How Business Monitoring Can Help You Succeed

Competitive business monitoring is going to punch holes into your budget. So why bother engaging? Why should you waste your time, money and effort spying on your competition? What’s in it for you? As a Toronto SEO company we’ve discovered the truth is, no matter how many times you tell yourself that your competitors and their business doesn’t matter to you, they will have an impact on you in a negative way.  You have to defend your online presence, or someone else is going to eat your lunch!
Now that we have talked about its importance, let’s discuss how the strategy will benefit you.

Helps Judge and Evaluate
Competitor Actions

According to a recent study, 40% of entrepreneurs feel that competition has increased by many folds. If you want to keep up, you have to start monitoring today. If your monitoring analysis are on point and effective, you will find out how your competitors deal with crisis and how they manage to stay on top. This information in turn will help you predict their future moves and plans your moves accordingly. For instance, if your competitor is planning to launch a new product or marketing campaign, you can use the information to outsmart them before word even hits the market. However, you must remember that ethics play a big role in competitive marketing so you shouldn’t engage in any cheap tactics which will end up getting you into trouble.

Helps Arrange Counter
Actions Against Shocks

No matter how good you get at your business, there will always be surprises that you never expected. Things like a shift in trends, marketing strategies or a change in your customer’s preferences will have a huge impact on your business. And if you don’t see it coming, you will be drowned and this will ultimately cause your business to fail miserably. To avoid this, you need to keep yourself informed through your competitors so you can quickly modify your own tactics according to the shifts.

Also, competitive monitoring allows you to keep tabs on who is exiting the market and who is entering. Meaning, you are able to see any new threats in the form of incumbent firms and eliminate them before they establish a strong footing in the industry.

Prepares businesses regarding
how to deal with unwelcome surprises

Unwelcome surprises are always there, lurking around the industry. Whether those surprises be in terms of a change in industry rules and regulations, a shift in consumer preferences or possible modifications to your competitors strategies – they all have the potential to weaken your position in the market. Competitive monitoring enables you to have preliminary knowledge of the changes and shifts to industry which can help you better prepare strategies to deal with the unwelcome surprises.

Helps Minimize Losses

One of the best ways to avoid mistakes is to learn from others’ mistakes. If your business monitoring efforts are really effective, you will find out what the competition is doing wrong and avoid it. So if you are planning to launch a new product but have seen that customers didn’t respond well to the one provided by your competitor, you can stop all efforts, saving time and money. On the other hand, monitoring will also help you detect any moves that your opponent is thinking of making to make you run out of this. Because you will not be the only one monitoring, you can judge their actions and get ready with a plan that will help you stay in place.

Helps Learn
About Untapped Markets

No industry is able to fulfil its customers’ needs fully. There are always some untapped areas in the market which need to be explored and looked into. Unfortunately, it is easier to detect inconsistencies in others businesses than your own. So though it may not look like your business is leaving anything out, running a deep analysis and report about your competition will help you look at the areas where their efforts aren’t focused. This in turn will help you look at your own discrepancies and correct them before time runs out.

Helps in discovering untapped
market avenues

There are always gaps existing in the market which are yet to be untapped. Not everyone is able to discover the untapped market avenues though as it requires detailed and intricate knowledge of what products your competitors are producing and which consumers they are serving to. Competitive monitoring analysis can help you discover the inconsistencies in the market as it amasses a detailed report on your competitors strategies and practices. Thus, after having uncovered the untapped market, your business can come up with products and services that cater to customer needs that were previously left unmet.

Helps Discover New Opportunities

Though your main goal is to beat your competitors and move ahead, competitive monitoring can sometimes give you a chance to explore new opportunities. For example, if your analysis helps you see that a particular business is facing trouble with its cash flow, you can decide to lend a hand and merge into a partnership. Likewise, the competitor’s position maybe so bad that they are looking for a buyer, and this will help you buy their company for a bigger market share.

Helps You Know Your Worth

When you are laying out the groundwork for a particular project or paper, it helps to have background information. Same goes with a business. When you know what works and what doesn’t with your competitor, you are able to make better decisions on how to make your business go forward. Following your competitor will tell you if they are leaving footsteps behind for someone to follow in the industry or if no one cares where they are going.

The truth is, there are hundreds of uses of a well-thought of monitoring strategy, and we have only covered the most important ones. Now that you know how monitoring will positively impact your business, you need to explore social media and marketing tools which help you engage in competitive monitoring so it doesn’t seem like a challenge.