid Bayer Thailand in online marketing with 360° digital marketing services. The services include account management, social strategies, LINE and Facebook channel management, content creation, media buy, and performance reporting.

Bayer Crop Science LINE Official Account

IH Digital will be managing two Bayer Line Official Accounts – @bayerthairice and @bayerthaifv. Additionally, these pages will provide insightful news, tips, and the latest product promotions.

bayer thai rice line oa
Photo source: IH Digital Thailand
bayer thai fruits and vegetables line oa
Photo source: IH Digital Thailand

Bayer Crop Science Facebook Page

Besides LINE, the digital marketing agency will also facilitate the brand’s Facebook page – Bayer CS Thailand.

bayer thai facebook page
Photo source: IH Digital Thailand

About Bayer Crop Science Thailand

As a group, Bayer is a global enterprise specialising in life science fields such as health care and nutrition. Initially, the Group began with an aim to design products and services to support people’s endeavours to overcome challenges caused by the growing and aging population.

The Bayer Group established its Thailand arm – Bayer Thai Co. Ltd. – in 1962. Generally, all the Group’s major businesses are represented in Thailand, such as Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Health, and Crop Science.

Located in 3 Thailand locations, Bayer Thailand offers products like prescription drugs, seeds, crop protection, non-agricultural pest control, and more companion ad farm animal products under Animal Health.

This article was first published on IH Digital Thailand (EN).

Featured image from Bayer Thai website

More Thailand digital marketing content

IH Digital is a 360° digital marketing agency in Asia that provides full services, including social media, China and Korea digital marketing, e-commerce, SEO, SEM, LINE marketing, influencer marketing and more! Interested to work with us and boost your brand’s marketing strategy? Contact us today at https://www.ihdigital.com/contact-us/ for a consultation soon.