When you start a business, always be prepared for fierce competition. Knowing your competitors, inside and out, is important to achieve success and your business goals. Data about your competitors contains a lot of useful information.
You do not have to invest a lot of money in using various analytics tools or software to track your competition. There are many simple ways to do that.
Five Easy Ways to Monitor Your Competitors
When conducting competitor monitoring, keep these 5 strategies in mind. They will help you to keep your competitors closer and learn from their failures and success.
-
Check Their Website Regularly
Your website is the first place your customers visit and learn about your products and services. If you manage to represent it well, they may consider purchasing your offerings.
So, regularly checking your competitors’ websites will help you learn the latest changes, news, and product launches. It will enable you to understand how they are delivering information and how user-friendly their website is.
Once you collect the necessary information, you can use that to improve customers’ shopping experiences, such as by improving product pages, writing more engaging content for your blog, using visuals, and so on.
2. Monitor Their Content
Monitoring your competitors’ content can allow you to understand their content strategy. It will also enable you to learn whether your content is better and more engaging than theirs. You can examine your competitors’ content by
- Reading their blogs, evaluating the quality (Is it free of grammatical errors? Does it give any value to readers? Is it engaging?) and length of articles.
- Use online SEO tools to discover the keywords due to which they are ranking high. You can also get information about search volume and difficulty levels of other keywords.
3. Read Their Customers’ Reviews and Feedback
The reviews of your customers are one of the most important customer success metrics. They allow you to understand if your customers are happy enough. So, tracking your competitors’ customer reviews will give you an idea about what satisfies and disappoints their customers the most. You can learn what they like the most about specific products and if they are facing any difficulty while using them.
4. Monitor Their Activity On Social Media
Nowadays, it’s essential to pay attention to social media. Tracking your competitors’ activity on social media is even more important. So, monitor their presence on social media platforms by considering
- Which social media channels they are using
- What type of social media videos and posts and how often do they usually share
- What topics are dominating the most
- What is their target audience
- Performance of their posts, and so on.
5. Subscribe to Their Newsletter
Many people think that emails are not effective anymore. However, it is not true. Newsletters are part of the content strategy of many companies. Thus, it will be beneficial to learn what email marketing strategies they are implementing, what information, and how often they are sending it to their customers. Besides, you’ll learn about their recent news, campaigns, and latest events to keep yourself updated and improve your strategies constantly.
Summary
As you can see, monitoring your competitors does not require a lot of time and financial resources. It is rather an ongoing task for you to improve your marketing strategy, products, services, and web content. As a result, you will be able to attract new customers and increase your sales and revenue.
