One of the biggest gaps I see companies unable to fill is the real-time understanding of what their competition is up to. During my years in digital marketing, I’ll be the first to admit to being so down in the weeds executing on the tactical plan that I didn’t have the wherewithal to notice what the competitive set was working on.
Having learned that lesson, one of the first things we do now is conduct a competitive analysis to see who’s out there, what they are doing well and where the opportunities are to differentiate and stand out.
Competitive analysis is as important for you and your personal brand as it is for the company you work for.
Understanding what other people in your niche are doing, saying and how successful they are is crucial to personal branding success. Here are a few things you can do to figure out who they are, their impact, and what you can do to wrestle attention away from them onto you.
Use LinkedIn to Research Your Industry
LinkedIn should be your first port of call. We use it to look for people with similar roles at similar businesses and see how well they are utilizing the platform. How well a person is using LinkedIn tells you a lot about how serious they are about their personal brand.
- Are they publishing content?
- How active are they on the platform, liking and commenting on other people’s posts and updates?
- How robust is their profile? Have they filled out all the experience fields?
- Do they have a summary and, if so, how does it position them within your industry?
LinkedIn is a goldmine of competitive information to help understand who has what experience in your niche and how well they are engaging with their connections.
Your LinkedIn presence should be a living profile that you update on a weekly (even daily) basis because, in our experience, the number one blocker to anyone having a tip-top personal brand is time.
Make time to understand your competition on LinkedIn and make time to be engaging on a regular basis.
Mine Twitter for Like Minds
Use tools like Followerwonk, an influencer discovery tool like Traackr, or a fantastic content sharing analysis tool like BuzzSumo to figure out who’s influential in your field and study their footprint.
- How many followers do they have?
- What are they sharing?
- What’s their social ratio (how much of what they share is personal versus professional)?
- What’s their reach?
- What content seems to resonate best with their followers?
Are they following as many people as are following them (always a good measure of authenticity in our opinion)?
Twitter is a great way to understand how others in your industry exude their personal brand in real-time. You can pick up tips from power users on what content you should be sharing and, more importantly, how agile and engaging you can be if you want to compete.
Stay Current on Where They Speak
An indicator of influence in any industry is being invited to speak at conferences and events. Scour the speaker pages of conferences to see who’s speaking on subjects close to your area of expertise. Do a search for their name and the conference on Google or Bing to see if any journalist or blogger covered their session and read what was written about them.
Try and understand from their speech topics and extracts what their “angle” is and think of a way to differentiate or complement what they’re focusing on if it’s similar to your expertise. You don’t want to give a conference organizer any reason to reject your speaking pitch, so make sure you know the lay of the land before you pitch a topic.
Remember: Quality Trumps Quantity, Always
While the beauty of digital and social media is the huge swathes of data it gives us, it’s also important to measure quality and not get stuck on quantity. Combining a gut feel for the quality of the digital footprint your competitor may have with the amount of followers, engagement, content produced or shared, is far better than focusing on numbers alone.
Your number one goal by making your personal brand discoverable, shareable and memorable is to instill trust in anyone you engage with or are discovered by.
To quote Stephen R. Covey, author of the fantastic book The Speed of Trust:
“Trust is equal parts character and competence… You can look at any leadership failure, and it’s always a failure of one or the other.”
Being competent enough to know what your competition is doing with their personal brand will help you set your character apart from theirs and limit the possibility of failure.
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