It is important to focus on positioning your brand on Instagram vis-à-vis your competitors. For that, you should conduct meticulous competitor research analysis. It could prove to be immensely beneficial in the future if you keep monitoring your competition. You can forge ahead of the rest if you can find out what is presenting working for them and identify the issues that are bogging them down. A competitor research analysis will be helping you in many ways. A regular competitor analysis could go a long way in:
- Identifying the gaps that exist in the market.
- Occupying the gaps present in the marketplace.
- Developing new services or products.
- Uncovering brand new avenues and market trends.
- Sell & market more efficiently and effectively.
According to Forbes, competitive intelligence analysis is a critical element while establishing or crafting a business stratagem in 2020. Understanding competitor behaviors and motivations will go a long way in shaping product development, brand positioning, and price. It is of pivotal importance to identify advantages, challenges, and white spaces for building a stratagem that generates competitive differentiation.
Reasons to Focus on Research Analysis
Competitive research or competitive analysis is supposed to be a strategic research niche that is known to specialize in the gathering and reviewing or appraisal of information relating to rival companies. Thanks to this evaluation, you can identify the reason why your product is unique. You could identify the attributes that are necessary to attract the attention of your target audience. Once proper analytical research about your competitors is done, you can consider monitoring them consistently so that you can keep track of their behavior all the time. This could be useful in anticipating their future actions and stay well ahead of the rest.
To Understand Your Audience Clearly
As a brand or business, it is important to know and understand your target audience clearly. It is important to know what kind of content is appreciated by your target audience. Your target audience should connect, engage, and even consume your content. Competitor analysis research is essential for understanding every aspect of your target audience. You may buy Instagram comments to boost overall follower count.
To Know Where Your Target Audience Loves to Hang Out
You can keep track of your audience and know where they like to spend more time: do they enjoy watching Stories or watching Reels? Knowing precisely where your users tend to spend more time helps you gain an edge over your business rivals. Depending on the research, you may consider narrowing your focus to just a few specific Instagram features. You should remember that 52 percent of stories seem to be videos and they will surely outperform picture stories on exit and forward rates both.
To Spot New Opportunities
While conducting a thorough competitive research analysis on Instagram, you should keep looking for gaps in the content of your business rivals or competitors. Maybe your rivals fail to respond at once to likes and comments or their content may not be fascinating enough. Or maybe your rivals are posting infrequently. These are the gaps you should spot and act accordingly to take advantage of the situation and forge ahead of the competition. Look for diverse angles to the same story. You may alternatively narrate your unique experience behind it. Share behind-the-scenes videos for showcasing your unique brand values and personality.
To Craft Enhanced Content
Once you obtain the necessary information and sound knowledge about precisely what your business rivals are posting as opposed to what you are sharing, you may end up finding some common ground between them. It could be beneficial in overpowering your present content stratagem. You can get creative spurts as you draw inspiration and motivation from key players in the industry. Once you can see what your business rivals are doing, you will surely put in your dedicated efforts at trying out an original version of their type of content. It could help get you a competitive edge.
Top Instagram Analytics Tools
Instagram Insights
Insights are the in-built Instagram analytics tool. It may not be hugely in-depth but it assists in giving you a quick snapshot or a perfect review of your performance. It allows you to browse through your recent engagements and impressions. You may consider comparing your Instagram posts by utilizing a host of metrics for seeing your best posts. Some of the vital metrics are engagement, reach, profile visits, likes, calls, shares, comments, and website clips.
Quintly
Quintly is supposed to be an excellent dashboard tool covering several social networks. It has a standard dashboard that may be custom-tailored with widgets for suiting your requirements and tracking the metrics that are of importance to you.
Conclusion
As competitive landscapes are fast becoming more dynamic, it is of prime importance for organizations to capture a knowledge advantage. This sort of knowledge could be leveraged for increasing revenue, brand equity, and market share.
Apple between US China Wars
By Dr. Dan Steinbock
America’s most valuable $2 trillion company is no longer immune to US geopolitics. Apple’s global success is an anomaly to the protectionist Trump-Biden administrations – for all the wrong reasons.
Recently, Apple announced a set of additional privacy protections. The “private relay” feature will not be available to users in China. After the announcement, New York Times reported that Apple had given in to Beijing.
In fact, in addition to China, the privacy feature will not be available to users in many countries, including Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, and Uganda.
Yet, Times only targeted China.
No multinational can ignore local responsiveness
Since the 1980s, the leading multinationals have sought to reconcile global efficiencies with responsiveness to local markets. Nonetheless, many American technology giants still earn the bulk of their revenues in the high-income US and Western European markets.
In contrast, Apple has proved more innovative in global markets. In China, the company is trying to adjust to local market practices, just as all foreign and especially Chinese companies face great adjustment pressures in the US.
There’s a difference, though. Apple and other foreign ICT giants remain welcome in the Chinese mainland.
Yet, the reverse no longer applies, as evidenced by a decade of increasing persecution of Chinese technology companies in America from Huawei to Tik Tok, and the consequent plunge of Chinese FDI in America.
Where’s the money
Still another protectionist assumption is the idea that “the Chinese are taking away American jobs.” The assumption is flawed.
In August 2018, Apple became the first publicly-traded US company valued at over $1 trillion; today its market capitalization amounts to $2.2 trillion. Its products are said to have some 1.7 billion users worldwide. Let’s illustrate the point with the value captured as a percent of the retail price of a smartphone (iPhone 7).
Apple captures a whopping 42% of the retail price of each iPhone sold. The rest goes to the cost of materials (22%), distribution (15%), IP licenses (5%), and countries like South Korea (1%), Japan (1%) and Taiwan (1%). Labor costs in China account for only1 percent of the total (Figure 1)
Figure 1: Value capture for iPhone 7
Usually, multinationals’ revenues contribute to consumer welfare via progressive taxation. However, US companies tend to minimize taxes via creative accounting and tax havens, so there’s a gap between what’s paid officially and effectively.
Since the 1980s, these disruptive changes have dramatically contributed to erosion in progressive taxation, consumer welfare and thus to income polarization in America. That’s America’s challenge, however; not China’s.
Apple, offshoring and Taiwan
If the value capture isn’t the issue, what about offshoring to China? That’s the third misguided assumption.
Apple’s “Greater China” market includes not just China, but Hong Kong and Taiwan. It has assembled most of its products in China for a quarter of a century, thanks to Foxconn (Hon Hai), the huge Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer founded by Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou.
Moreover, work conditions at Foxconn factories have been a matter of public debate since the early 2010s. The basic salary for a worker at a Foxconn facility is about $315 per month; less than 10% of the median American salary.
In June 2017, Foxconn said it would build a $10 billion TV manufacturing plant in southeastern Wisconsin that would initially employ 3,000 workers set to increase to 13,000, in return for the highest subsidies in US history. A few months later, a plant was launched in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Rise and Fall of Foxconn’s US venture
Source: Wikimedia Commons
However, Foxconn began soon reconsidering its initial plant plans and the high labor costs in the US. After Biden’s election triumph, Foxconn announced it would reduce its planned investment to $672 million with 1,454 new jobs.
As long as per capita incomes will differ significantly among countries, opportunities for offshoring will abound.
US geopolitics vs Chinese market potential
And the final misguided protectionist assumption. What if Apple would refocus its operations into the US, as it is being pressured to do?
In the past decade, Apple’s quarterly revenues from Greater China have increased to $21.3 billion (1Q 2021). Its revenues from China remain around 15% of the total. That’s still significantly less relative to highly exposed US companies in China.
Last year, Apple had a great year in China, where full year shipments returned to the 2018 level, driven by both iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 models. It has recently added a dozen new Chinese suppliers. Chinese market is vital to Apple’s global future.
The developer community of Apple’s iOS app ecosystem has surged to over 4.4 million third-party developers in China. Moreover, China’s shipment of wearable devices notched robust year-on-year expansion in the first quarter of 2021.
To position for the lucrative electric car future, Apple is in early-stage talks with BYD and CATL, and possible other companies over battery supplies for the “Apple Car,”. Chinese car market is critical to Apple since rapid growth remains in the mainland.
Over time, Apple’s revenues from China have potential to increase significantly, thanks to its innovative ecosystem which is hard to replicate by the competitors. Yet, the White House could derail Apple’s plans, which rely on economics, not on geopolitics.
Who’s undermining US competitiveness
To sustain its global position, Apple is trying to navigate amid the US Cold War against China. If it ignores US views, it will face pressures in the US; its largest current market. If it neglects Chinese views, it risks failure in China; its pivotal future market. What is certain is that
Apple’s greatest challenge is not China, but the underlying conflict between its ecosystem and Trump-Biden protectionism.
About the Author
Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
A longer version of the commentary was published by China-US Focus on June 25, 2021. It is based on Dr Steinbock’s fully-referenced global briefing https://www.differencegroup.net/apple-between-us-china