When it comes to spying on your competition, what can you do with the information you gather? There are actually a number of ways you can use competitive intelligence. Here are a few:
- Use it to improve your search engine optimization campaigns.
- Keep abreast of your competition’s developments so you can maintain a competitive posture. Remember when Google+ introduced Circles? Facebook replied with its own version of friends management called Lists.
- Find out how your competition is responding to your developments.
- Use the information to poll your customers to see if you can improve your own products and services.
- Compare the intelligence against developing market trends.
- Identify your own areas of relative weakness.
- Discover new ways of looking at old problems.
Competitive intelligence is a never-ending process. What you can learn from studying and spying on your competition could improve your own business practices. Your core products and services might have some weaknesses revealed by what your competition is doing. Do consumers have a more favorable perception of your products or those of your competition?
If you want to remain competitive, keep tabs on your competitors and use the information you gather to make your company and its products the best they can be.
Where do you gather information about your competition? There are plenty of sources online where you can keep tabs of your competition and gather competitive intelligence. Here are 21 sources of information for keeping tabs on what your competition is up to.
- Twitter – Are you following your competition on Twitter?
- Their website and blog – Are you following the competition’s blog? Do you regularly check their website? You can use SEO tools to look at their effectiveness in search engine marketing and use that against them.
- Facebook – Are you checking in on your competition’s Facebook page or the walls of their executives? You should be.
- News sites – Do you read industry news portals? That’s a great place to find out what announcements the competition is making public.
- E-mail newsletters – Do you subscribe to your competition’s newsletters?
- Forums – Industry forums are a great place to gauge what people are saying about you and your competition, plus you might be able to lurk on what representatives of your competition are saying in the forums.
- Q&A websites – Is your competition using sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Answers.com? Are questions being asked about your competition? You should be keeping tabs.
- LinkedIn – If your competition is using LinkedIn, find out if they are using the Questions format or joining groups. Go where the competition is going and watch what they are doing.
- Google and Yahoo! Groups – Is your competitor a member of any groups on Yahoo! or Google? Unless you join the niche groups yourself, you can’t know.
- Niche social sites - Are there are social sites within your niche that your competition might be a member of? Join them.
Competitive intelligence is important. Don’t be blind to its benefits. Use these tools effectively to keep tabs of your competition.
There is one big problem with the Internet – it’s always changing. I don’t mean on a daily basis, either. The Internet is a living, breathing animal that is changing by the minute. Take organic search for example. Search spiders are crawling the web as we speak, sucking in new content, following links, and generally trying to find the best content available.
A search conducted now could reveal entirely different results to an identical search performed an hour ago. The rate of change is such that competitive intelligence has a very short life span. Knowing a competitor has x number of links today could be worthless tomorrow, especially if they have been on a link-building campaign. Check the links tomorrow and they may have increased noticeably – they may have dropped as well.
Because the Internet is continually evolving, competitive intelligence is not a one off activity – it has to be ongoing with data available on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean you need to be buried in data, or to become fixated on what your competitors are doing. Rather, competitive intelligence has two major uses. One, from an Internet marketing perspective, it shows what areas you need to work harder in.
From a business perspective, competitive intelligence can help with your more traditional data like prices, models, reputation, free offers, or special marketing programs. With this knowledge, you can make business decisions aimed at either competing head on or adjusting your aim to target areas your competitors are not targeting. Without up-to-date competitive intelligence, your business has nothing with which to base its own progress on the Internet.
Are you chasing the impossible? When it comes to search engine optimization, many website owners are. They spend a lot of time, effort, and money chasing that number one ranking in the search results. Smart SEO is all about assessing your position and comparing it to your competition, then acting on what you can realistically achieve – the probables rather than chasing the improbables.
The number one ranking in search results is not a fixed rank. If you have Google’s Webmaster Tools tracking your website, you will find that your search rankings change, and frequently too. Search results now also take into account factors that are beyond the reach of search engine optimization – these factors include a user’s history. This means that, in some searches you are actually number one – or number twenty-one. You have no control.
If your analysis of your current positions suggests it would be hard work, time consuming, and perhaps costly to chase a higher search rank, then it’s time to change your strategy. You need to work on other factors such as your meta description, your landing pages, and perhaps even your social media marketing.
Your meta description may help you stand out from the crowd and so draw more clicks – even though you are only number two or three in the search results. Spending time on developing a good landing page may see you convert a higher rate of visitors – which would you prefer, more visitors or more sales? Social media marketing, of course, uses another channel to attract visitors.
Don’t chase the improbables – it can be a frustrating experience. Take a realistic approach and tackle what is achievable in the current environment. You’ll save time, money, and your sanity.
Spying on your competition isn’t as hard as you can imagine. There are open places on the web where your competition hangs out and where they publicly disclose what they are doing with their products and marketing initiatives. Here are 5 easy places to spy on your competition.
- LinkedIn – There are so many companies actively using LinkedIn these days that it’s worth a look just to see if your competition is there. If so, follow them. Read their questions and their answers and see who their friends are. You’ll be able to tell a lot just by that alone.
- Facebook – It’s hard to find a company without a Facebook presence these days. Find your competition, follow their fan page and see what they are putting out on their updates page.
- Twitter – Twitter is one of the easiest places to spy on the competition. Find them and follow them. Everything they say will be visible to you. Also, subscribe to alerts that let you know when your competition is mentioned on Twitter.
- Quora – Quora is a fairly new website that is growing in popularity. All kinds of people go there to ask and to answer questions of one sort or another. If your competition is on Quora then you can follow them and see what they are asking, and what they are saying in their answers. What’s more, you can do much of it anonymously.
- Company Blog – Finally, subscribe to the RSS feed of your competition’s company blog. You’ll know as much as you need to know.
Spying on the competition isn’t hard. You can do it online in just a few minutes a day and at relatively low cost.
Social networking is not going away. In fact, the most trafficked websites online these days are social networks, including the #1 site – Facebook. These networks are great places to scope out the competition.
In fact, if you aren’t following your competition on the most popular social networks then you probably are not engaged enough online. I’d recommend, at a minimum, following your competition on these three four social networks:
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- YouTube
But what if you can’t find your competition on these sites?
If your competition isn’t engaged in online social networking then take advantage of this shortsightedness. You’re there so enjoy the competitive advantage. Chance are, however, that you can find at least one of your competitors on these social networks. When you do, follow them. Keep an eye on what they’re up to.
Are these the only social networks to monitor? By all means, no. In fact, if you have industry social networks, forums, blogs or other areas online where members of your profession meet then you should go there and monitor/follow your competition.
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your business to a cross-section of businesses within the same niche. You don’t get any real data about any of the other businesses. Rather, you only get a compiled data set of all the other businesses with an average, or mean, for comparison purposes. So what good is it?
Benchmarking does have its place, but it has limitations. First, the benefits:
- You get to compare your business to the average business in your niche and see where you fall
- Any data that can be measured can be benchmarked
- Benchmarking can take place over a short term or a long period of time
- Information you gather from benchmarking can be used to better market your business and position it within the marketplace
Now what are the drawbacks?
- As competitive intelligence, you can’t get any real data on any specific business
- If you don’t know what you are looking for then you can easily misinterpret the data
- You cannot benchmark data that you can not measure in some way
Benchmarking is useful for a specific purpose – it tells you where you stack up against your competition based on industry averages. In other words, if you have 5 key competitors and their average sales is 10% higher than yours then you know that you are 10% behind the average business in your niche. What you don’t know is which competitors are higher or lower than you (there’s other data for that).
When you want to see where you stack up against the average business in your niche, benchmarking is an excellent marketing tool.
Competitive intelligence, if done correctly (and legally), can give you an edge on your competition that will make it more difficult for them to stay on top. But you’ve got to have actionable intelligence and accurate intelligence. The following three free tools are great resources that you can use to spy on your competition and maintain a competitive edge.
- Google Alerts – This is perhaps the best free competitive intelligence tool on the Internet. Simply add the keywords you want to track (the competition’s brand name, company name, names of executive officers and top keywords) and you’ll get e-mail alerts every time those words are mentioned in online content that has been indexed by Google.
- SEOQuake – SEOQuake is an SEO toolbar that you can download for free and use on your competition. Just visit their website and you’ll know all their important keywords, their PageRank, Alexa ranking, traffic counts and backlink counts. Anything that is important to know about your competition is well within your grasp.
- The Competition’s Blogs – Have you subscribed to your competition’s blogs? Why not? Let them tell you in their own words what is important to know about them. There’s no better way to keep tabs on what the competition is up to that to read their own marketing materials.
These three free competitive intelligence tools should not be overlooked. Add them to your spying arsenal today.
One of the best ways to keep up with the competition is to buy what they’re selling. And if it’s free then it’s really easy to do. Just take that free download and look it over. Can you compete?
It might seem difficult to compete with free, but if you first understand what “free” is then it might not be so free after all.
Most marketers will offer a free download in exchange for an e-mail address or contact information. It’s considered an even trade off. I’ll give you something for free right now if you give me your e-mail address so that I can keep contacting you over and over again to try to sell you something. Of course, we know this works.
But is that the model that you should use? That’s a question that only you can answer, but before you answer it you should see how many of your competitors are giving stuff away for free and what it is they are giving away. If it’s working for them then it might work for you. Consider that.
Competitive intelligence is one of the most important aspects of doing business online. Keeping tabs of your competition and what they are up to will allow you to respond more quickly to market developments. The following 4 tools are free and will enhance your competitive intelligence efforts and make your overall marketing much more effective.
- Google Alerts – This is a mainstay in every online marketer’s arsenal. It’s been offered by Google for a very long time. You can enter as many search terms as you want to and any mention of those terms will be e-mailed to you almost as soon as they are indexed.
- Twitter – You’ve no doubt heard a lot about Twitter, but you don’t often hear about it in terms of competitive intelligence. In actuality, it’s a great way to keep tabs of your competitors. Follow them and you know immediately what they are talking about. It’s a direct line to their communications team.
- Yahoo! Site Explorer – There has been talk that Yahoo! might do away with this tool, but until they do it’s a great way to check the back links of any page on the Internet. Enter your competition’s web pages and see who is linking to them.
- SocialMention – Type in an important key phrase for you and see who is talking about it, what they are saying and whether the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral. A great way to keep tabs on your competition’s social media campaigns.
These 4 spying tools are a necessity in today’s online competitive marketing culture. They’re all free and in just a few minutes each day you can know what your competition is up to.
There is a heated controversy that has been raging for several years about the practice of bidding on competitor brand names for your search engine marketing campaigns. One camp says it is trademark infringement. Other professionals claim it is perfectly acceptable and likens it to setting up a similar business across the street at a busy intersection in the real world. Who is correct?
There is no easy answer and it is one that you will likely have to answer for your own business if you intend to engage in search engine marketing. You may have competitors bidding on your brand name, but should you bid on theirs?
We won’t tell you how to run your business, but we believe in ethical marketing, which is not deceptive and which is based on a strong commitment to “playing clean”. Competition is tough, and it should be, but it should also be fair. The honest truth is, there are enough keywords in any niche to bid on that bidding on the competition’s brand name isn’t really necessary. But that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. And I hope your sleep habits don’t change.
Pay Per Click marketing is a great way to get results online and there are some definite advantages to PPC over organic search. For instance:
- With PPC you have greater control over your search listings
- You can get faster results with PPC whereas organic search can sometimes take months or years before solid results materialize
- More control over titles and descriptions in PPC ads
- It’s easier to track PPC results than organic search results
- PPC is a lot like traditional advertising so many organizations may feel more comfortable with this model
Despite the clear advantage to PPC advertising, there is one sure death trap for any advertiser who lets his competitive ego get in the way of good business sense. The desire to have the top ad can lead to a bidding war if two or more competitors start going head to head in order to win that top spot. In this scenario, no advertiser wins. The search engine wins and the advertisers just end up throwing good money away.
It is best to seek out the optimum ad placement for your keywords based on quality and wise keyword bidding. Don’t let your ego take over.
There’s the old joke about military intelligence being a contradiction in terms. And some people might say the same thing about competitive intelligence. But it really isn’t.
Competition is a fact of life. No matter what industry you find yourself in, you have competitors. And you are likely keeping an eye on what they are up to. There’s no doubt that your competition is keeping tabs on your moves. This is, simply put, “intelligence”.
Intelligence is the gathering of information about your enemy. At least, that’s the way the military puts it. But in business, your competition isn’t necessarily your enemy. They are your adversary in the marketplace, but they have as much right to be there as you do. If you want to compete for business then you’ve got to know what your competition offers and how it stacks up against what you have to offer. That’s why it is so important to keep tabs on what they are up to.
You want to be able to respond to the market in a reasonable way. If your competition is driving the market in one direction while you are trying to go in another then it’s important to measure how the market is responding to you as well as to the competition. That’s information you can use to adjust your stance.
That’s about it in a nutshell. Competitive intelligence might sound like an oxymoron, but we call it a necessity.
One way to spy on the competition to see how they handle customer service and to check pricing is to pose as a customer. Many companies do not disclose prices publicly. And if you are in an industry that typically keeps prices under wraps so that businesses can sell directly to consumers using consultative practices and hide their pricing models until it’s time to close, you can always have someone pose as a customer for your competition.
This is a highly risky endeavor. If the competition believes that you are spying on them in this manner then there might be repercussions. But if you do it right then it’s possible to get the information you are looking for.
Of course, there is the concern of expenses. If your competition’s services are expensive then it could you just to gather information. Some businesses, however, are willing to hire secret shoppers to spy on the competition and let the shopper keep anything that is purchased for personal use.
We don’t necessarily recommend this strategy for your business, but if spying on the competition is a necessity then keep in mind that someone can pose as a customer and gather the data.
Competitive intelligence is gathering information on your competition that can help you be a better competitor. You should know that there are legal and illegal ways to gather this information, ethical and unethical. Twitter presents a great opportunity and is an ethical, legal way to spy on your competition.
When you set up your Twitter account, be sure to follow your competitors so you can keep track of what they are saying. Use a desktop application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. Create a panel just for your competition and add your competitors to that panel so you can track them more easily. This allows you to see the tweets that your competition put out without being mixed in with all the other tweets you see in your tweet stream.
Another way to spy on your competition, and this works if you want to be clandestine, is to set up a dummy account on Twitter. Your dummy account should have an innocuous name that doesn’t connect any way to your company. In other words, don’t use your company name or a variation for the Twitter account name and don’t put your company’s URL in the profile. For e-mail, use a separate Gmail account. You don’t want the Twitter account traced back to your company in any way.
Next, subscribe to all of your competitors. Don’t subscribe to anyone else. Just subscribe to your competitors and keep an eye on what they are tweeting.
That’s two ways to use Twitter to spy on the competition. What tools do you use for gathering competitive intelligence.
You might think, with all the talk of social media, real-time, and video/viral marketing, that SEO is not as important as it used to be. Don’t be fooled. It’s still as important as ever and, if anything, is more important than it ever was.
There are two things more than anything else that influence the importance of SEO – increased competition and search engine policies.
Regarding competition, there’s not a lot you can do other than try to out-optimize your competition. That requires some competitive intelligence, but it also requires some aggressive search engine marketing and keyword research. You need to know what people are searching for and how you can meet the demand for information better than the other guys. That’s a bit of a no-brainer.
The tough one is search engine policies. They change, and they can change drastically. Sometimes without much notice. But they rarely change in ways that are unforeseen and illogical.
For instance, in the past couple of years we’ve seen the search engines go from offering 10 blue links of organic results to offering a handful of organic links along with images, video results, and listings from other verticals. Savvy web marketers should have seen that coming. The rise of the verticals almost ensured that would happen. And people demanding better search results all around was a huge factor as well. Plus, it just makes sense. People searching for information on a given topic may not necessarily be looking for a website – they could be looking for a video or an image.
So, search engines change. And that means SEO can sometimes change. But, again, it rarely changes in ways that can’t be unforeseen or that are totally illogical. Just because your friends are going social doesn’t mean that SEO isn’t still necessary. It is – now more than ever.
Here’s a woman who clearly has a competitive advantage.
What should you do if you find yourself in this man’s position, where your ex-spouse is now your business competitor and knows the inner workings of your business? I think fake reviews is the least of this guy’s problems. He needs to combat her built-in competitive intelligence advantage.
With Google Local’s recent changes in how it will allow local businesses to list themselves, this man may not have much of a choice, but if possible he could realign his business so that his ex-wife doesn’t have inside knowledge on his operations. Otherwise, he may lose the competitive intelligence war.
We live in a competitive world. Everyone wants a bigger piece of pie. No one wants competition, but everyone wants to compete. Intelligence is a word we use to describe ourselves, but it really means information. We want information that makes us more competitive and our competition less competitive. The pressure is on. Some people succumb to the pressure. Then they cut corners and try to compete unfairly or cheat. When they get caught they try to figure out how it all fell apart and make a few excuses. But the world goes on.
Competitive intelligence. It’s really just information. But information for the sake of information is not good. What can you do with it? What do you want to do with it? Chances are, you won’t be able to do what you want unless you figure out how valuable that information is.
First step to being competitive in the marketplace is to know. Know yourself and know the competition. From there, all other things either fall into place or fall out of necessity. Information is the key to winning in competition no matter what the game is.
Competitive intelligence is just that – competitive (meaning you against them) and intelligent (what do you know?). The idea is to outsmart the competition and beat them at their own game. But how?
There are 4 steps to good competitive intelligence:
- Research
- Analysis
- Rallying
- Employment
You can remember these steps with a simple acronym – RARE.
Here’s a brief synopsis of the 4 RARE steps involved in competitive intelligence:
- Research – Just as the name implies. In this stage you are collecting information about your competition. But before you do that you need to have a good idea as to what you’re going to do with the information. Responding to market needs, however, cannot be done without a good grasp of what your competition is up to.
- Analysis – In this stage of the process you are attempting to answer the question, “What does it mean?” So your competition is up to X; great, what does that mean for you? For your customer? For the customer you’d like to win?
- Rallying – It’s time to get your team on the same page and start putting together your game plan. How will you respond to the information you gather in the research phase now that you know what that information means to you?
- Employment – So you’ve planned your actions, now it’s time to get them to working for you. The employment stage is the part of the process where you put your action plan to work. It’s time to test your competitive mettle and your intelligence.
Competitive intelligence is all about outmaneuvering the competition. Beat them to the playing field then knock their socks off. It starts with research and ends with work. Follow the RARE steps to competitive intelligence and be prepared to win.
Spying on competitors is not that hard. There are some simple tools that make it a little easier, but I’d go beyond just the basics and really put emphasis on competitive intelligence. Nevertheless, one of the most basic tools for spying on your competitors is Google Alerts.
Just as you monitor your own name brands and important keywords, you should monitor your competitors’ brands as well. This does a few things for your competitive intelligence strategy:
- Any time anyone mentions your competition, you know about it and can gauge the context more easily.
- Whenever your competition updates their website or blog you are notified
- You keep tabs of important social media where your competition is active
- If your competition adds new products or services then you will be one of the first to know about it when it is announced publicly
But understand that Google Alerts won’t tell you everything. It will only keep you notified of public comments made by or about your competition, not what they are talking about in their board meetings. Still, it’s an important place to start.
