Don’t break into their office or take their IP. We DO recommend that you take advantage of all data publicly available on your competitors. It’s scary how much information is available. Knowing your competitors’ successes and failures will be valuable in doing your own marketing work.
Where to start? First, make a list of your competitors. This is not as simple as it seems and should be broken down into three groups:
List businesses you view as your com petitors (Easy: You know them).
•Who Google thinks are your competitors (Easy: Google your name, your product, your market).
•Who do your clients think are your competitors? (Not as Easy: Talk to your clients regularly and use Surveys).
Next, implement an “always on” scanning and reporting mechanism of both your competitors and YOUR business to deliver status, changes, and comparisons.
Competitor data presented by RadiusBridge® analytic dashboards provide for better executive decisions.
What’s Next?
Take the best ideas of your competitors and improve on them. Look at their failures and make plans to avoid the pitfalls.
An example list of items to track include press releases, website updates, staff and phone number changes, advertising volume/budget, and security breaches.
Maintain an awareness of who’s gaining/losing attention to then relate that to your overall market.
Once you have a system in place, part of the larger strategy is to regularly take a broader view of the market and look beyond your own category to refresh your competitor list and forecast future business threats.
It’s likely some of your competitors are already doing competitor surveillance. Talk to us to learn how to identify, acquire, and analyze public competitor information.