7 Strategies For Monitoring Competitors
No matter how experienced or new to digital marketing you are monitoring
your competitors is the key to staying on top of current trends and making
profitable decisions.
Monitoring competitors is essential to understand their behavior and
actions, which will help you quickly adapt to market changes, understand
customer needs, solve industry problems and make better business
decisions.
As a result you will be able to strengthen the position of your brand in
the market and offer products and services aimed at solving your audiences
in turn, will help you beat the competition, achieve greater business
success, and be known in your industry.
This article will help you understand all about
competitor monitoring, its importance and how to do it effectively.
So let's get started!
What is competitor monitoring?
Competitor monitoring is a strategy by which an organization tries
to identify its potential competitors, study their actions (e.g. marketing
campaigns, content, site changes, etc.), anticipate their future actions and
determine their strengths and weaknesses.
This helps the organization better understand its industry and target
audience, understand what to do and what not to do and determine which
strategies can work to be more successful.
Competitor monitoring is essential for every business to stay ahead in the
race and beat the competition by creating unique profitable strategies. This
is why competitor monitoring is useful.
Why should you keep an eye on your competitors?
Any business strategy seems incomplete without observing competitors. You
must understand their actions to understand what to do and what not to
do.
This will help you learn what strategies your competitors are working on
and if your audience is the same you can also implement those strategies and
possibly improve your current ones.
Let's take a look at how competitor monitoring can benefit your
business.
Identification of weaknesses
Spotting other people's mistakes is easier than spotting your own and
probably cheaper too. Using the data obtained from monitoring and analyzing competitors.
you can conclude the problems associated with the marketing strategies of
your competitors. You can then compare it to yours to see if you're making
the same mistakes. And if so you can easily fix them.
This will be an opportunity for you to learn what not to include in your
marketing strategy.
Stay up to date with current industry trends
Studying your competitors gives you an idea of what trends are happening
in your industry. Therefore you can use this information to shape your
campaigns, products and services.
Keeping up with trends is vital to offer what your target audience is
looking for and not keep working on old patterns that are out of date and
possibly alienating your customers.
Identify strengths and weaknesses
Analyzing your competitors will give you an objective view of their
strengths and weaknesses. You can compare competing brands to see where you
excel and where you can learn from them to optimize your strategies, whether
it be marketing campaigns, products, services or pricing You can also fix
what you are missing and strengthen your plans.
Discover new brands and audience base
In recent years, a large number of start-ups and new ventures have emerged.
So if you don't know who you are fighting, how can you win the battle? With
competitor monitoring, you can learn about new competitors and their
strategies that helped them make a good impact on the audience.
You can use this data to change or optimize your strategy and ensure that
you stay ahead. In addition, competitor monitoring will help you find
out what new audience your competitors are targeting.
This could be a potential opportunity to increase sales and profits. Now
the most important question - is how to do it.
How to keep track of competitors?
Before you start monitoring competitors, you need to identify them.
You need to know about your biggest competitors, industry leaders and
newcomers. Keep track of where their target markets are and whether they
match yours.
Also find out where your competitors have expanded their marketing
territory and what their results are. This will help you discover untapped
potential markets for your products and services.
So, when you already have a list of competitors don't stop there, keep
watching for new arrivals. And here are some strategies that you can apply
to monitor your competitors.
Check their website regularly
Your website is the first place your customers will land to see what you
have to offer and how your products/services can benefit them.
If you present it well, they may consider your suggestions or become your
regular readers. Therefore, regularly reviewing competitors' websites will
help you understand what changes, news, events and product launches have
occurred recently.
This will help you understand how they present information and how
user-friendly their site is.
You can use the information to improve your customer experiences, such as
better web copy, product descriptions, high-quality blogs and articles,
images, contact information, navigation and other parts of your site that
visitors may look to when looking for information.
Think about how you can make it easy for customers to find information,
make payments, get contact information, etc. and improve it. You can use web
monitoring tools like Visualping to check your competitor's website.
Check Competitor Pricing Pages
Pricing your products and services is critical, especially if you're new to
the industry. And even if you have an established business, you should
monitor competitors' prices to make sure you don't over- or under-price your
offerings.
After all, if you overprice you can scare away your customers and if you
underestimate them your customers may doubt the quality of your
offers.
Therefore the best way to find the sweet spot is to analyze how your
competitors are doing. This will help you develop an effective pricing
strategy that will attract more customers to your brand, as long as your
quality is up to the mark.
To do this regularly look at the pages with prices of competitors to find
out what price they set for a particular service or product, what features
they offer in a particular price range and whether they include free trials
and other related stuff.
And it's important to keep doing this regularly to stay up to date with
current price changes in your industry.
Follow their activities online
Observing the activities of your competitors on the Internet is beneficial.
You must know:
- What are they doing online?
- Where are they mentioned?
- Who do they work with
- What are their PR and advertising campaigns?
- What products and services they market, and so on.
This is sometimes referred to as media monitoring, where you can track
mentions of brand-related keywords on the web.
This will help you gather valuable insights such as blogs, websites or
media where the brand, author name, post time, location, reach, audience
mood, engagement, influence and other details are mentioned.
Media monitoring can be done using automation tools to find relevant
keywords and media mentions, get notified about new searches for a given
keyword, track social media, etc.
A simple Google search can give you a lot of information about what your
competitors are doing. For example, Google your main competitor's brand name
and go to tools, then filter by "in the last 24 hours" or "in the last week"
to get the latest results where they are mentioned.
So, once you've collected all of this data, compare it to your own to
understand your performance. This will give you an idea of what you are
missing, what you can improve on, what you are doing better than them and
optimize your strategies.
Follow their content efforts
Analyzing your competitors' content can help you understand their content
strategy. It will also help you know if your content is better than theirs
or if you need to improve your content game by comparing their content to
yours. This can be done in various ways:
1. Check out their
top-performing content: Check out your competitors' top-performing content -
blogs, articles and more. - in terms of social shares and engagement.
You can find out what keywords they rank for, what topics attract their
audience, the length and quality of articles, and more.
2. Finding the Best Keywords:
Choosing the right keywords can help you drastically change your SEO and
content strategy.
You can use tools to monitor your competitors' keywords, search volume
data, different keyword competitions and more.
3. Attend their webinars:
Webinars are a great form of content marketing to engage your audience,
position your brand and prove your knowledge on a specific topic your
audience wants to know about.
So attend your competitors' webinars to find out how they're doing it,
whether you're a new or established brand. This will help you gauge your
audience's interests, reactions and engagement levels.
4. Sign up for their
newsletters or email updates: Email is still effective and newsletters work
well in a modern content strategy (when done right, of course).
Therefore it will be useful to know how your competitors conduct email
marketing, such as what information they provide, how, how often, etc.
In addition, you will learn about their culture, campaigns, news and events
and will be constantly updated and improve your strategies.
Monitoring your competitors' social media accounts is another great
strategy. Social media is booming and today's customers want to keep up with
the news and notifications on their social accounts.
So it's important to provide them with fresh, unique and problem-solving
posts to keep them focused on your brand.
To do this you can track the social media presence of your competitors by
following them to find out things like:
What platform do they use?
- Types and frequency of posts they share
- Topics they cover
- How their posts work
- Who engages in their messages?
Tracking content on their profiles, such as biographies on Instagram and
Twitter
Gather this information to refine your social media strategy. You may also
want to update your social media profile with the growth in information and
keep uploading new, high-value posts across platforms to attract users,
increase your followers and increase your conversion chances.
Control their marketing strategy
Constantly monitor the overall marketing strategy of your competitors and
then analyze and compare it with yours.
To do this, you should follow their advertising campaigns, content, email
marketing, conferences, PR presence, webinars, affiliates, etc.
Also, find out which influencers they work with and how effective their
plan is:
1. Keeping track of their PR
presence, such as online and newspaper articles, will help you understand
their media interests and improve your PR strategy.
2. Likewise, keeping track of
who is covering your competitors such as bloggers, journalists, influencers
and other content creators on their blogs, websites or YouTube channels will
help you unlock your potential.
You can use this data to build a long list of all those who can tell your
story and introduce your products and services to ensure you get more
recognition among your target audience.
3. Keep track of new products
or services your competitors are launching and the impact they are having on
their customers.
Watch the public reaction to see if their new move was successful or not.
You can use this information to learn how to do this trick even
better.
Read competitor customer reviews
Tracking your competitors' customer reviews will give you insight into
their strengths and weaknesses. You need to look at your competitors as if
you were their target customer, not as that competitor who always wants to
find the negative side of the brand.
So, put on your customer hat and analyze your competitors' products,
services and marketing strategies. This can be done both online and offline,
but online is the easiest and fastest way.
You can check their online reviews on sites such as Google Customer
Reviews, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc. related to your offerings. This will give
you information about how customers feel about the brand's products and
services, what difficulties they face in using them, as well as the level of
satisfaction with the support service.
In addition, it will give you details on pricing, marketing metrics, and
other small details that can help you shape or change your products,
services and marketing strategies.
It will also allow you to avoid repeating the mistakes of competitors,
increase your efficiency and improve your strengths to delight customers
even more.
Sneak up on their job boards
Finding out what positions your competitors are hiring for will give you an
idea of their next strategic move. For example, if they hire a PPC
specialist, then they will soon be investing in paid advertising.
This is a clear indication of their marketing strategy, which you can also
consider and improve to generate more leads and conversions.
Therefore, constantly monitor all the vacancies for which they hire
employees. If you want to have a similar marketing strategy, you can also
start searching as soon as possible and up your marketing game or develop
new offerings.
Automation of the tracking process
Last but not least, following the competition is made easier if you use an
automation tool like Visualping. These tools can change your marketing
strategy:
- Automate your search process to save time and effort on manual tasks
- process a huge amount of information in a given amount of time
- Error-free execution to prevent delays in your marketing campaigns and facilitate contests
- Collect information faster from all corners of the Internet
Let's look at the Visualping example to understand how automation tools can
help you keep an eye on the competition.
Visualizing
Visualizing is a great tool for monitoring changes to your competitors'
websites and marketing strategy, saving you and your team the hassle of
going through hundreds of competitor web pages and analyzing each page to
take notes on changes.
You just need to enter the target website and click the "GO" button and it
will show all the information about the latest changes. In addition you can
receive change notifications by entering your email address and selecting
the frequency: every 5 minutes, hour, day or week.
It also has advanced functionality to compare sites by visual, text,
element or area. And the best part is you can try Visualping for FREE and
see how you can track your competitors and benefit from it.
Characteristics
- Simple and powerful analytics to track changes
- Alerts via SMS, email, API, Slack etc.
- Suitable for a variety of use cases such as price monitoring, career page tracking, new product launches on eBay, social media tracking ad monitoring, traffic changes, research reports, news sites etc.
Over 5 billion checks completed and 800 million changes notified to
date
Visualizing is suitable for businesses of all types and individuals such as
content marketers SEO professionals and more.
Pricing.
You can choose from monthly or paid subscriptions to use the resources
according to your needs. Their prices are as follows:
- Starter: FREE, 2 pages/day, 65 checks/month
- Intensive: $13/month, 40 pages/day, 1300 checks/month, high-frequency search, email support
- Intensive 4k: $24/month, 130 pages/day, 4000 checks/month, high-frequency search, email support
- Intensive 10k: $58/month, 333 pages/day, 10,000 checks/month, high-frequency search, email support
- Intensive 20k: $97/month, 668 pages/day, 20,000 checks/month, high-frequency search, email support
Custom plans: contact sales
For corporate clients, they have three pricing plans starting at $20/month
for 130 checks/day and 4,000 checks/month with additional features such
as:
- Dedicated account manager
- Training and demonstrations
- Phone support
- 99% uptime guarantee
- Secure servers
- 2 months FREE service for annual plans
Conclusion
Competitor monitoring can help your brand in many ways by improving your
marketing and pricing strategy, shaping your products and services and
attracting more customers.
As a result you can witness greater marketing success and higher sales and
revenues. And to save time and effort you can use tools like Visualping to
get competitive information.
