Digital advertising for small businesses is a cutthroat world. Competition is higher than ever, and it will likely continue to rise for the foreseeable future. To gain the upper hand, a business owner must be able to market your brand better than your competitors. But how exactly is this possible?

There are many tactics you can use, and one of the most powerful ones lies in reverse engineering the competition’s advertisements. If you’re curious about what this means and how it can help your business grow, keep reading to the sections below.

What is reverse engineering in digital marketing?

Before we proceed, however, let’s get rid of any confusion you might have about what this term means. In the broadest sense, reverse engineering in digital marketing means to analyze a competitor’s strategies in order to replicate and, ultimately, improve them.

The process involves evaluating several factors, such as a competitor’s content marketing strategies, the structure of their website, and the marketing channels they utilize. All of these different elements will give you an idea of what they’re doing well so that you can apply them to your own business.

Now, you might be questioning the inventiveness of this approach. The short answer is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel – you just have to re-imagine it.

How can I apply this to my business?

The concept is relatively simple. By analyzing your competitors’ advertisements, you can gain inform the best foundation to go about your own advertising campaign. This insight can cover areas such as the appearance of the ads themselves, as well as the locations where these ads are displayed.

The execution, however, is the trickier part. You would probably need the help of a digital advertising agency to fully make sense of the knowledge you gain from your competitor’s ads.

A good place for you to start is with Google. Type in a keyword that is relevant to your business, and check whether or not there are any paid ads at the top. If there are, you can click on those links and look at what their landing pages look like. From there, you can take a look at the quality of their landing pages, the content they publish, and other sites that they provide links to. You can use all of these to pattern your own marketing strategies after.

Additionally, you could simply go about your usual browsing habits and keep an eye out for ads that are served to you. It may be the case that some of the websites you visited earlier show you ads as you’re on your travels across the internet. This is where programmatic advertising comes into play, and it’s a way of advertising that we’ve talked about a great deal before.

Conclusion

The whole point of reverse engineering is to pay attention to what your competitors are doing so that you can keep your business as relevant as theirs. After all, if their ads were displayed to you, then there’s a good chance that they were also displayed to your customers.

We are a programmatic agency in London and New York, and we’d be more than happy to help you learn more about reverse engineering and programmatic advertising in general. Get in touch with us today if you’d like to learn more.