No matter how specific your goods and services are, there will always be rivals in the market. Due to the intense competition on social media platforms, every firm is competing for more customers. It increases the value of competition monitoring.

Whether you acknowledge them or not, they exist and are eager for your clients. Consider investing time and effort into monitoring your competitors, even if it might seem, considering everything else you need to stay on top to grow your company.

Using this information, you may develop marketing tactics that capitalize on your rivals’ flaws and enhance your company’s success. You may also evaluate potential challenges from recent market beginners and ongoing rivals. This understanding will help you be realistic about your chances of achievement.

How to Keep Track of Your Competitors

1. Follow Your Rivals (You Have Permission)

It’s crucial to work together with your team. It takes five minutes a day to observe competitors to get valuable information. Utilize project management tools, and ensure that every team member contributes daily. Over time, opponents will need somewhere to run.

Assemble a comprehensive picture of your rivals. List your most powerful rivals. Keep a daily, weekly, and monthly record of them. Choose the marketing tactics that will Concentrate moment to concentrate your investigation on them.

Make sure you focus more on rivals with the largest market shares. What determines them from the competition? Can your company also do that? As well as stay away from the mistakes that others have previously committed. A little bit is often enough. Knowing your rivals can help you keep clients interested in your company.

2. Business Planning

Even though you’re unlikely to learn the precise details of your competitors’ company plans, you may get as much information as possible about their operations via competitive marketing research. The best method for doing this is via competitor profiling, a process similar to developing a consumer persona.

The following elements should be considered while creating a competitor profile:

Serving Segments: How different is their consumer base from yours?

Market share: Do they dominate the clients in your sector? Is their clientele expanding? What subjects, trends, and ideas are they actively aiming for in content marketing?

Distribution Channels: Have they had a blog? Are these prices, discounts, and annual specials available on their website? They may be on social media.

3. Analyze the website and SEO tactics of your competitors

While it is advisable to visit your competitors’ real websites, you may go one step further by using Google tools or those that are related to Google and AdWords campaigns. Searching Google with the phrases “file type: doc site; company name” might reveal hidden resources. You will be astonished at how much information you may discover simply by modifying the file type you use to search for data presentations.

One of the simplest areas of competitive marketing research is SEO since it allows you to compare your website to others’ websites using various techniques.

You must consider the following factors about your website and your rivals:

• Utilizing the SERP Checker tool, rank keywords
• Utilizing the SiteWorthTraffic tool, site traffic
• utilizing Website Authority Checker, determine the website authority
• Do a generic search for your business type and location (e.g., “florist in San Francisco, CA” or “yoga studio in Minneapolis, MN”) on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
• Which page does the competition show up on versus your company in organic results? If your competitors are showing higher on the page, you must focus on your SEO efforts.
• Are your competitors using Google Ads or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to drive website traffic?

4. Website Visitors

Discovering the traffic sources of your rivals may lead to many insightful discoveries. You may use a different technique to monitor the website traffic of rival businesses and see how much traffic each one of them has received over time from the following sources:

• Referrals
• Direct
• Mail
• Search
• Social
• Display Ads

Knowing which incoming traffic sources are strong (and poor) in terms of both volume and quality for marketing and sales initiatives is very helpful. You’ll be able to determine which strategies are successful and which are failing for your competitors. It can assist you and your team in reevaluating your marketing strategies so that you may draw inspiration from your competitors and fill in any holes that other businesses in your industry may have overlooked.

5. Subscribe to the newsletters

The perfect method to keep up with the competition’s happenings is to sign up for their newsletter. You may evaluate their content strategy and output using this. The tone and style of a brand are sometimes set through newsletters, which may provide helpful information about the business’s location. You may learn about a company’s recent successes and the composition of their customer through its newsletters. Additionally, newsletters are used to communicate modifications to products and services, which is highly advantageous.

6. Creative subject lines and promos

Focusing on their subject lines, creativity, and marketing tactics is one of the simplest methods to monitor your rivals. It is beneficial to check what the creative team of your rivals’ competitors is up to because you and they are selling comparable items.

Are they creating campaigns that you perceive to be completely unsuccessful, or have they developed a novel and intriguing technique to sell their brand? Both strategies assist you in maintaining a unique brand voice that sets you apart from the competition.

7. Review consumer testimonials

To find out what consumers say about your competitors, check sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Google Reviews, Foursquare, etc. Here are 20 online business listings to browse.

• Are there any patterns or recurring characteristics in the praise or criticism?
• How do your ratings stack up against the opposition?

8. Join their social media networks

• Follow your rivals on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Facebook recently introduced a feature that allows you to add rival pages to your “Pages to Watch” area and contrast their performance with your own.
• When it comes to interacting with potential buyers, how does the rival company utilize social media?
• How often do they share what kinds of information?
• In comparison to you, how many followers do they have?

9. Set up a Google Alert

• Find out the latest news that hits the web regarding your competitors by using a Google Alert.
• Set up the Google Alert once, and any news stories related to your competitors will hit your inbox. You set the topics and frequency.

10. Visit or Buy From Them

• Do it the old-fashioned way. If they have a physical location or a storefront, check it out in person. Talk to the employees. Get a sense of how they interact with customers. If your business and competitor offer software or a service, sign up for a free trial or have a chat with a salesperson.
• If they have an online store, buy something online and note the process. Track how they communicate with customers before, during, and after the shopping experience.

With the exception of your time, doing a competitive analysis won’t really cost a thing (unless you buy one of their products). It’s time well spent.

Conclusion:

For any firm to succeed across all sectors, competitive analysis is essential. Both established, and start-up businesses may agree with this assertion. It makes no difference whether you are attempting to determine the target demographic for your business or creating an ad campaign for a 20-year-old brand. You must keep an eye on your rivals. But it might be hard to watch every rival since so many exist.

Regular competition analysis can help you stay on top of what’s hot in your sector, from analyzing your competitors’ keywords and rankings to keeping an eye on their blogs and social media postings. You’ll be well on your way to ensuring that your content continues to be stronger than the competition by keeping an eye on what your rivals are doing across all verticals.

What other techniques have you used that have worked to find out what your competition is up to? Share in the comments.

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© 2014 – 2018, Kathy McGovern. All rights reserved.