When Should You Conduct Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is a necessary part of conducting business, both online and off line. But when should you do it? Should you do your research on your competition before you conduct your keyword research, during your strategic planning, during the marketing phase or at another time in the business cycle? The short answer: Yes. The longer answer: Throughout the business cycle.
The technical answer is, you should never stop competitive intelligence research.
Competitive intelligence is really the act of monitoring your competition to see where you might have an opportunity to compete against them head to head or respond to a market development with your own development. In essence, competitive intelligence is an ongoing mission.
More important than when is how. What methods of competitive intelligence are acceptable and which methods are deemed unethical? Obviously, if it’s illegal then you shouldn’t do it. It is often frowned upon to plant a spy in your competitor’s business to steal trade secrets. But you can monitor market developments to see what the competition is doing publicly.
Competitive intelligence is important, but not so important that you should risk you reputation to gather information. Stick to ethical behavior and you’ll be just fine.
Check Competitor Back Links Often
One of the most important competitive intelligence tools you have is a back link checker. The idea is to take a look at the inbound links pointing to your competitors’ websites. Many Internet marketers even go so far as to look at the websites linking in to those sites. The reason this is important is because many of those sites could also link to yours and all you may have to do is ask.
Link building is an integral part of Internet marketing. Not only does it drive traffic to your website, but it also can increase your search engine rankings.
Before you do any link building, take a look at your top competitors and their websites. Take a look at meta, keywords used in the content and inbound links. Those inbound links will tell a story and if you see a trend of inbound links from high PR relevant websites, be sure to follow that trend.
Keyword Research As Competitive Intelligence
If you understand Internet marketing in the slightest then you know that keyword research is essential. And competitive intelligence is no less so. Did you know you can take care of both essentials in one action?
It is permissible to steal your competitors’ keywords. When you start your keyword research, one of the first things that you should do is visit the websites of your key competitors and take a look at their meta tags. Don’t just look at the home page either. Look at all of their important pages and make a list of the keywords on each page.
You won’t necessarily use every keyword your competitors use. You probably will use some they aren’t using. But by surveying the keywords that your competition is using, you can better judge how you should approach your niche and which keywords are important. It’s a very simple competitive intelligence maneuver and one that many new Internet marketers often overlook.
Metrics: The Key To Effective CI
Competitive intelligence is one thing. Comparative intelligence is quite another and if you want to really understand what your competition is up to then you need to have a basis for the comparison. There should be a benchmark.
A benchmark is a basis for comparing data. Your benchmark can be anything that makes logical sense, but it is generally one of two things:
- An internal metric or milestone of which you are proud off or that you would like to test
- An industry norm
Which ever benchmark you choose is up to you, but both of them require that you have a set of metrics in place to test your progress. While you are testing your own progress, you should also be testing your competition. How do they measure up against your benchmark? How do they measure up against you? How do you measure up against the benchmark?
These questions can only be answered with a quantifiable metric tool. Competitive intelligence is your best comparative measure.
How To Use Twitter For Competitive Intelligence
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.
Who Is Competitive Intelligence Really For?
Who are you conducting competitive intelligence for? Are you doing it for you or for your customers? Or maybe for your stockholders?
Competitive intelligence should be seen as an asset. Whether you are a corporation or a small business, you have competition and if you expect to remain competitive within your niche then you need to stay on top of what your competition is doing. Your stockholders expect it. Your customers will appreciate it (even if they don’t know you are doing it). Your employees need it. And you have a responsibility to each of them.
Competitive intelligence is something that must be done for your company’s survival. Without a good idea of the competitive landscape within your industry you will likely not survive. That will place your stockholders’ investments at risk, your customers could end up doing business elsewhere, and your employees may lose their jobs. A good competitive intelligence strategy is a necessary part of doing business.
What Keywords Are Your Competitors Targeting?
There are two reasons why you might want to know what keywords the competition is targeting:
- So you can target the same keywords
- So you can identify keywords they are missing and capitalize on them
The competition is certainly targeting keywords. But are they targeting the right ones? Are they targeting the keywords that you should be targeting?
Keywords are not all created equal. Some of your competitors may actually be targeting the wrong keywords. Your goal should be to identify the right keywords and to go after those aggressively. That means studying the keywords that the competition is (and isn’t) using and studying the keywords that searchers are searching for. The right tools can make that process much easier for you. And your competitive intelligence initiatives will go a long way toward making you successful.
Competitive Intelligence Is As Good As Your Tools
When it comes to gathering competitive intelligence, the information you can obtain legally and ethically is only as good as the tools you use. One good tool for gathering information on your competition’s organic SEO campaigns and PPC campaigns is KeywordSpy.
KeywordSpy allows you to search for information in several ways – Domain, Keyword, Destination URL, and Ad Copies. You’ll probably use the Keyword search most often, but the others do come in handy.
When you search for a keyword at KeywordSpy you get a boat load of information on several competitors. You get keyword statistics on PPC competitors, including CPC and search volume. There is even a nice pretty graph to show you the history of your competition in PPC.
You also get an overview of related keywords, which is nice because it also shows you the CPC and search volume for each of those keywords. Then you get samples of PPC ads from your competition.
Another great benefit is an overview of your top competitors, comparing organic SEO information and PPC information on each one. You get a nice list of the keywords for each of those competitors and how many keywords they are using for PPC and SEO.
I would definitely recommend KeywordSpy for conducting competitive intelligence before embarking on any PPC or SEO campaign.
Quarkbase As A Competitive Intelligence Tool
Competitive intelligence tools are a dime a dozen, but good ones are hard to come by. One tool I like is Quarkbase.
Quarkbase will give you a pretty good overview of any site on the web. Some of the information you can obtain using Quarkbase include:
- Important tags
- Key people behind the website and their Twitter profiles
- How often it is bookmarked
- Overview of Internet traffic
- PageRank
- Countries in which the site is popular
- Social popularity
- Where the site is hosted
- A list of tools used on the site
You could get all of this information in other places, but there aren’t too many tools that would deliver all of this information all in one place. At any rate, Quarkbase is just one tool, but it’s a useful tool for spying on your competition. Try it out.
Hitwise Offers Competitive Intelligence Analysis
Hitwise, one of the most credible companies reporting on competitive intelligence issues, cites some interesting stats from the past couple of months. First, if you are a part of certain industries such as automotive, sports, entertainment, business and finance, news and media, and social networking then your industry has experienced a double-digit increase in the percentage of traffic coming from search engines. The same industries also saw a double-digit increase in the amount of traffic coming from Google. These stats are a comparison between October 2008 and October 2009.
This just simply proves that search engine traffic is still good today. And it doesn’t look like any other traffic source will pass the search engines any time soon.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, the best way to use this information is as a benchmark. If you are below your industry average then perhaps you need to step up your search engine marketing. If you are well above your industry average then you can take that as a sign that you are doing well at search engine marketing. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t improve.
There is more than one way to gather useful competitive intelligence. One way is to get your hands on information that you can use as a benchmark. It may not reveal anything about any specific competitor, but if it helps you better understand where you fall within your industry then it’s good information.
Using Public Documents For Competitive Intelligence
One often overlooked source of competitive intelligence is public information documents. These are documents that are a matter of public record and you’ll often be surprised at what you can find in those places. Here’s an example:
(Source) We once found sales and profit numbers for a large privately held company that were included in the transcript of an Environmental Protection Agency hearing. The company was trying to show that it couldn’t afford a large EPA fine, and in doing so had sent its CFO to testify at the hearing. He brought along his spread sheets for the prior three years, which became part of the hearing, and subsequently became a matter of public record through the minutes of the hearing.
Sales and profit numbers are not the only data you might find through public information documents. You could also find web data that typically would not be pubic information. Just as in the case above, companies looking to impress others or engage in CYA tactics might use their private information to make an effort at persuasion in a public meeting. That data then becomes a matter of public record and is accessible to anyone for the asking. All you have to know is where to go to find it.
If you have government oversight agencies for your industry or regulation agencies in any country in which you do business then information from the meetings of these agencies could be public depending on the country. If that is the case then you can mind the meeting minutes of past meetings and see who in your industry made public presentations. Request that information from the agency through a formal information request and you could have your hands on some good competitive intelligence data.
What Are Competitive Intelligence Tools?
In any business you need the proper tools to succeed. That’s no less true for online marketing. And if you want to beat the competition then you need to rely on the proper tools for competitive intelligence. But what are those, exactly?
Competitive intelligence tools are tools that online marketers use to get a better handle on what their competition is up to and why. They range from the purely public – like Google Alerts – to the purely private. Espionage is one element that has been used to gain a competitive advantage, but at the risk of making it sound sexy and adventurous, it can be dangerous. The idea is to gain some inside knowledge on the competition’s processes, goals, and business workings that might help you be more competitive in the marketplace.
Spying on the competition, however, is not like living a James Bond movie. At its worst, it can employ illegal activities like bribery, blackmail, etc. At best, the tactics can be questionable.
With competitive intelligence, companies tend to stick with the more public information available about the competition. In most cases, you don’t have to resort to illegal means to gather information on your competition. Public documents and information tell a good story. But without the proper tools, even that can be a challenge.
The Ultimate Competitive Intelligence
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.
A Sneaky Way To Spy On The Competition
One way to gain some competitive intelligence on your most important competitors is to subscribe to their newsletter. A newsletter is a marketing tool that has come to be a staple for many businesses in a lot of industries. In a newsletter, a company will share the latest information about their company with their customers and announce plans for upcoming offers. You may think that by the time information hits a company newsletter that it’s too late to act on it. Not true. It may be just the right time.
But you don’t just want to head over to the competition’s website and sign up for their newsletter under your company e-mail account. That will send up a red flag and you may never get the newsletter. Instead, sign up for a free e-mail account at Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. Choose a name that won’t arouse suspicion. Then use that address to subscribe to the newsletter.
You’ll have to be sure to login to your free e-mail account to read every issue of the competition’s newsletter. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time. If you don’t have to time to do that then have a staff person do it or hire an assistant to handle that task for you. But it’s an easy way to spy on the competition and gain actionable intelligence for right now.
How Competitive Is Intelligence?
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.
The 4 RARE Steps To Competitive Intelligence
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.
A Simple Tool For Keeping Track Of Competitors
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.
What Is Competitive Intelligence?
It is easy to misunderstand the concept of competitive intelligence if you are not accustomed to working within a strategic organization. It is not merely guessing at what the competition will do. It is not simply monitoring the competition so that you know what they are doing while they are doing it. A successful competitive intelligence program is more proactive and more engaged with the competition on a comprehensive level, without the competition necessarily knowing they are being watched.
The game of business is played in competition. Companies with similar products and services compete for business or market share. In order to win a piece of the pie you often have to take a piece from another company. But to do that you need to know several things about yourself, your competition, and the market, such as:
- What do customers like about the competition and its products?
- What do customers like about your products?
- What would customers like to see in a product that isn’t currently being offered by anyone?
- What weaknesses, or perceived weaknesses, do your products have?
- What weaknesses, or perceived weaknesses, does your competition and its products have?
These are just some of the questions you should be asking. Some of these questions can be answered by having a member of your staff or a friend purchase your competition’s products and evaluate them against yours. Surveys and polls are other ways to get feedback – especially if conducted with anonymity so respondents don’t know who’s asking.
When it comes to competitive intelligence, it makes sense to asking the tough questions of your own company as well as the competition. The idea is to know what’s happening in the minds of consumers as it relates to your business and the competitive playing field. It’s not easy, but necessary.
Using Google For Competitive Intelligence
One of the most important tools at your disposal, and it’s free, to spy on your competition is well within your reach – Google. So how can you use the search giant as a competitive intelligence tool? There are a number of ways.
- Links – If you type in links: followed by the domain name then you’ll get a list of links that point to the site. Great for checking backlinks. You can see which ones are most valuable, which pages they are linking to (and from), and gauge the value of your competition’s links with just one click.
- SES – Search engine saturation is the number of pages a domain has indexed at Google. Using a search engine saturation tool, you can figure out how many pages your competition has indexed at Google.
- Meta Data – If you visit your competition’s website and look at the meta keywords tag on their home page then search for that keyword in Google, you can find out how many pages on your client’s site rank for that keyword.
- Google Analytics – With Google Analytics you can benchmark your site against your competition. Know where you stand in relation to the competition for important metrics like traffic, page views, etc.
- Google AdWords - You can also spy on your competition with Google AdWords. Target their most important keywords for a test campaign and have someone go up at different times of the day to perform a search using the search terms you have bid on to find out if your competition is bidding on the same keywords. You can also judge how much they may be paying per click based on where their ads fall in relation to yours.
Google has several tools you can use to spy on your competition with. Competitive intelligence is one of the most important aspects of running a web business. Don’t leave it out.
Keyword Analysis As Competitive Intelligence
One of the most important aspects of competitive intelligence is keyword analysis. One of the simplest parts of competitive intelligence, it is also one of the most involved. There is more to keyword analysis than simply checking which keywords are the most popular searches in the search engines and which are the most sought after in terms of competitive business. Those are important, yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
One very important piece of the keyword analysis puzzle is the keyword meta tag. It’s relatively easy to scour the competition’s website and extract their keyword meta tags. The danger is that your competition may not have optimized their meta tags well and you’ll just be getting garbage, but if your competition has done a good job at producing optimized web pages, including the meta tags, then you can get their full list of keywords just by visiting their websites.
When using meta tags, you have to visit each page of your competition’s website individually. That’s because they will likely have optimized every page for one, two, or three keywords. The meta tags, if done properly, will show up to 10 important keywords for each page (5 is better) and each page will be optimized for different keywords. So you can see that there should be some overlap from page to page.
At any rate, while the keywords meta tag is not the only place to go for competitive keyword analysis, it is one place you don’t want to overlook.
The First Step To Competitive Intelligence Is …
If you’ve been thinking about doing some competitive intelligence – and you should – then you’ve got to take the first step. But what is the first step, exactly? Glad you asked.
Before you do any amount of competitive intelligence, the first thing you need to do is identify who your competitors are.
That seems like a no-brainer and it is, but sometimes it isn’t so cut and dry. For instance, who are Twitter’s competitors? There are a dozen or so microblogging services, but none of them are at the scale that Twitter is at. Then there are Twitter Search, Bing, and Google – are they competitors? How about Facebook? Facebook seems to be trying to compete with Twitter on some level.
In some industries, a competitor in one market segment could be a partner in another. High tech companies have operated that way for years. Now, it seems, we’re starting to see some of the same happening in Internet services companies.
What you think is a no-brainer may actually contain a few shades of gray. Be sure to identify your competitors for each of your markets and define them intelligently. Otherwise, your competitive intelligence information may not be helpful.
What Is Benchmarking?
When it comes to seeing how you stack up against the competition, one good measure of an industry is benchmarking. With benchmarking, you can’t compare yourself to specific competitors like you can with other types of comparison, but what you can measure is just as important. A good benchmarking tool will put your company side by side with industry averages on important statistics like web traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.
This is important information because benchmarking statistics are compiled from individual companies within a niche, but rolled up into an average for the aggregated whole. It allows you to measure you against the playing field.
With benchmarking, you can see whether you are above the average company within your field for each important statistic or below the average. Then you can tweak what you need to tweak to move your company in the right direction. Don’t overlook benchmarking when you conduct your competitive intelligence research.
What Is Actionable Intelligence?
Is there a difference between competitive intelligence and actionable intelligence? Actually, there is.
Competitive intelligence is any intelligence undergone that leads to a better understanding of the competitive landscape within your niche. Actionable intelligence is any intelligence you can use to improve your marketing position within the marketplace. Sometimes these two kinds of intelligence intersect, but sometimes they don’t. You hope you gather actionable intelligence about your competition and that you are able to act on it in time to be profitable.
But you have to be careful. There are some things that are illegal when spying on the competition.
In general, competitive intelligence simply means surveying what the competition has to offer its customers from the perspective of a customer and then turning that into data that you can use to beat them in the market. But some competitive intelligence doesn’t really mean anything that you can act upon for marketing purposes. For instance, you might find out that employees of Company A within your niche all drive Porsches. It’s nice to know, but does that help you be a better marketer for your company?
On the other hand, if you find out that employee morale is higher at Company A because they have a dress down Friday and catered lunch then you might be able to use that to improve your company’s relationship with your employees. That could in turn lead to better relations with your customers. That’s actionable intelligence.
Other forms of actionable intelligence about the competition includes:
- The price of competitive products
- Benefits of a product that are enjoyed by the company’s customers
- The size of a company’s marketing budget
- Which keywords they use in their AdWords campaigns
- The size of the company’s website
- Which calls to action are effective
- What subdomains the company owns
There are countless other items of competitive intelligence that can be considered actionable as well. And if you take the time to find out what the competition is up to, you’ll likely learn that you can act upon a lot of it.
Why Your Competitors’ Inbound Links Matter
When it comes to competitive intelligence, there are a number of things that you want to know about your competition. One of those things is number and type of inbound links.
Inbound links are important for a number of reasons:
- It tells you how popular your competitors’ website is in other places on the web
- You can see the quality of websites that consider it worthy of links
- You’ll get an idea of how long it might take to build your own link portfolio and the types of links you should seek
- You can analyze your competition’s inbound links for anchor text value
- Check on potential link partners for your own website
Overall, inbound links are important for any website’s SEO. By studying your competition’s links you can get an idea of just how competitive they really are. Then you can design a strategy for overtaking them in the SERPs.
Learn more about competitive intelligence strategies.
What Is Competitive Intelligence And Why Should You Focus On It?
Competitive intelligence isn’t spying on your competition. Many forms of espionage are actually illegal. You can’t, for instance, steal trade secrets. But you can use market analysis tools and other (legal) tools to analyze and compare yourself to your competition in order to make yourself more competitive. But how do you do that online?
The first step to real competitive intelligence is keyword research. Don’t just look for the best keywords for your business. Spend a little time analyzing your competition and see what keywords they are using. In some ways, competitive intelligence on the Internet is easier than in the real world.
But don’t just stop at obtaining a list of competitive keywords. You should also analyze those keywords to see if they are good fits for you. Just because your competition uses certain keywords doesn’t mean that you should. Maybe you can find better keywords for your business.
Competitive analysis also involves a careful study of other ranking factors such as link analysis, PageRank, search engine saturation, social media optimization, and social proof. All of these factors can give you an idea about where your competition stands in the marketplace. They can also give you an idea of what you need to do to be more competitive.
Once you gather all the information about your competitors then you need to analyze it and that’s the hardest part. What does your data mean? Just because a competitor appears to be beating you at search engine marketing, SEO, or another aspect of Internet marketing doesn’t mean that they are beating you where it counts. If you can get sales information and other marketing data on your competition then that will help too.
Is Competitive Intelligence Ethical?
In every area of marketing on the web there are questions surrounding morality and fairness. These debates generally stem from questionable practices, and more specifically from uncovering those that are involved in such “foul play” pertaining to their area of so-called expertise. With Search Engine Optimization, there have been numerous malpractices, known as black hat SEO, from link farms to cloaking, which achieve numerous links by deceiving search engines and misrepresenting actual content on site. Luckily, for those of us that wish for search engines to return relevant results and not those which contain massive metatags or get the majority of their rank from sites riddled with unrelated links, search engines are smarter now.
But the debate still remains, whether or not certain practices are ethical. Competitive Intelligence is one of these areas with a significant grey area between what is considered right and that which is not.
Consider sites that store information about other sites. Whois.net, for example, is a domain-based research service, which will return numerous facts about any domain name, including registrant, server, date registered, and more. Many other sites like Whois.net will disclose similar information. Additionally, searching on Yahoo, appending “link:” to a domain name will show all incoming links to that domain, and it’s various pages.
As you can imagine, there are a significant number of ways to retrieve information about a competitor through publicly accessible sites and databases, so as one may wonder, where is the line drawn?
- First and foremost, anything that is illegal applies online as well. This may be a no-brainer for most of us, but there are still those that think being behind a screen protects them from certain laws, like plagiary. This is most certainly not the case.
- Public databases, searches, and information are available for everyone; what they choose to do with what they find is their decision, and the choice to use that information in an ethical manner is theirs, as well as any consequences which may result.
- Analyzing data is a large part of Competitive Intelligence. Obtaining such data through illegal practices, such as bribery, bugging, or theft, is of course considered to be extremely unethical.
The best way to protect yourself against such practices is to ask a lot of questions of your Internet Marketing Firm. As part of a firm that insists on ethical practices, we are happy to answer any questions or concerns you may have about the services we offer.