Your competitors are full of valuable information and believe it or not, they just can’t wait to shove it down your throat. You can subscribe to their blogs through RSS feeds or email, or you can become a subscriber to their newsletters, and you can become followers or friends on any of their social media presences. The danger is that you’ll gain too much information.
Knowing what your competition is doing is a necessity and always has been. The best offline businesses are the ones that have always strategically placed themselves to best advantage – and you can’t accomplish that without knowing where you competition is, and what they are doing. The online business world is no different. What is different are the methods used to obtain some of that information.
You can research and spend some time spying on your competitors – or you can let them send you information. The reality is that you will need to do both. Your own research will uncover a lot of the un-publicized data ( such as keywords) – but that flood of information coming out in the form of blog posts and newsletters for example, can also help to build a picture of where they are at and what sort of threat they present to your business.
Internet marketing can be a two way street – while you are out there promoting your business, you need to be aware of how your competitors are promoting theirs. Are you subscribing to any of the information that your they provide? You should – it’s free and they can’t wait to send it to you!
There are two types of competitive intelligence:
- Battlefield Intelligence
- Noncompetitive Intelligence
Let’s start with Battlefield Intelligence. I call it this because its purpose is to help you gather information that will lead to stealing market share from your competition. This is the most common type of competitive intelligence though it may not always be the most productive. In order to succeed, your intelligence must be actionable and contain enough information to help you develop better products, better deliverables, better marketing and better customer service. It might even require you to develop new products to match your competition one on one.
Noncompetitive intelligence consists of strategies and techniques that do not necessarily impact your competitive stance. However, they are important strategies and lead to the gathering of important information to help you improve your internal processes.
The second type of intelligence, noncompetitive intelligence can consist of:
- Forecasting and predicting
- Describing your current business environment
- Challenge existing assumptions
- Identify your company’s weaknesses and propose solutions
- Point to strategies that are outdated or that may need adjusting
- Provide information to help you formulate intelligent questions for review and analysis
There are many different sources of information and techniques for gathering it. There are electronic sources of information and manual sources. You have in-house assets as well out external assets that you may be able to query for actionable intelligence. Furthermore, your intelligence gathering initiatives may be ongoing or short term.
One method of gathering intelligence about the marketplace is market research. A market research team can ask consumers what they think about certain aspects of your business environment, including strengths and weaknesses of your product and strengths and weaknesses of your competition’s products.
You can also collect the sales and marketing literature of your competition, which will give you some insight into how they are reaching their market and how they are communicating their own perceived strengths.
Academic libraries usually contain articles and abstracts written by industry professionals. Read what your competition has to say about important issues related to your market.
These are just a few of the techniques available in helping you collect actionable competitive intelligence. The first step is to decide just what you need the information for and what you will do with it once you gather it.
If you want quick, clear and concise competitive intelligence information then there are two online sources that are easy to use and very affordable. They’re free.
One of them you are likely familiar with. The other one you may not have heard of, but it’s still just as useful. In fact, the reliability of the information may actually be better than that of the first source. So what are these two sources of free competitive information?
- Wikipedia – Everyone knows about Wikipedia. That is, everyone who’s conducted a Google search. You’ve likely seen Wikipedia land at the top of the search results a time or two. While not all of the information to be found in Wikipedia is 100% reliable, you can usually pick up some good competitive information about the companies in your niche. But not always. If you are the creator of a new niche of business then you won’t have competitors, but you get my drift. You can find Wikipedia here.
- The Free Library – The Free Library is an article directory unlike any other article directory. Most of the articles are original content. And they’re also valuable pieces of information. You can search for articles on any topic by topic, author, title and keyword. It’s like a virtual library right at your fingertips. Find information on anyone or anything. You can visit The Free Library right here.
When it comes to competitive intelligence, don’t leave these two free online sources out of your research.
Competitive intelligence is something you can never overestimate the importance of and you should never underestimate it as an information gathering resource. One resource that you should add to your arsenal of information gathering about your competition is WhitePages.com.
Off line, the White Pages has always been a great source of information about phone numbers for local business. Online, WhitePages.com has traditionally just been a resource that pointed you to other places on the Web. Not any more.
WhitePages.com now allows you to find national chains in your local neighborhood. This is a great competitive intelligence tool – and it’s free. Look for the Store Locator feature on the front page and start looking for your competition. You can find out just where their chain stores are located all around the country.
Sometimes, competitive intelligence is really simple.
Every so often I run across a tool so useful that I have to tell you about it. Such is the case with this free competitive intelligence tool. It’s a tool that gives you a ton of useful information about your competition in a single click. Right at your fingertips. Add your own cliche.
The tool is the SEOQuake toolbar. Here’s what it does for you:
- Tell you the Google PageRank of any web page on the Internet
- Gives you the number of pages indexed in Google for any website online
- Also tells you the number of links pointing to any web page as reported to Google
- Reports the number of pages indexed at Yahoo
- And the number of Yahoo links
- Reports the number of links to any domain as reported to Yahoo
- LinkDomain2 – The number of links reported to a full Yahoo domain, unlike LinkDomain1 (previous bullet point) which reports for a single domain such as a subdomain.
- Shows whether a website is listed in the Yahoo directory
- Reports the number of pages indexed at and links pointing to each page at Bing
- MSN (Bing) LinkDomain and LinkDomain2
- Tells if a website is listed in DMOZ
- Alexa Rank
- Links to Digg, Technorati and Delicious histories for any website
- Link to Whois
- Gives keyword density report
- And a whole lot more
You can also judge the value of your competition’s website with traffic data and monetary value information. There is so much that SEOQuake can tell you about your competition that it’s difficult to NOT recommend it.
The only catch is that it can only be used with Firefox since it is a Firefox add on. And you can add other plug-ins to the add-on such as SEO Toolbar and AdsSpy.
If you want real solid competitive intelligence data then download the SEOQuake toolbar.
Companies have been engaged in competitive intelligence gathering since the beginning of trade and commerce. The tools and strategies have grown more sophisticated over time and society has built rules around what is considered ethical with regard to competitive intelligence.
When it comes to gathering intelligence about your competitors you are relegated for the most part to anything that is considered public domain or information that is publicly available. In other words, you cannot place spies within their organization to steal their trade secrets. However, you can subscribe to their newsletters, blogs and other publicly available information in the same manner as one of their customers would.
If information that was supposed to be secret is leaked to the public then that information becomes public information as long as you broke no laws to acquire that information.
When it comes to the legalities of competitive intelligence, be sure to consult an attorney. This blog post should not be construed as legal advice. We’re just interpreting the playing field of competitive intelligence as we understand it. At the end of the day, any public information or information that is publicly available is fair game for competitive intelligence. That’s a pretty open field if you play a fair game.
Spying on the competition in today’s fast-paced Internet business environment is a necessity. If that is something you place high priority on then you might be interested to know that Facebook could very well be your best spy tool.
Competitive intelligence just keeps getting better and better. And Facebook has recently introduced some interesting developer tools and social plug-ins that could make that a lot easier. However, they are quite controversial.
Privacy concerns are what’s on everyone’s lips, but businesses could find one benefit in Facebook’s Like button. The fact that you’ll be able to see users’ likes publicly, including events they plan to attend, may mean that you can spy on your competition and do it right out in the open. How’s that for a benefit?
Of course, privacy advocates are working hard to nip that in the bud and if they succeed then it will be a moot point. However, until they do, follow your competition on Facebook and see what you can learn about them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
