Competitive Tracking

When you’re in business, competitive tracking should be one of your top priorities. This article will show you how to start keeping a closer eye on the competition to give your business a competitive edge.

What Is Competitive Tracking?

If you know what the competition is planning to do before they do it, you can be better prepared to respond. Competitive tracking makes this possible, giving you more insight into the competition than you’ve ever had before.

Competitive tracking involves monitoring all aspects of your competitors. How do they handle their marketing strategy? Are they getting higher customer satisfaction? Have they managed to cut costs somewhere in their budget? Are they making major hiring or branding changes? Does it seem like they may be coming out with a new product or promotional deal?

It can be easy to get so focused on your own business that you forget to explore what’s working for the competition. Although, when you ignore your competitors, you miss out on valuable information that can inform your own business strategies and allow you to promptly address threats in your industry.

The professionals at Archintel take your competition seriously. They know how to strategically track your competitors and deliver cutting edge insight directly to your business. You can trust them to get you the fullest picture of the competition so that you can best anticipate your competitors’ next moves.

6 Tips for Competitive Tracking

When you start the process of competitive tracking, it can be hard to know what the best strategies are. Here are six tips to help you get the best results from tracking your competitors:

Figure out your own strengths and weaknesses

Before you can get any meaningful information from the competition, your team should take a look at where your own strengths and weaknesses may lie. Are there areas where you’re excelling or ones where you may be lacking?

If you can first identify these areas for yourself, you can spend more time monitoring the aspects of your competition that could pose more of a threat to your business. Conducting a SWOT analysis can help you more precisely home in on these areas of your business so that you can most effectively keep tabs on the competition.

Get alerted when the competition does something new

Google Alerts can help you stay on top of any new changes your competitors might be making. You can search for relevant keywords related to your industry or particular products. With Google Alerts, you can be one of the first to know if your competitors are planning something new.

Stay on top of social media

For many industries, social media is one of the biggest sources of competitive intelligence. Most companies have business profiles on social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and regularly share updates and announcements.

Analyzing the competition’s social media approach and user reaction can be incredibly valuable for your own business. You can get a really good sense of what your competition may be planning from their marketing strategy. How are they choosing to interact with their customers? How do they advertise their products?

When you start competitive tracking, don’t forget about social media.

Check out the competition’s own site

You can get a lot of information by regularly checking the websites of your competitors. Keep an eye out for new hiring updates, recent promotions or deals, and product images and descriptions. Your competitors may also change the layout or branding of their site, which can signal broader changes ahead.

Pay close attention to how your competitors choose to market themselves. How do they display and describe their products? Is their website especially creative or eye-catching? Do they have a compelling description of their background in an About Us section?

Examining your competition’s website can give you critical insight into the direction your competitors may be headed, giving you time to develop a strategic response.

Pay attention to their blogs and content for keywords

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the surest ways to drive more traffic to your site. But it can be hard to know which keywords are the most relevant for your industry. Looking closely at the blogs and content your competitors are producing can give you a better idea of which keywords are working for them.

Some online competitive intelligence tools even allow you to conduct a comprehensive SEO analysis. This can tell you which keywords are especially relevant to your industry. Then you can use an online SEO ranking tool to compare your content’s rankings in search engine results to that of your competitors. You can use the results to optimize your use of keywords in blogs and other SEO-informed content.

Conduct a competitive product analysis

You need to know how your products measure up to the competition. That’s where a competitive product analysis comes in. Conducting a competitive product analysis allows your business to specifically focus on how you can improve your products compared to the competition.

Are you missing certain features that your competitors offer? Do they have a wider variety of versions than you? How do customer reactions differ between your products and theirs? Are they investing in innovation or new technology?

You don’t want to be the last to know about what the competition has to offer. Regularly tracking the competition’s products can help your business figure out where you might be able to invest or direct more energy.