If you run business offline and online, it is very likely that your offline and online activities are integrated in a great measure. Today we are speaking on a very slippery topic, which is not about emergence, or integration, or any other abstract marketing word. Here we would like to point out some things regarding the confluence of offline and online competitor clusters and ways of analyzing them apart and altogether. The original article contains three case studies and lots of tips and trick on competitors investigation and segmentation. Please read the full article here at our blog: http://www.link-assistant.com/blog/online-offline-competitors/

1. Segment your offline & online
competitors brainy
Thoughts on competitors
segmentation and tips for entering
online market

2. Do you investigate your competitors?

3. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
Main Nike competitors:
• Puma
• Adidas
• Reebok

4. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
Strong offline presence
does not mean a strong
online brand.
Let’s see how it works in the Nike case!

5. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
All these brands sell running shoes.
Let’s check the UK SERP for this
highly competitive keyword.

6. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
This SERP for the UK
does not have any
pages of the
competitors listed
above.
All of the sites
represented here are
resellers.

7. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
For this keyword nike.com results are
on 28th position in google.com SERP
and off the top 100 for
google.com.uk at the moment of
writing this article.

8. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
Well, at a first glance it’s clear why:
• Keywords? Are you serious?
• No point in placing 'Nike Store UK' at the beginning,
it’s better to move relevant keywords closer to the
beginning
• Auto generated meta tags

9. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
That is how the product URL looks like:
No sign of a user friendly URL.
Not a big sin, but…

10. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
But just imagine the amount of traffic and
additional online sales that could be
brought by SEO here, provided Nike can
afford a lot – just look at their SMM
campaigns.

11. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
Conclusion:
In SERPs you have to compete
with those who sell your goods
and services and not with
brands.

12. Case Study #1. Nike, or when your
partners turn smarter than you
By the way, check this,
you’ll like it:
http://store.nike.com/
robots.txt

13. The sooner the better
The more you wait, the
more efforts will be
needed to become a
strong competitor.
While you are thinking
whether SEO is the right
choice for you, your rivals
are overdoing you and
conquering your
audience.

14. Prices
• Price building is different on the Web
• You have to compete with your resellers
• There are several resellers in SERP who sell
shoes even cheaper than the Nike online store

15. Case Study #2. SEO for Branding?

16. Case Study #2. SEO for Branding?
It’s important to be the
first on SERP for brand
keywords!
Official Puma website is
not in the top 10
for Puma shirts keyword,
but they have an ad for
this SERP:

17. Competitors segmentation
Online
competitors are
not always
industry
competitors.
Industry
competitors are
not always
online
competitors.

18. Steps to segment your competitors
1) Set up a goal for your online marketing.
2) Connect it to the goal of your offline marketing, if
any.
3) Build a list of your offline competitors.
4) Build a list of your online competitors.
5) Find out which companies are in both lists (area 3
in the picture above). Here you need an advanced
research.
6) Do a standard investigation of your only-online
competitors.
7) Pay attention to the possible keywords of your
offline competitors.

19. Advanced online-offline competitors
research
1) Compare the efforts they put in to offline and online
marketing.
2) Do they have the same target audience online and offline?
3) Do they do brand activities or sell online?
4) What type of ads do they use?
5) Are they successful? This is a vital question. It tells you
what to do: to implement some of their strategy points or use
them as an example of wrong marketing activities.
6) How deep is their online-offline integration? For example,
how do they represent their offline campaigns on the Internet?
7) How long are they online and offline? What have they
achieved through this period?

20. Best practice for information gap
Imagine you would like to buy headphones. You
can go to the store and try out some, compare
how they sound, choose those that fit your head
best. But the best way to compare the specific
lists of features is to reach them online.
Conclusion: provide exhaustive descriptions on
the website.

21. Not enough!

22. Good!

23. Best practice for information gap
Customers can try on clothes at the shop, but a
website picture of the jacket itself provides poor
information.
Conclusion: upload pictures of the models wearing
clothes in different positions, indoor and outdoor.
Make HQ zoomed pictures for showing details of
the item, provide an advanced size chart.

24. Not enough!

25. Good!

26. Best practice for information gap
A shop assistant at your store may help your
customers to choose a PC mainly for graphic
design software usage. How can they define a
suitable PC on a website?
Conclusion: provide suggestions ('This PC is the
best solution for game players') or arrange
online consultation via Skype, online chat etc.

27. Good!

28. Useful reading
The list of points that add to this customer
information gap is huge and it influences e-
commerce if compared with offline sales
according to the Online vs Offline
Competition part for the Oxford Handbook
of the Digital Economy.

29. I have no friends
and no enemies -
only competitors.
Aristotle Onassis

30. Read the full article
here on our blog!

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