What is Competitive Monitoring?
It’s challenging to keep up with everything the competition is doing. From analyzing their last social media posts to the traffic they are getting on their website… you need to be informed about all that data to adapt your strategy.
That’s where competitive monitoring steps in. It’s a strategic approach to monitoring competitors’ moves and staying ahead of the market.
So, why bother with competitive analysis? Because it’s crucial for survival!
Businesses constantly look for competitive intelligence to gain valuable insights and obtain a competitive advantage. They ask questions like, Who are our rivals? What’s their next big product launch? Are we falling behind?
Gathering this data is like being Sherlock Holmes in the business world.
So it’s time to put a plan in place, and we’re here to help. These are the four key steps to learn from your competitors and take a few shortcuts.
Let’s get down to business.
Benefits of Competitive Monitoring
Understand Your Competition to Get Ahead
To truly excel, one must first understand what they’re up against. Competitive monitoring equips businesses with the insights necessary to beat their competition. By monitoring their marketing strategies, companies can spot trends and capitalize on them before others.
Identify Industry Trends
Businesses can discover opportunities by monitoring competitors. Competitive monitoring allows them to identify market trends and adjust their strategies to meet demand, often before the competition knows what’s happening.
Benchmark Performance
How does one measure success without knowing another’s performance? Competitive monitoring provides companies with vital data to benchmark their performance against industry standards and competitors. It’s not just about being good; it’s about being the best.
Uncover Gaps in Your Business Strategy
Every company has blind spots. It’s through competitive monitoring that these gaps in business strategy are revealed. It can highlight product offerings, customer service, or market presence weaknesses. It enables businesses to adapt their strategy.
How to monitor competitors
Keeping tabs on your competitors can give you a strategic edge. From spotting trends to anticipating competitive moves, effective monitoring can transform intelligence into actionable insights.
1) Identify your competitors
I can already hear your response – it’s obvious who our competitors are. They’re the other companies doing what we do, making what we make. We’re Coke; they’re Pepsi. We’re Nike; they’re Adidas.
But you need to think not only about direct competitors – those brands whose products look just like yours – but also those chasing your same market.
There are three main categories of competitors:
- Direct competitors – These brands offer essentially the same product as you.
- Indirect competitors – These have different products but target the same need.
- “Available spend” or replacement competitors – These compete for the same budget as your brand, even if the product is different.
For example, a lipstick brand competes with other lipsticks (direct), lip balm, and lip gloss producers (indirect), as well as eyeliner, eyeshadow, and mascara companies (replacements).
To understand your market, you need to watch what all types of competitors are doing. It’s obvious that lipstick brands eat into each other’s market, but what if buyers decide they don’t need lipstick if their eyes steal the show? That’s why it’s important to consider the whole competitive landscape too.
How many companies you monitor will depend on your resources. With a little imagination, your list could be endless. But you don’t have the time to monitor every competitor, so it’s important to prioritize which ones matter most. There are a few different factors to consider, so let’s take a look at them.
2) Determine what to monitor
Deciding on what aspects to focus on is crucial, and it will help you conduct the rest of your competitive monitoring analysis correctly.
There are a lot of different things you can monitor. Here is a non-exhaustive list of competitor aspects you could monitor :
- Product or service they offer
- Pricing strategies and promotions
- Marketing campaigns and sales tactics
- Customer service
- Supply chain and logistics
- Technological advancements
- Content marketing strategy
- Financial performance
- Online presence and social media engagement
- Email marketing strategy
3) Choose your tools and sources
Now you know what you’re looking for, it’s time to pick the right tools and sources.
Utilize a variety of tools and sources for gathering competitive intelligence, such as:
Websites and Blogs
Competitors’ websites offer relevant information about new products, partnerships, expansions, or strategic changes. You can also hear about leadership changes, the competition’s financial health, and their tone of communication (how they position themselves on the market).
Social Media Platforms
Social media is the best place to analyze how top competitors engage with their audience and create brand loyalty. It’s a rich source of customer feedback that also helps to see how the competition is marketing itself.
Industry Reports
Industry reports are comprehensive documents prepared by market research firms that provide an overview of your industry, including its current state, future outlook, key players, market shares, and significant market trends.
Market Research
Market research involves collecting and analyzing data about your target market and consumers. The data can be primary (collected through surveys or interviews, for example) or secondary (gathered from existing sources like academic papers or online databases).
Financial Reports and Business Filings
These documents provide extensive information about publicly traded companies’ financial health and strategic direction. The main documents you can access are balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements.
Customer Feedback
Reviews and testimonials on third-party websites can provide valuable insights into strengths and weaknesses and show areas where your product or service could be better than the competition. This is the place to analyze how reactive the customer support team is and gather feedback for product updates.
Competitor Analysis Tools
Various online tools are designed to monitor competitors. You can use website traffic analysis, keyword optimization, social listening, and ad management tools. We’ve compiled a list of competitive intelligence tools at the end of the article that you can check out. Let’s move to the next step:
4) Analyze the data
Once you’ve gathered the data points, dive into the analysis. The best way to synthetise the insights gathered into a clear framework? Use a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).
- Strengths: The organization’s attributes that help achieve the objective. This includes internal resources and features that are superior to competitors.
- Weaknesses: Attributes of the organization that are harmful to achieving the objective. These are areas where the business or products are lacking compared to competitors.
- Opportunities: External conditions that could be exploited to advantage. These are areas where changes in the market, technology, or customer preferences could be turned into a competitive advantage.
- Threats: External conditions that could damage the business’s performance. This includes changes that could challenge the company’s current position.
5) Develop an action plan
Based on your SWOT analysis, craft an action plan. Remember, the goal is to monitor and ensure that your business remains competitive and relevant in the long term.
Capitalize on Weaknesses
- Product or Service Improvements: Identify areas where competitors’ offerings are lacking and improve your products or services to fill these gaps. This can include enhancing your existing features, the overall quality, or the reactivity of your customer service.
- Market Expansion: Look for markets or customer segments that competitors are overlooking or not serving well. Tailor your offerings to meet these unmet needs, potentially capturing a new customer base.
- Pricing Strategies: If competitors are perceived as too expensive or too cheap, adjust your pricing strategy to offer better value. This will make your products more attractive to cost-sensitive customers.
Mitigate Threats
- Differentiation: Develop clear differentiators for your products or services that are difficult for competitors to replicate. This could be based on technology, customer experience, brand, or unique features.
- Strategic Partnerships: Form alliances with other companies to combine strengths and resources, helping to counteract competitors’ advantages. This could be through technology partnerships, co-marketing agreements, or distribution deals.
- Innovation and Agility: Invest in research and development to innovate faster than your competitors. Being agile allows you to adapt quickly to market changes and capitalize on emerging trends before your competitors do.
Enhance Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- Brand Positioning: Refine your brand messaging to highlight what makes your business unique and why customers should choose you over competitors. This involves promoting your USP in all your communications.
- Customer Experience: Offer an unmatched customer experience, from the initial contact to post-purchase support. A superior customer experience can be a significant differentiator and drive loyalty.
- Leverage Customer Feedback: Use customer feedback to improve and innovate your products or services continuously. Engaging with your customers can strengthen your brand and turn existing customers into brand advocates.
Implementing Strategic Actions
Once strategic actions are developed, you can establish clear objectives for the implementation. This could include market share growth, customer satisfaction scores, or revenue targets. Then, you’ll monitor your plan’s progress and use the customer feedback you gathered to adjust your competitive monitoring efforts if necessary.
Best competitive monitoring tools
Knowing what the competition is up to is crucial. That’s why having the right competitive monitoring tools can make all the difference. Whether you’re looking to improve your SEO or see which tech stacks are trending, these tools offer insights that can help shape your marketing strategy.
Mention
Mention offers a robust platform for real-time monitoring across various sources including social media platforms, forums, and blogs. Imagine being able to track every time your competitors are mentioned online—that’s what Mention does. This competitive intelligence tool tracks 1 billion sources daily, giving businesses the edge to pivot and adapt strategies almost instantly.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO toolkit that enables users to collect reliable data on competitors’ traffic strategies. Want to know where you are ranking in organic search compared to competitors? Ahrefs can be your guide. They simplify analyzing your competitors’ search engine rankings, giving insights to refine your SEO strategies.
Wappalyzer
Are you curious about which technologies and tools your competitors are using? Wappalyzer is there to unravel this mystery. By analyzing a company’s tech stack, this tool provides an overview of the technologies used by competitors, from analytics systems to e-commerce platforms. It’s like a tech detective, revealing tools that could contribute to your competitive intelligence report.
Intelligence Node
Lastly, Intelligence Node offers advanced AI-driven analytics for competitive monitoring. They specialize in pricing intelligence and optimization, ensuring that companies stay competitive in their pricing strategies without constantly monitoring competitors’ pricing strategies manually.
Everyone loves a deal, right? Intelligence Node helps ensure that your deals are also smart business moves.
Conclusion
Competitors provide a veritable playbook on what to do and, sometimes more importantly, what not to do.
By engaging in effective competitive monitoring, companies equip themselves with valuable intelligence.
It’s not just about being nosy; it’s about being smart and understanding market dynamics.
For example, should you follow or zag in another direction when your competitors pivot? If they launch a new product or service, analyzing its reception can save you from costly mistakes or highlight an untapped opportunity.
But here’s the catch: competitive monitoring isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a continuous process that should be constantly checked during strategic planning.
If you’ve ever been surprised by a competitor’s move, it might be time to take competitive monitoring more seriously.
But be flexible. Your plan will change as you modify your strategy or new competitors enter the market. If you aren’t ready to adapt, you’re doomed to fail.
And if you want to do it without spending time analyzing the marketing campaigns of your top competitors, try Mention for free!
