How to Analyse Your Competitors’ Video Marketing Strategies

Tools to uncover competitor video content approaches

In the past, competitor analysis meant hours of trawling through your competitors’ social media sites and building time-consuming reports.

Nowadays, SaaS based systems can do some of  the hard work for you. All you need to do is log on, input your competitor details and see for yourself exactly what’s going on behind the scenes. Some systems are free and do not even require a login.

In this post you will find out about some great tools that will help you uncover great video marketing strategies and ideas.

Changing landscape of video strategy

After Google, YouTube is the internet’s second largest search engine. A growing number of viewers are beginning to subscribe to business channels too. In fact, the number of people subscribing daily has increase three-fold since 2013.

As more businesses start to tap into the power of video marketing, the need to effectively analyse your competitors’ web presence and strategy success has become even more paramount.

Once you have identified your competitors, it’s time to start analysing their video marketing strategy. There are several tools on the market claiming to simplify the process and collect data themselves. In most cases, data is presented via a report or dashboard.

MWP Video Marketing Comparison Tool

The MWP Video Marketing Comparison Tool (that's a bit of a mouthful) was released earlier this year. This is the only free, yet comprehensive analysis tool on the market that allows you to delve into the video analytics of up to ten competitors.

The beauty of the MWP tool is its simplicity. YouTube channel URLs are inserted into the search box and a report is generated in less than a minute.

After various metrics from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have been measured, the top ranking business is identified. The other businesses are scored on a comparison to the top-ranking business.

Here you can see the results from three of the world’s top beverage companies:

Further insight opens up a host of data where you can assess the effectiveness of your competitor videos.

Here you can see exactly how viewers are engaging with the content. You can match your competitor’s statistics to your own data to accurately measure how well you compare.

By comparing Red Bull’s data to Pepsi, you can see that although Red Bull has more videos posted on its channel (4,103 compared to Pepsi’s 911) and has a much higher level of total shares than Pepsi, its score indicates that it is pipped to the post by its rival.

This is because the tool measures a range of differently weighted data. The results aren’t based on just the number of video views or how many comments a channel might have accumulated, but how much of the content has been shared and how viewers have been interacting with the content.

How can you benefit from this tool?

Marketing agencies would typically benefit from using this tool as it would allow them to see what their clients’ competitors are doing. From these results, they could create their own campaign based on what’s already working, or not working in the industry.

A video production agency could also use this tool to demonstrate the effectiveness of online video campaigns and what it means for a video to go viral.

Even small and medium sized organisations would find this tool useful for comparing their video marketing efforts against their rivals. The results can be downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet and included in a report.

Rivalfox

Rivalfox was launched in May 2013 and provides on-demand competitor analysis reports. It uses an algorithm that collects results from over a hundred different KPIs from your competitors.

Information from all social media avenues is collected in real-time and presented in an actionable report format.

The dashboard is your hub for insider information. You are notified instantly if there are any changes to your competitors’ websites or if they make any announcements.

Rivalfox also allows you to just track part of a webpage. For example, this could be a headline or the call to action.

Rivalfox offers a fourteen day trial period. After that, there are three price packages to choose from, ranging from $49 per month, which offers access for one user and tracking for up to two competitors, to $299 for seven users and tracking for up to fifteen competitors per month.

Qualitative measures

You don’t have to rely on pure statistics to measure the success of a video marketing strategy. Investing in user testing to get a true understanding of what customers are saying about your competitors’ websites and videos will reveal the truth about how easy your site is to navigate, or how helpful a demonstration video is.

User experience website, Usertesting.com poses a series of tasks and questions to a target audience with parameters set by you.

Once your target audience has visited the selected website, you can gain valuable insight into what they liked about the video and what frustrated them.

You can also run tests where a user will visit your site and your competitor’s site and tell you what they like and dislike about each.

A direct comparison is useful for websites, but for videos, you will need to delve deeper into human psyche to see what people love and are willing to share.

A study by media firm, Unruly, revealed that videos with emotional content were twice as likely to be shared than those which just detailed facts.

Once you have some insight into what potential customers are saying, you can tailor your offerings to meet customer need.

Unruly

Big brands such as Evian, HSBC and Adidas use marketing technology company, Unruly, to uncover the percentage of social video shares their own and competitor videos experience.

Clients are able to access analytics from paid, owned and earned media through Unruly Analytics.

Choose from either ‘Benchmark Edition’, to look at social video impact against competitors or ‘Campaign Edition’ to assess each campaign’s performance. You can also measure success of current campaigns with previous campaigns, your own KPIs and a list of competitor videos statistics.

Set time parameters to measure the success of your advert against competitors. You can also choose to bundle videos together, so a whole video campaign could be assessed against another.

Aside from identifying trends, you can also see what social media avenues are having the biggest effect on your ‘share of voice’.

The video analytics Unruly uses include: likes, dislikes, shares, views, comments, blog mentions and tweets. Basically it just indexes the API's in the same way as the free MWP tool does it but then analyses the data in a different and more in-depth way.

So you’ve got the data, now what?

Once you’ve compiled your data and discussed your findings with your team, you need to create your marketing strategy. This doesn’t mean replicating a rival’s video campaign, but it does mean finding out what works and emulating their success.

These tools allow you to see what works as sharable content. This is a crucial building block for your own marketing plan. Of course sharing is not the aim, but it is a signifier of content that has an emotional impact on people.

Stay on top of your video marketing strategy by regularly using competitor analysis packages to evaluate changes in your industry, recognise trends and set benchmarks.

Over time, you’ll begin to predict how viewers will react to your videos and your competitors’. You’ll be able to determine the best way forward for your campaign to ensure it stands the best chance of success and beats your competitors’ attempts hands down.