Have you ever felt that your competitors always come up with better posts and are ahead of you no matter what Instagram content you publish? Have you noticed an increase in their social media followers? Are you wondering what the secret is to their influencer marketing strategy? An Instagram competitor analysis will get you closer to solving the mystery.
Advertising by influencers and the popularity of social media aren’t slowing down. Influencer marketing is steadily becoming an integrated part of several brands’ marketing strategies. It’s, therefore, crucial to map out your rival businesses’ marketing approaches and know how they leverage influencers.
In this article, we’ll answer your questions about what data to measure when you research your competitors. Besides, we’ll also let you know how you can discover their influencers and best practices. Let’s jump right in!
What Is Competitor Analysis?
Most businesses are familiar with their strongest competitors, the products or services they offer, and their prices. Our poll revealed that 56.66% of the surveyed businesses and agencies analyze 1-4 of major competitors.
Several companies even monitor the search engine rankings and social media posts of other industry players. This data gives you a vague idea of what changes should be made to your influencer marketing strategy. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Examining other companies in your niche goes beyond just looking at their posts and products.
Through competitor research, you can learn more about their goals and their best practices. On the one hand, this enables you to stay ahead of your competition. On the other hand, it keeps you up to date with current trends. Considering this, it’s surprising that only 50.56% of brands and 55.7% of agencies analyze rival businesses’ Instagram accounts before launching an influencer marketing campaign.
If you want to work with influencers as part of your digital marketing strategy, you must be aware of which creators and what content will reach your target audience. Analyzing your competitors’ past influencer marketing campaigns is a great way to determine what works for you.
Why Should You Research Your Competition?
As with any other business, you want to increase conversions, get more subscribers, or reach as many consumers as possible. The key to achieving these goals is constantly monitoring your brand’s performance and intervening when things don’t work as planned. Even so, you should pay attention to your competitors. By regularly auditing them, you’ll never miss a trick and learn valuable data on:
What influencers they’re working with now or have worked with in the past;
The number of paid and sponsored posts their influencers published;
What campaigns they ran previously;
Their influencers’ posting frequency;
Which social media channels they leveraged;
How creators’ content performed;
What their top-performing posts were.
Based on this data, you can roughly figure out their influencer marketing strategy. You may identify influencers that most closely match their brand and thus your industry. You can find out which posts have generated the highest engagement. You can discover the hashtags, CTAs, and captions influencers used, as well as whether they linked to another brand's page. Considering the posts, you can deduce the campaign types, the target markets, and your competitors’ primary marketing goals.
During this process, you will uncover the strengths and weaknesses of other players in the industry. You’ll work out whether their campaign failed somewhere or if they missed out on something. Furthermore, you will learn what sets your business apart from other businesses in your niche and how you can outperform them.
How to Analyze Your Instagram Competitors?
Instagram has evolved from a simple photo-sharing platform into one of the most powerful advertising and sales platforms for businesses today. Having more than 1 billion active users provides you with the opportunity to reach a lot of people at once or target specific groups based on interests and hobbies. What makes Instagram especially attractive from a marketing and sales perspective is that 90% of Instagram users follow at least one brand.
With all this in mind, everything appears to be in place to ensure the success of your business's influencer marketing campaign. However, the popularity of Instagram is largely due to the numerous features it offers, which causes a high level of competition to gain and keep followers. Hence, if you want your brand to be noticed in this large crowd, you must analyze competitors and find influencers, niches, or types of content that you can use to outshine them.
Reveal Your Competitors’ Influencers
Influencers will be the cornerstone of your influencer marketing campaign. Choosing the wrong people can result in financial failure and even compromise the reputation of your brand. Therefore, it's crucial to learn from your competitors' past marketing activities and see which creators they have partnered with.
Mentions
Influencers will undoubtedly mention the brands they work with or love in their organic or paid content. Yet, only 49.72% of the brands participating in the survey conducted an influencer mention analysis before launching a campaign.
Through mention research, you can uncover several relevant influencers.
Find out which users and creators mention your competitors.
Or look at the influencers or experts rival businesses mention in their own posts.
Hashtags
Hashtags are keywords that help people find social media posts on a topic and are another popular way of uncovering influencers.
Review hashtags that include other industry peers’ names.
Seek keywords that are associated with your niche.
Tags
Check who tagged major key players in their content.
Track Campaign Post Performance
Without a doubt, collecting and analyzing the performance of your competitors' campaign posts is the most challenging and time-consuming process. Furthermore, without an influencer marketing platform, you won’t have access to all metrics. If you decide to take this approach nevertheless, review all the open data, like:
the number of influencers' followers,
the frequency of posting,
the type of content they created,
the number of likes and comments,
the campaign type,
your competitors' audience growth.
Take a look at how many influencers they have partnered with, as well as their number of followers. Have they worked with celebrities to reach a large audience or introduce a product? Or have they partnered with niche influencers to target specific user groups or build a community?
Explore how often creators posted on Instagram and what types of content they created. Haven't they posted regularly? Perhaps their Instagram stories received fewer reactions than photo ads. All these shortcomings can be used to your advantage.
Listen to your audience
At the same time, keep a close eye on your brand's mentions as well as audience sentiments. By taking note of how people react to your brand, you can improve the user experience and your services. Ultimately, people will spread the word about your proficient customer relationship management, and you will grow your reputation as a trustworthy company.
Even though all this seems excessively labor-intensive and tiring, there's no need to worry. With HypeAuditor's competitor analysis tools, you can simplify the workload to a one-person task and significantly reduce the amount of time and stress spent on data analysis. Read the next paragraph to find out how.
How to Get Competitor Insights with HypeAuditor?
Through HypeAuditor's Competitor Analysis, Insights, and Comparison tools, you can gain valuable insight into major industry players’ influencer marketing campaigns. Without an influencer platform, you must measure and calculate key metrics manually. How great it would be if you could see vital data for posts mentioning competitors?
HypeAuditor provides you with all the data displayed on the chart, plus much more information, like budget estimates, reach, CPE and EMV. Moreover, based on the analysis, you can create visually rich and easy-to-understand reports.
Outsmart the competition
Learn how to use your competitors’ strategies to your advantage. Outline your rivals’ major performance metrics, content insights, and the influencers they work with to figure out the best way forward.
Download free template now
Final Thoughts
Overall, competitor research is crucial if you want to understand the landscape of your industry and how you can improve your marketing efforts. Assess rival companies to set future marketing goals, avoid surprises, and learn what makes you different. Try our competitor analysis tools and benchmark your brand's performance against key industry players.
Competitor Analysis FAQs
What is competitor analysis in influencer marketing?
Competitor analysis evaluates how other businesses in your niche manage their influencer marketing activities on several social media platforms. Your research can reveal industry marketing trends and other brands' successes or failures. Moreover, it enables you to build or improve your influencer marketing strategy.
Why is it critical to research competitors?
To launch a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to plan and have a good understanding of what the market expects. By conducting an in-depth competitor analysis, your brand can identify your industry peers' strengths and weaknesses, as well as potential market gaps. Additionally, competitor insights provide great suggestions for content style and tone and help you tweak your content ideation. This will allow you to distinguish yourself from your competitors and implement an effective influencer marketing strategy.
How do I analyze competitors on Instagram?
First, determine whether they have worked with influencers previously by researching hashtags, mentions, and tags. As a second step, conduct an Instagram account analysis by examining the number of followers and frequency of posting. Make sure you measure the performance of creators, namely the number of likes and comments, to calculate ER. For a more in-depth analysis of your competitors' campaigns, try HypeAuditor and access vital KPIs and estimated stats on budget.
How do I identify my competitors’ influencers on Instagram?
Instagram competitor analysis involves determining which influencers other industry players have partnered with. One way is to check which creators have mentioned one of your competitors, used branded hashtags, or tagged other businesses on Instagram. Alternatively, you can pinpoint your competitor’s collaborators in HypeAuditor's Competitor Analysis and identify top-performing influencers with the highest reach, popularity, or activity.
