Monitoring your business competition can help you find new strategies and approaches to scale your business. Researching and analyzing your competition allows you to stay on top of industry trends, find out what customers within your target market like, and incorporate new ideas into your business. Here are eight ways you can approach monitoring your business competition today.
Monitoring your business competition is crucial. It helps you analyze what enables business success in your industry, what customers are engaging with, and how you can use that information to achieve your own success.
If you want to make informed decisions about your business and marketing strategies, then data mining your competition is necessary. Here are eight ways you can monitor your competition:
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Social Media Engagement
The simplest way to monitor your business competition is to regularly check heir social media updates. Look at the kind of marketing campaign they undertake, how customers respond to them, and how well their marketing strategies help them grow their business.
Learning from your competition helps you avoid potential mistakes by learning from others. If you find that a certain aspect of their strategy isn’t working, then ask yourself why. Do the same for strategies that are working.
They key takeaway here is to find opportunities to market your own business in a way that surpasses your competition.
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Customer Engagement
Aside from their marketing strategies, how they approach their customers is equally important. What kind of content do customers respond to?
What makes customers leave positive feedback, and what creates negative feedback? This will show you what works for your competition, and more importantly, what doesn’t. This tells you what you should incorporate into your own marketing strategy, and acts as a foundation that lets you know what customers are looking for from your industry.
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Visit Their Website
Here, you’ll be looking at what products or services they’re offering on their website, as well as how they’ve framed their website.
Look at the target keywords they’ve used, and make a note of them. Find out what kind of an online checkout process they’ve enabled, and whether you think you can do the same.
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Customer Testimonials and Reviews
These will be available on your competition’s website, on their social media accounts, as well as on relevant review websites.
Customers testimonials let you know what the customers appreciate about your competition. You can also discover what customers don’t like about your competition through negative reviews. Avoid making the same mistakes yourself and you’ll appear better than your competition.
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SEO Comparison
Log on to the Google search engine and input keywords relevant to your industry in the search field. Here, you’re trying to discover where you rank against all your competitors on the search engine.
Do you see your website alongside your competition? Or is it much further down? If you don’t see your website, then this shows that your website isn’t properly search engine optimized. You can run a search on keywords your competition is using to boost their SEO. Then add those to your website to rank higher on search engines.
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Utilize Google Alerts
Monitoring tools can enable you to track your competition without additional effort on your part. Google Alerts is one of the best tools for achieving this.
Add the targeted keywords you want Google Alerts to monitor. Ensure that you’ve enabled the feature that allows notifications to be directly mailed to you.
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Press and Public Relations
Following what press outlets, journalists and blogs are saying about your competition. Keep in mind though that PR can also be a form of paid advertising. Even if that’s the case, you’ll learn how to engage with this kind of marketing yourself.
But not all press outlets and journalists are paid by businesses. Follow reputable news outlets to see what the general reputation about your competition is. Are there any journalists that they specifically work with? What about blogs?
News media is a powerful tool that informs public opinion. Understanding where your competition is positioned here and how you can do the same for your business can enable you to reach larger demographics.
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Prices, Discounts and Offers
Price fluctuations are a part of any business. From when you’re setting the price for your products or services from the first time, as well as afterwards, competition research here is necessary. Learning about your biggest competitions pricing strategy is important. This tells you about prices that customers see as valid.
Learning about the kinds of discounts, coupons or offers they provide let you make similar offers yourself. Remember that customers will expect similar if not better offers from your business. To boost conversions, the right pricing strategy is necessary.
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