Ads can be tricky—especially making ones that are effective! There are so many components to making sure an ad is going to speak to your intended audience. Factors like style, copywriting, advertising platform, spend, and much more.
What if we told you that proper competitor research could help guide you in the right direction to make sure those components are combined properly? By doing competitor research, the Ballistic Arts team has found their ad campaigns to be more effective, increase ROI, and exceed the expectations of the amazing companies we support.
After working with hundreds of clients nationwide, we know having a strategy behind your advertising plan is essential! That’s where we use our expertise to dig into important information about our clients’ competitors! If done right, this competitor analysis will lead to ads that will help drive brand awareness, attract new customers, and ultimately increase sales.
If you’re unsure of the connection between competitor research and optimizing ads, let’s lay out all the benefits for your future advertising campaigns. Before you know it, you’ll buy into the idea that competitor research is essential, not just a nice-to-have!
Let the Ballistic Arts team help you with competitor analysis that works
1. Improve Your Understanding of Your Target Audience
Competitor research can give you valuable insights into your target audience! Although your company probably has a lot of knowledge already, analyzing your competitors could give you new, valuable information about your potential customers’ pain points, preferences, and buying habits.
By studying competitors’ ads, you can get a better understanding of the target audience they are focusing on and what is working or not. This information can be used to adjust your own ads to better target your likely similar audiences. For example, if you find that your competitors are targeting a particular age group or geographic location, you can use this information to tailor your ads accordingly, making sure that your ad is continually refined to reach the right people at the right time.
2. Determining the Best Ad Format & Placement
What type of ads formats draw you in? It could be just a static ad visually designed to pop (think bright colours and bold copy). Or it could be a short video ad that conveys all the right points. It could even be just a GIF, or animated graphic.
The type of ad format that is impactful varies, depending on your company’s industry and target audience.
This is also true of where your ad is placed. You’re a B2B company, so based on your industry, you need to use the correct socials—is this Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, or Twitter?
Analyzing your competitors’ ad formats and placement can give you ideas for how to optimize your own ad campaigns. You can experiment on your own, testing different ad formats and placements to see what resonates with your target audience. However, having additional insight from your competitors can often make your life easier!
3. Improving Ad Design or Copy
Competitor research can also give you an idea of the correct language, tone, and messaging to use so that your ads resonate with your desired demographics. You can use these insights to refine your own ad copy and messaging, which will in turn improve engagement and conversion rates.
This is also a time to look at how your competitors are visually designing their ads. Yes, you can consider what is currently working well for them, but you are also able to see gaps and generate ideas about new things that they haven’t tried.
4. Differentiating Yourself From Competitors
Regular competitor research helps you stay informed about the latest industry trends, innovations, and marketing strategies used by your competitors. This information can help your team stay ahead of the competition by allowing you to adopt new marketing strategies and tactics before your competitors do.
This is especially true if you’re planning on using social media advertising as the platforms and strategies surrounding each one continue to change.
Talk to us about steering your competitive analysis in the right direction
5. Optimizing Your Advertising Spend
Return-on-investment (ROI) is always important to our clients, and it should be! We want to make sure that ad spending is being used effectively and to generate real, valuable leads to drive more sales.
If you look at your competitors and their ad strategy, you’ll be more informed about what they’re spending on and whether it’s working. It’s important to use the learned knowledge to improve the ROI of your own campaigns.
Think about how nice it would be to stay under the estimated budget and still exceed all the company goals surrounding lead generation.
Make this a reality—do competitor research!
Example of Competitive Research in Action
If you’re not sold yet, here’s how competitor research was part of the solution for one of our newest clients!
Ballistic Arts recently started working with a client, Ecoraster, where we used social ads to generate better-quality leads. Our team was able to create the most suitable ads for the company because of doing comprehensive competitor research that allowed us to explore the details of Ecoraster’s competitors’ weaknesses to better shape our ad strategy.
After completing research related to competitors, industry, and target audience, the Ballistic Arts team identified a gap in Ecoraster’s previous ads strategy. Although they were using Google Ads, they hadn’t set up anything through Meta—ie. Social advertising. We used competitor research to identify that this strategy would lead to the most success!
We agreed upon a set number of quality leads for Ecoraster per month; instead, we delivered 1300% more than that target in one month (December). It is part of our mission to help B2B companies solve problems like this, and the fact that we delivered almost 13x the amount of ads in 8 months’ time shows that we’re serious about efficiency.
As you can see, conducting competitor research will help your company achieve many things and actively compete against other companies in the same space. However, analyzing competitors effectively and efficiently can be difficult. There are so many different companies to evaluate, sources to read through, and marketing-specific tools to use.
This is why working with a B2B lead generation agency like Ballistic Arts is valuable. Not only do we have the experience, we also have the tools and insights to make sure that any findings from competitor research are applied properly to a successful and creative ad strategy.
