SPECIAL LIMITED SERIES: ===> See COMPETITOR Info! EXACTLY how to see what your competition is doing!🚽 <=== | BATHROOM Break #20 (COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom.

Or both.

But I don't recommend both.

But that's your choice.

This collab is going to be super fun.

We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this, not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. We are here for more bathroom time.

It's me, Jay, and I'm here with Daniel Murray, the marketing millennial himself. Daniel, how you doing today, man?

Good. Taylor Fritz is in the quarterfinals of the US Open. So excited for the American out there. He also went to my high school fun fact.

So I'm rooting for him.

So, wow. How many people care about the U.S. open out there? Five, six, maybe?

What you want to hear? Actually, a funny story about this before we go in.

I was, I looked at US Open's website is usopen.org and I was like, why the hell did they not get the dot com? Who got that out of it? And then I realized that the golf U.S. open golf has the dot com.

I was like, actually, people care about golf maybe more than the tennis. So it's just funny.

I don't even know if that's true. They care about golf more. You care about tennis way more. Do you even play golf?

No, I do not play golf.

How bad are you at golf? Like, if you went out there right now, would you be like an embarrassment or are you like, good and you're lying right now?

Embarrassment. I. I don't know what clubs to use. I don't know. I. I probably can get a hit a good drive once in a while, but the rest of the shots, I'm done.

I don't know where I'm gonna hit it.

You're a putt putt master though. I could see you at putt putt, dominating, like the windmill thing. You have to like hit in that little thing.

I feel like you could cry you and argue out there and just play mini golf all the time.

I don't think Ari doesn't really like doing sports. I got her into tennis, but she used to be an all star soccer player. Fun fact back in the day.

So I know we're going off tangent, but we're here to talk about marketing.

All right, let's jump into it. I'm all over the place. Sorry everybody. All right, today we're talking about something pretty cool.

How do you reverse engineer what your competition is doing? And we have some really specific ways on how to do that. So Daniel, you want to kick us off and then I'll jump in?

Yeah, I'm just going to give a broad level thing that I used to do is actually go through their whole funnel from start to finish. So you can go on their Facebook ads library. Everybody has a access to that. If you go to ad transparency you could see anybody's ad.

So click on the ad, see what landing page you go through, fill out the form, see what emails you get, go. If you're in e commerce, go even further and actually buy the product. See the flow of that whole flow that there's.

But actually go through their funnel and see what are every touch point and document it. I think a lot of people don't take the time to go through the actual funnel and see every single step actually put in that email address.

See how quickly that email gets to you. What's their subject line, what are they saying to you?

So when I was a marketing ops, I used to go through all our competitors funnels and I had a specific email dedicated that was like my spammy email that I would put in there so I can have all my competitors. And then once you put your competitor, you could see what emails they're sending to you on a daily basis.

And I know you have an email just dedicated to that as well. So I used to go through all my competitors funnels and even people that I think would be like cool companies that are doing cool things.

What are their funnels look like?

Yeah, and I think it's really important whether or not you deem somebody a competitor or just somebody in your category they think is doing a good job keeping an eye on what they're doing can be really useful. So there's two things that I do that that I found useful. One is I really dig the website Spy Fu. That's S p y f u.com super free.

What does super free even mean? I don't even know it's free.

And you can go there, you put in the domain of your competitor or whatever and it'll pull up all their organic search, paid search, all sorts of traffic information. So that's one. The other one is any email that you get from any list that you're on.

If you want to find out the sending platform that they're using to send out their emails, you Just take any email that you get and you forward it to this one address. The address is espendviewio. That's espendviewio.

You forward any email to the address and then within like two or three minutes, you get an email back telling you exactly what email sending platform they're using, which can be really valuable. So you could see, you know, what other people are doing, what they're using, if you think their emails are great.

So leveraging these free tools or are pretty cool. There any tools out there that, that you leverage?

Yeah, and shout out to Ari for introducing this tool. But there's a Chrome plugin called Built with that basically looks at their code in the back end.

And if you look at the code in the back end, you probably can also find what ESP they're using as well.

So it tells you what is their market, like, what are their automation platform, what's their sending platform, what, what, what are they using for web analytics and, and this.

And then they'll give you their whole tech stack if you just have this plugin on your Chrome and use it on sites that you want to know what, what they're using for X, Y and Z.

Let me ask you something though, because do you ever look at competition for the marketing millennials and say, oh, this is our biggest competitor, we're going to adjust our strategy because they're doing this?

Or, or do you just view it as I'm doing my own thing and everyone else is going to do their own thing and I don't really care what other people are doing?

I think I don't, I wouldn't say adjust strategy. I think strategy never changes. It's more that how can I be different than what attention they're getting from my competitors? So how can I.

What are the things that they're doing that are grabbing more and more attention from my audience is what I care about and how could I do something different than what they're doing or stand out from what they're doing? Or if they're doing something that I'm not doing, why aren't we doing it? It's just a question to ask.

Like, I don't think you adjust your whole strategy towards what your competitors are doing, but it's good to know what are they doing great, what are they doing poorly, what are they doing differently? Why aren't we doing the things that they're doing? How could we do something different than they're doing that they're not.

What channels are they on that we aren't on what channels are they on that we are on? How can we be better? I think it's just a good way to just analyze what. And then also, like, messaging is a key thing when standing out.

Like, is our messaging exactly the same as these people? Like, or how could we be different in our messaging and getting our value to out that's different than our competitors out there.

So we, I mean, we've done it with newsletter. When we launch our newsletter, we looked at all the top marketing newsletters. Analyze and see what we could do different.

We'll do it with any new thing we launch. We do a competitive analysis of, like, what's out there, what price points they're selling at, What. What are. What are they doing different?

What is their value? Who's the audience they're targeting? All that good stuff.

Yeah.

And, you know, for anybody out there that's listening, I think sometimes people make the mistake of, let's say you're thinking about a new business that you want to launch or a new anything, and you look at and say, oh, there's so many people in whatever category. I shouldn't be in that category. I shouldn't launch this product or service. There's too much competition.

And I've always felt that that's the exact opposite of how you should think that. If there's a category that has a ton of business in there, a ton of companies, a ton of whatever, that's where I want to be.

Because there's gotta be room for one more company to be in there to get their little piece of it, and then you can grow from there. Because if there's a ton of companies in it, that means there's a. There's a market for it.

When you try to go into something where there's no competition, that's when you're probably gonna lose. Because to create a new category is much harder than to penetrate an existing one. So don't be scared off by competition.

It's incredibly important to see what they're doing, but just jump in with two feet. That's my vibe.

I'm 100. When there's a mark, if there's a market, someone's already created the market. The best thing to do is when you get in the market.

If you want to create a category in that market, that's the easier thing to do because you know this totally set demand. But if you're trying to. Because the. When you're creating a category, you also have to market the category because nobody knows the category.

So you have to do two types of marketing.

You have to market, like, what the category even is, and market your company, which, when you market the category, makes more opportunity for more competitors to come in anyway. So it's just I. I like the route where I know there's going to be business to be made, so.

Absolutely. All right, well, you know, we've taken up too much time from, from Daniel being able to go watch tennis, so we, We. We got it.

We got to cut this one off, Daniel. So you have to predict right now, at the time of this recording, who's going to win the U.S. open. You call it right now.

Oh, bowl prediction, Fritz. Not bold prediction. Yannick Sinner, who's the number one player in the world.

So, fun fact, I have no idea who either one of those people are. All right, another amazing bathroom break has come to an end. We will see you at the next one.

Go follow the Marketing Millennials and the do this, not that podcast. Later.

Later.

Daniel. Come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay.

Check out my podcast, do this, not that for marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Market Millennials podcast, but also tune into the series. It's once a week. The bathroom Break.

We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email, subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it.

Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.

Later.