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.
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.
Facebook has reached the level of ubiquity that the rest of us covet. Because of that, it is likely that you’ll find your competitors hanging out there, lurking and even interacting with your customers. You could be among them, spying on them as they do so. But you have to do it discreetly.
First, Facebook doesn’t allow business accounts so it is likely that your competition isn’t out there promoting themselves by writing on people’s walls. At least, not as a corporation.
They likely have a fan page (as should you). And you can become a fan of the page, but that’s an obvious CI strategy, isn’t it? Let’s do something less obvious.
Try to find out the names of top people in your competition’s companies. They likely have personal Facebook accounts. One way to do that is to look at the list of followers of the company’s fan page. If you can figure out who the first couple of followers were then they are likely employees. Follow them.
But, let’s back up. Your Facebook account should be in your own name. Better yet, find someone in your company who isn’t a high profile employee (in other words, their names don’t appear on press releases and prospectuses). Get them to follow your competitors. They’ll blend in much more easily.
Now isn’t that sly? It’s also good competitive intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
