| In business, you always need to know what
your competitors are doing. To survive you must perform competitive intelligence
activities and monitor the broader market for new developments that could affect your
company, your products and brands, suppliers, and distributors.
Tracking your competitors is the only way to make to make
sure you are thwarting threats, taking advantage of opportunities, marketing effectively,
and, ultimately, winning in the marketplace. By performing competitive intelligence, you
will significantly increase your margins and profitability.
There's one resource that's often underutilized in this
regard: your competitors' websites.
Today's digital footprint, while increasing corporate
transparency and yielding greater power to consumers in the marketing dialogue, enables
marketers to measure conversions. Companies spend enormous sums of money on maintaining
their websites so that they can attract and influence prospects, customers, and analyst.
Your competitors may wish they could block you from their
websites, but remember that the information they post there is public. If you aren't
harvesting this rich - and free - resource, you are the loser!
Here are 5 things you must do regularly to effectively
track your competitors and uncover their not so hidden secrets:
1. Identify your competitors
Now, this may seem odd to you. You’re probably
thinking, “doesn't a company know who its competitors are?” Not always. New
firms come seemingly out of nowhere, preempting existing companies with different
technologies or approaches they never saw coming.
Often a company in an adjacent area will change its
positioning to try and address your market, or a new startup may emerge in a related area.
You need to create a master list of your key competitors and make sure you keep this up to
date.
To do this, Google the terms, which describe your industry,
your products and services. You can also use a little known feature in Google. In the
search box, type in "related:www.yourcompanyname.com" and Google will display a
list of companies that it considers related to yours. Look for new companies that show up
and see if any of these pose a threat.
2. Check your competitors’ home pages for positioning
changes
When you visit a company's website, first look at its home
page to see if they have made changes to the way they describe their products and
services. Carefully scrutinize how they emphasize different features or benefits and how
they are positioning themselves. Sometimes, you can learn a lot even from the subtle
changes your competitors make on their home page.
3. Review the trade shows they participate in
Trade shows can take a big chunk out of a company’s
marketing budget, so it is important to know which shows your competitors participate in.
Regularly review the events page on their websites and
maintain a spreadsheet with names, dates and locations of the shows that your competitors
plan to be at. You can then see which ones you might want to sign up for.
If you spot one of them at a new show, you might ask
yourself, "why are they exhibiting at this defense-related show?" It might be an
indicator of a new market they are entering – perhaps one that you should consider as
well.
4. Create a competitive intelligence database of white
papers and webinars
Increasingly, white papers and webinars have become the
preferred way for a company to establish its mind share and leadership -- so this is
another area you should be tracking. You should maintain a list of titles of the
white-papers and webinars your competitors create or host to get an idea of their new
direction.
You may not learn much from one single event or white
paper, but you'll learn a lot when you look at these as a whole. You'll see trends and
patterns that clearly indicate how these companies are positioning or repositioning
themselves.
5. Check who they are hiring and firing
Once in a while, check the management team and job postings
pages on your competitors’ websites. Try and see whether your competitors have added
or removed any names from their management team. This is often the only way you may learn
that your key competitor has lost their VP of Sales; no press announcement is likely to be
made about such events.
Competitive intelligence is rewarding, but not easy
You’ll gain a lot by making these activities part of
your routine, but this work does take serious time, effort, and discipline!
If you don't have the time to invest in such activities,
you can always stick to just using Google Alerts to get the top-level news about your
competitors. But the truth is, you're short-changing yourself if you do this. Quality
competitive analysis may not come easy, but it will go a long way towards ensuring your
business success.
The good news is that some new automated competitive
intelligence tools are now starting to become available. Such tools can automatically scan
company websites and deliver any new information that posted. You may want to consider one
of these to make this job significantly easier. |
