It is due to relentless competition that you get to see such wonderful products and services sprouting on the web. So what can online businesses do to make sure they continue to stay ahead of the curve? Competitive monitoring is the answer to this. Let’s find out more.
What Competitive Monitoring is at its Core
At its most basic level, competitive monitoring may be seen as the technology, strategy and methods employed to gain business insights into your competitors. By harnessing today’s technologies, analytical tools and the power of social media, businesses can determine factors which fuel a competitor’s successes, such as promotions, marketing and rankings.
The top online businesses are using tools like Google Alerts, Topsy, SEMRush and InfiniGraph to silently monitor their competitor’s online movement to plan ahead. However, fully capitalizing on the power of these tools is something that’s best left to a seasoned digital marketing firm.
These analytics are looked at by a highly comprehensive and technical monitoring team that observes how a particular business or businesses rank against their clients. This entails several real-world benefits: improved promotions and marketing plans as well as positioning the business to offer more in terms of value.
Get on the Competitive Monitoring Bandwagon or Get Left Behind
It really pays to understand why having an active competitive monitoring strategy in place is so important in the online business and marketing business world, no matter what your niche is.
Fast Reaction Times
Stay well-informed on what your competitors are doing online to get ahead and you are in a position to react quickly to how they are innovating. For example, they might be introducing a new service, discontinuing old products or changing the pricing model, along with other actions as governed by their business needs. Be in the know.
Being caught by surprise can spell disaster for your business – all the more important to know ahead of time what online strategies your competitors are devising to edge ahead. It doesn’t matter how big or small your web presence is; even your local takeout place has a competitive monitoring team in place to see how other restaurants are doing it over the web.
Stand Out from the Pack
Competitive monitoring exists in the online market today for a number of reasons – one of them is knowing what not to do. Gather data on your competition, but with a clear goal: you need to stand apart. Your product and services must do something creatively and differently, and it all needs to be top-notch in order to be memorable. When you know what your competition is up to, you know what you should avoid by learning from their mistakes and pitfalls. By the way, that’s exactly what they’re doing; keeping an eye on your online movements and doing things differently to get ahead.
Identify Areas of Opportunity
Competitive monitoring also comes into play when you need to identify areas of opportunity. You may have identified most of them already, but studying your competitor this way can help you expand further and explore brand new possibilities. Because your competitors have a knack for snuffing out new space no one has taken. Understand who they market to over the internet and the kind of outreach they’re aiming for. You might just beat them to the punch.
Why Competitive Monitoring When I Already Have SWOT?
“Nothing happens in a vacuum”; this particularly applies to competition among businesses. Unless you have well-defined modes of comparison and round-the-clock analysis, you will not get a handle on which market strategy really works in order to dominate a greater share of the market. Online business tactics and practices have changed over the years and what you learned a few years back in business school may not be that effective today.
Historically speaking, companies of all calibers have relied rather heavily on SWOT analysis to get ahead in the marketplace. However, there’s one major problem: you are effectively leaving yourself paralyzed. The truth is often inconvenient and the best way to escape any online competition is achieving almost a complete monopoly in your niche.
On the other hand, competitive analysis is a more dynamic and involved system that focuses on metrics, while capitalizing on the power of social media to truly understand who your customers are and where to focus in order to retain them, while driving competition into the ground. The best way to do this is to learn the A-Z of what you’re competitors are really good at and the mistakes they are making.
CM Aspects to Understand – How it all Works
A well-rounded competitive monitoring service provides many critical insights into what you’re competitors are doing and how they are succeeding. Some agencies tend to focus more exclusively on specific aspects such as advertisement awareness or social media presence, while others prefer a more well-rounded and comprehensive approach, which involves the following:
Social Media Monitoring
You will rarely come across a business today that isn’t relying heavily on social media to drive its marketing strategies. Be it Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, these platforms serve as a hub between prospects and the business. Social media acts as a net to bag more clients, drive marketing strategy and profits.
Monitoring teams look at competitors of all sizes and determine which ones are losing out in rankings. They monitor reviews and ad placements which help to pinpoint new opportunities for promotions or highlight a business’s unique strengths. Truly determining your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can identify growth opportunities.
A well-rounded monitoring strategy and service provider tracks various social media aspects, including but not limited to hashtags, which are very popular way of creating trends in the social media world. A single hashtag can be the subject of something that goes viral and gets millions talking. If your hashtag is trending, there is an ever present possibility of your brand awareness shooting straight for the skies.
SEO Monitoring
It’s important for a business to be aware of how competent they are in achieving a high ranking in search engine results. The higher the ranking, the more clicks they get, which is not necessarily an avenue for growth but more clicks mean more leads, which in turn gets people talking about you. This leads to growth and revenues.
Monitoring teams look closely at SEO rankings and determine how you rank against your competitors. This is particularly important as it highlights weaknesses, strengths and areas of potential growth.
Advertisement Monitoring
When you track competitor social media ads and other postings related to promotions, goods and services, you effectively understand why customers are drawn to or avoid any given business.
For instance, if a competitor likes to promote their brand on social media around specific times, it can give you insights into what the best time to promote your services is. If ads are successful, you can determine where they were posted and why they worked so well.
This helps to compete with external businesses, in addition to demonstrating consumer trends, which is crucial in understanding the businesses landscape itself. A fully equipped monitoring team thoroughly assesses these ads from a comparative standpoint which greatly helps your business.
Reporting
Another standout aspect of a good monitoring agency is how they relay their findings to you in order to keep you in the loop at all times. Rather than trying to digest complicated analytics report full of technical jargon, you get something that gets right to the point.
A great team constantly keeps their clients in the loop, while comparative reports and analysis help to create a broader understanding of current market trends. If your business is not making gains where it should or if a competitor is steadily making progress, these trends can tie in heavily and you need to be on top of them. They should not be ignored as such and timely reports give you a view of ground realities on a day-to-day basis.
How Top Businesses Are Doing it
Here are some ways through which the most successful businesses in their niche gaining an edge over their competition through competitive monitoring analysis:
Monitoring Social Activity
Through ‘social listening’, you can keep an eye on what your competitors are posting, what they share, how they communicate with customers, what’s trending in their business and what’s not. Setting up Facebook and Twitter lists is a good way to accomplish this. Use a personal profile to Like/follow your competitor’s page and organize them into lists.
This eliminates the need to visit their profile page regularly or checking your newsfeed as you can monitor their content by clicking through the list on a day-to-day basis.
Making Website Comparisons
The company website truly represents your digital presence – it is crucial to outrun your competitors in terms of website optimization, particularly for mobile. Competitive monitoring of key websites look into the following:
Page Variety – Do competing businesses offer a wide assortment of landing pages, comprehensive info on pricing and a detailed About Us page?
Navigation – Is the website easy to navigate? Are competitors matching user experience to what your buyer’s consider savvy?
Social Integration – Are there social media ‘follow’ buttons on site pages? What about opportunities for sharing landing pages?
Load Times – How quickly do web pages load on mobile and nonmobile devices?
Targeting
Prospects simply do not have the time to relate to generalized information on your product or services. You see, your competitors are working towards the same goal more or less, but that doesn’t mean they are going for the same buyer persona as you.
Take Qdoba and Chipotle, for example – they have a similar product though the latter projects itself as an eco-friendly business. Take home lesson: understand what kind of customers your competitors are trying to net and pay extra close attention, if those happens to be the same prospect you’re eyeing.
Measuring Success through Competitive Monitoring
Still wondering why you should spy on the competition? Here are just three ways in which a robust competitive monitoring service can help you overcome the odds:
Helps to Understand Untapped Markets
There’s no such thing as a business being able to satisfy all of their customers’ needs and desires. It is only natural to see your competitor’s inconsistencies more than your own. It may appear that you’re doing everything right to get ahead, however, running an in-depth analysis into your competition helps to find potential markets they haven’t tapped into. This also helps you identify certain pitfalls and correct them before your competitors get to strike the iron while it’s hot.
Better Equips You to Deal with Unwelcome Guests
Unexpected changes in the industry can come knocking on your door without warning – change in rules and regulations, a shift in your competitor’s business strategies or general consumer behavior as well as preferences. Do you really need surprises that can weaken your market position almost overnight? Competitive knowledge acts as an “early warning system” and lets you know what shifts are about to occur so you are ready to modify your action plan accordingly.
Cut Back Losses
Listen in to your competitors and see what they’re doing wrong. Avoid the mistakes they are making while capitalizing on what they couldn’t get right in the first place. Maybe a shift in their policies chased away prospects – this is where you jump in to offer something unique. Also determine what your competitor’s next move is and plan well in advance to save a tremendous amount of time and money that may have been wasted otherwise trying to cover losses.
What the Future Holds for Competitive Marketing
As social media continues to evolve at an exponential pace and competition heats up, you can bet competitive monitoring is going to play a governing role in determining who emerges on top.
Fierce competition is an inherent part of business and it makes complete, logical sense that every business needs to have an effective long-term competitive monitoring strategy in place. Without it, you’d be taking shots in the dark and just hoping to hit the bull’s-eye out of sheer luck.
The AOK Marketing Advantage
Instead of marketing in a vacuum, know precisely what your competitors are up to with each post, hashtag and keyword. AOK’s competitive marketing strategies help you get a firm handle on what your competitors’ next moves are, before they even get a chance to execute them.
Cut your losses and call us today at 1.888.566.2577 for a FREE consultation or get in touch with via email, as you stand to only gain with a comprehensive competitive monitoring strategy.
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