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)

0:28Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. We are here for more Bathroom Time. It's me, Jay, and I'm here with Daniel Murray, the marketing millennial himself. Daniel, how are you doing today, man? Good. Taylor Fritz is in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, so excited for the American out there. He also went to my high school, fun fact, so I'm rooting for him. 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 looked at US Open's website. It's usopen.org. And I was like, why the hell did they not get the.com?

1:10Who got that out of it? And then I realized that the golf, US Open golf, has the.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 than you. You care about tennis way more. Do you even play golf? no i do not play golf how bad are you a 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 um embarrassment i i don't know what clubs to use um 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 yeah you're a putt-putt master though i could see you a putt-putt dominating like the windmill thing you have to like hit in that little thing i feel like you could cry you and arya go out there and just play mini golf all the time um i don't think arya 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 going 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.

2:27And 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 access to that. If you go to ad transparency, you can 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. If you're in e-commerce, go even further and actually buy the product, see the flow of that whole flow. But actually go through their funnel and see what every touchpoint is documented.

3:14I 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 spam 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.

3:49So 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? Yeah, and I think it's really important. Whether or not you deem somebody a competitor or just somebody in your category that you 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 I found useful. One is I really dig the website SpyFu. That's S-P-Y-F-U dot com. It's 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.

4:28So 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 esp at sendview.io. That's esp at sendview.io. You forward any email to that 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.

5:04So leveraging these free tools are pretty cool. Are there any tools out there that you leverage? Yeah. And shout out to Ari for introducing this tool. but there's a Chrome plugin 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 marketing, like what are their automation platform, what's their sending platform, what are they using for web analytics and this. and 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 they're using for X, Y, and Z.

5:50Let 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 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 just 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.

6:31And how can 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? What channels are they on that we aren't on? What channels are they on that we are on? How can we be better?

7:04I 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? Or how can we be different in our messaging than getting our value out that's different than our competitors out there? So we, I mean, we've done it with newsletter. When we launched our newsletter, we looked at all the top marketing newsletters, analyze and see what we can 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 um what are what are they doing different what is their value who is their 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 it and say oh there's so many people in whatever category, I shouldn't be in that category.

8:02I 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 got to 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 market for it. When you try to go into something where there's no competition, that's when you're probably going to lose because to create a new category is much harder than to penetrate an existing one.

8:35So 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 a hundred percent. When there's a market, 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 set demand. But if you're trying to... Because 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 what the category even is and market your company.

9:11Which when you market the category, it makes more opportunity for more competitors to come in anyway. So it's just... I like the route where I know there's going to be business to be made. absolutely we've taken up too much time from Daniel being able to go watch tennis so 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 US Open you call it right now oh um bold prediction not bold prediction Yannick Sinner who's the number one player in the world fun fact I have no idea who either one of those people are All right. Another amazing bathroom break has come to an end.

9:58We 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 got to 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 you try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millennials podcast, but also tune into the series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marking tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email, subject line to any marking tips in the world.

10:40We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.