Trailcams and Trends: The Importance of Understanding the Landscape

Ticks, stings, thick brush, and sweltering heat. Why brave all of this to get trail cameras hung now? Because they pay off when it counts. The same can be said for conducting brand and competitive audits.

When approaching a new lease or property as a hunter, one of the first steps in scouting is placing trail cameras. Trail cams are valuable tools for several reasons. They allow you to observe wildlife movements, travel paths, and feeding patterns. They let you audit a property, quickly determining what scale and class of animal it holds, and they let you do it all with minimal impact on the day-to-day of the animals themselves. By aggregating this data, you can build plans for the best times to hunt the property, determine access routes, and ultimately hang a treestand.

Conducting a competitive analysis or brand audit yields similar results. Getting a sense of the landscape, your competitors, and the opportunities that may be present can help direct brand strategy and business development. 

While a brand audit primarily evaluates your brand's performance, a competitive audit focuses on your competitor's strategies and content. Both are valuable and provide actionable insights. As part of our client onboarding process, we conduct both audits, placing ‘trail cams’ into your market to help us make informed marketing decisions.

Market Trail Camera Data

Strategy Insights

Unpacking the driving factors behind your competition’s content programs can help uncover their approach to the market. We can determine messaging strategy, audience segmentation, and valuable channels by analyzing competitive campaigns.

Understanding their marketing tactics can help spur new ideas to differentiate your brand and can help refine your efforts to stay ahead of the competition.

Content Creation

Similar to trail cameras uncovering commonly used travel paths, auditing your competition’s content can help you determine the path their brand is taking and where they’re focusing their messaging efforts.

Understanding the types of content they produce and where they place can identify content gaps in the market, allowing you to discover innovative ways to connect with your target audience. This information can refine your content strategy and ensure you’re not wasting money on content that isn’t going to move the needle.

Customer Engagement

Brand touchpoints are critical to the overall brand experience. Often, when conducting an audience survey, we will buy from competitors, sign up for their newsletters, and find other ways to engage with them, all to see how they engage with us in return.

A refined brand experience is crucial for nurturing leads, encouraging conversions, and building brand loyalty, resulting in return customers.

We examine dozens of other critical elements of competitive and internal marketing during our audits. A good trail camera strategy focuses on monitoring activity hotspots, which are determined by pre-scouting and simply walking a piece of property to get a sense of the terrain.

We use a similar approach for brand audits, examining the global marketplace before focusing on the competition most relevant to your brand. The data we gather influences the creative direction, marketing strategy, and more. 

While it can be unpleasant to brave the tick bites and summer heat in the woods, the results are often very worth it. Going into a new lease, much like going into a new market, is better faced with confidence in your strategy.

To book your consultation, click here.