LinkedIn is a platform with a professional pulse.
Conducting marketing here is especially beneficial for businesses. It helps them expand the network in their own industry and other sectors as well.
Now, competition across industries is a well-known fact in the current business landscape. But this can be the very ingredient to incredible success for organizations.
LinkedIn allows you to conduct market research and gain accurate insights. From connecting with industry experts to building online communities, the platform enables it all.
You can effectively identify your competitors and estimate their reach in the field. For that, you need to keep up with your competitor’s progress and growth in the online space consistently.
But this needs the data-driven and proactive approach of LinkedIn competitor analysis.
As mentioned before, LinkedIn is on the professional spectrum of social media sites. So, brands need to put their best into developing their LinkedIn competitor analysis strategy.
In this blog, we have compiled a guide to help you with the whys and hows of LinkedIn competitor analysis.
Why LinkedIn competitor analysis is important
The business landscape across industries has changed drastically.
To keep up with the progress, brands need to adapt quickly. LinkedIn competitor analysis equips businesses with insights to navigate this cutthroat market.
Here are some of the top benefits of conducting competitor analysis on LinkedIn:
1. To understand the market
To reach the right people through LinkedIn, you must deliver a message that portrays your brand value. However, it needs to resonate with your audience as well.
For that, you need a firm grasp of the market you are operating in.
LinkedIn competitor analysis helps you understand what your market demands from your niche. You get insights on what topics are trending on your competitor’s page and what makes them click with the audience. Competitor analysis also shows you how top brands plan their outreach campaigns.
2. Better brand positioning
For every new brand in the market, there are already hundreds of alternatives available. Besides, when you have similar products, you target the same segments.
But competing for the same demand makes scaling difficult and becomes counterproductive. Closing the sale you worked so hard for becomes next to impossible.
With LinkedIn competitor analysis, brands learn how to market their USPs. They can efficiently identify gaps and show what unique solutions they bring to the table.
You also understand the best way to position your products in the market for the best returns.
3. Content benchmarking
How you curate content for your audience defines your growth in the digital space. The only way to be among the big fish on LinkedIn marketing is to deliver solution-oriented posts.
But how do you bring finesse in accommodating what your customer demands? By comparing your performance with that of your competitors.
This is where benchmarking comes into play.
To draw an accurate portrait of your brand’s performance, you need a planned approach to benchmarking. This shows you are in the market strategy that needs improvement and helps you thrive in your niche.
LinkedIn competitor analysis helps you identify your top contenders. It gathers data on several key metrics. This helps you check your content with your competitor’s profile to see what you need to include to drive better engagement. It helps you sort out your priorities and focus your resources on those.
Besides establishing a LinkedIn identity, competitor analysis also helps you improve your products. It allows you to align your services with audience demands and outperform competitors.
4. Staying relevant
Currently, every social media platform’s engagement highly depends on popular trends. Be it reels or the more professional LinkedIn posts, trends are everywhere.
Trends drive conversations in social spaces. Thus, to stay relevant in a severely competitive market, brands must join in the current discussions.
While trends are excellent opportunities to connect with your audience, you must be methodical with the approach. Participating in an irrelevant trend will not resonate with your audience. It will also portray your brand in an immaterial light.
LinkedIn competitor analysis helps you identify trends that have worked for your rival brands. This makes it easy for you to leverage the current topics early on.
Joining the bandwagon keeps you relevant on LinkedIn and makes it easier for new viewers to find profiles.
5. Learning
The key to sustainable success is to learn constantly from your peers. Making mistakes in your journey teaches you a lot about brand building. But avoiding those mistakes by learning from your rival brand’s journey is even better for effective growth on LinkedIn.
Competitor analysis also shows you what your top contenders are doing right to the target audience. You get to examine their failures and see what went wrong in their strategy. This way, you get to prevent those mishaps in your LinkedIn marketing.
Brands also learn what type of content has the most appeal to their market segment. They understand what makes a brand click. Tracking how your contenders interact with their audience sets up guidelines for you to follow.
Still wondering what the best way to enjoy all these benefits is? Opt for a third-party competitor analysis tool to simplify the entire process.
3 Steps to do a LinkedIn competitive analysis
LinkedIn competitor analysis sounds like a complex process. But it doesn’t have to be. While the results involve several aspects, you can complete the process in only three simple steps.
Here is what you have to do:
1. Determine competitors
To outperform competitors, first, you must identify who they are.
There is a clear distinction between your regular competitors and your contenders in the virtual space. To target them on LinkedIn effectively, you need to start by identifying your top virtual competitors.
There are two types of competitors on Instagram as well — direct and indirect.
Your direct competitors market similar products. To tackle them, you need to show your audience how you provide better services. Track every new move of your contenders. See what solutions they bring to the table. This will make it easy to enhance your approach.
The dynamics become different with indirect competitors.
These contenders offer products and services capable of replacing yours. Here, an efficient and feature-rich competitor analysis tool can help you win over the challenging algorithm.
Start identifying your competitors by surfing through the platform. Search relevant hashtags and keywords.
Here, social listening can come in handy. You can track what brands are popular among your audience by monitoring their online discussions.
2. Decide analysis goals
To achieve precise results, your LinkedIn competitor analysis has to be strategically focused. Your plan needs a purpose and establishes a set of goals. This way, you know exactly what insights you want to retrieve at the end of your research.
Once you figure out who your competitors are, understand what you want to achieve through this process. Discuss with your team and sort out the pain points in your social media marketing framework.
Consider writing the reasons you need a competitive analysis on LinkedIn and what you expect to gain in the end. Are you finding it tricky to settle on post frequency for the best engagement? Or do you want to optimize your content to reach a targeted segment of the audience?
The goal here is to set up questions you need answers to. If you aim to enhance your customer experience, examine your competitor’s interaction with the audience. Check their tone and response time.
The bottom line is to create a competitive analysis strategy that helps you create specific goals. Once you know what you want to gain, your marketing team can retrieve data from competitors accordingly.
3. Gather key data
The data you need to collect depends on what you want to achieve through LinkedIn competitor analysis. Not all the information you come across will be useful for your reports. Hence, it is important to focus your resources on the key metrics.
Here are some of the important metrics you should prioritize:
- Follower metrics: This shows a page’s follower numbers and new followers gained within the specified time range. The number of followers reflects a brand’s popularity on LinkedIn. This particular KPI can help you see how your brand’s performance compares to that of the competition. It measures growth in prospective viewers and helps you visualize the specifics of your LinkedIn growth plan.
- Total post metrics: This shows how many posts it took a specific brand to reach the following they currently have. You can also measure its impact on their follower growth in a specific time range.
- Share of the market: This defines the competitor’s share of the target market.
- Reactions and comments: This KPI helps you gauge what the audience demands from your niche.
- Total engagement metrics: Such data shows you the organic content metrics for a specific page’s posts within the specified time range. This helps you curate content that appeals to your audience and persuades them to engage with your profile. The formula here is:
Engagement Rate = (Reactions + Comments) / Followers X 100.
Gather all the relevant data from your competitor’s page. Brands that have already built their image on LinkedIn are likely to have a significant number of followers.
While you should focus on their activity, don’t forget to analyze other competitors’ metrics as well. Also, pay attention to how each brand interacts with its audience.
LinkedIn competitor analysis and research using Keyhole
Here are the steps you need to follow to make the best out of LinkedIn competitor analysis:
Step 1: Add competitor profiles
First, log into your keyhole account and click on the ‘Profile Analytics’ tab.
A new page will open. Here you will see an orange button on the top right corner of the screen showing “Add New Profile”. Click on it and select the “Analyze New profile” option from the dropdown.
As illustrated in the above screenshot, the subsequent page will show several social media options for you to choose from. Now select the LinkedIn button.
On the next page, first, add your LinkedIn profile and then add the competitor page you want to track. Once you do that, the “create comparison” button will turn orange. Click on it. From here, Keyhole’s automation will trigger and backfill all the relevant data.
Step 2: Create a comparison report
Brands conduct LinkedIn competitor comparisons to identify relevant trends and curate better LinkedIn posts. It also helps them settle on a posting schedule to maximize engagement, etc.
Insightful competitor analysis reports also help you refine your audience interaction framework.
Keyhole turns this seemingly complex journey into an easy and rewarding one.
Once Keyhole backfills the data on your and your competitor’s engagement on LinkedIn, it automatically creates reports. These benchmark your performance on the platform. The insights also help you identify current topics and show you ways to boost your engagement rate.
You can point out the top-ranking content types in your industry. This way, you can plan how to align those with your brand image.
The reports can show data history of up to a year. All you need to do is to select a date range. This will show your analytics results over your selected timeline or a specific date.
Keyhole also allows users to share the generated reports. You can turn them into PDF, XLS, or Google sheets and download them.
Step 3: Analyze key data
Now that you have your competitor analysis reports, it’s time to examine the results. Here are the points you should focus on:
1. Content
A sizable chunk of social media marketing depends on the content. Hence, start your LinkedIn competitor evaluation by scrutinizing your rival brand’s content. See what type of posts they share the most.
Do they share a lot of media content? Or do they focus on textual content? See the tone of voice of those posts. Focus on their post frequency.
2. Reactions
Like Facebook, LinkedIn also lets users react to a post through five different reactions. See the total number of reactions their top posts receive. You would also find some “insider” reactions.
These are the likes and comments the post receives from the competitors’ employees. Make sure you filter those out and only take into account the rest. This will help you gauge the quality of engagement the brand gets on its posts.
3. Responses
Study the comments the viewers leave under your contender’s posts. This will give you an idea of your target’s market likes, needs, and desires.
4. Demographics
See what type of LinkedIn users interact with your rival brands the most. These are the people you want to target through social media campaigns.
5. Follower growth
Examine their follower growth in a specific time range. This will help you point out what they did right to increase their reach. A decrease in followers will show you the mistakes your competitors have made on the platform.
Build a professional edge on LinkedIn with Keyhole
LinkedIn gives you a chance to connect with industry experts and future customers from different demographics. Thus, if you want to scale your businesses, you must ace your marketing game on the platform. For that, your competitor analysis strategy has to be on point.
However, it cannot be a one-time process. For best and sustainable results, it needs to be frequent and accurate — which is not always possible with manual methods.
That’s where Keyhole can change the picture. It would conduct competitor analysis routinely to identify topics you’re missing out on. This would help you create a better strategy that positions your brand as an industry leader.
For detailed insights and performance improvement, start your free trial with Keyhole today.
Related Articles:
How to Track & Analyze Competitors on Facebook
How to Track and Analyze Competitors on TikTok
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find a company's competitors on LinkedIn?
Use the search button to find your top competitors. Enter the keywords you think someone might use to find brands in your niche and go through the profiles you get in the results.
Should you follow competitors on LinkedIn?
Yes. To grow your brand on LinkedIn, connecting with your competitors is a great way. It will help you follow their content, interactions with the audience, and follower growth.
What is LinkedIn's competitive advantage?
As LinkedIn is a professional social media network, it can give you a detailed insight into your competitor’s business activity. Its competitive advantages rely on network effects.
