Spy on Your Competitors in the Digital World

A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity. Hence, having competition and complete knowledge about your competitors is an absolute strategy that a firm should indulge in. Monitoring competitors provides much more insight than mere industry awareness, therefore it is considered a must to spy on your competitors.

While evolving a strategic management for a firm, it’s an utmost task for managers to know the existing marketplace.Therefore, industry awareness is important but for a deeper understanding of markets, it is necessary to be aware of the competitor’s strategies, their target audiences, the commercialization plan, the setbacks faced by the businesses, etc.

This article deals with the top strategies adopted for competitive analysis and benefits of knowing the anticipated trends.

KNOW YOUR COMPETITOR

Since we are a part of a social environment, working on your project is important but equivalent attention should be given to accessing competitor’s work.

1. Social Media Accounts
   Check the social media sites for your competitors and follow the content they are following and sharing. Check Facebook, Quora, Twitter, Youtube etc and identify what is working best for whom.
2. Technology Stack
   Technology they are using to build their products
3. Company Feedback
   Feedback input of the company on portals like Glassdoor, G2Crowd etc. Figure out what people like and dislike.
4. Patent/Research Work
   Patents a company is filing. research and white papers they are publishing.
5. Job Listings
   What profile and location are your competitors hiring for. Changes they are making to their websites to identify the message they are delivering.
6. Hidden databases on sites
   Many companies have exposed databases online that can give you deep insights into their operations.
7. Web Ranking
   See their Global and Local website rank to identify their focus markets and estimate competitors website traffic.
8. SEO keywords and backlinks
   Using Keywords to improvise SEO’s and keeping an eye on your competitor’s keywords will help you discover the trending and constructive ones. Find competitors keywords and implement your SEO strategy accordingly. there are free keyword spy tools available in the market sufficient for most people.
9. Funding
   Measure the firepower that your competitor has. How fast can they expand and mutate?
10. Customers
    Scan company website pages and different portals to understanding who is using your competitor’s products. Will help you identify new markets or acquire their customers.
11. Website Performace analysis
    See how good or bad is a competitors website when compared to yours. Good performance helps improve Google ranking.
12. New Competitors
    Try to find the competitors of your competitors. Chances are they are your competitors that were hidden from your sight.
13. Advertisement
    See what advertisements your competitors are running. Figure our what story they are selling.
14. Website Pitch
    Study your competitor’s website thoroughly. it is the gateway to acquiring customers. figure out their secret sauce.
15. Blog
    Follow your competitor’s blog and see what they are publishing and what’s working best for them.
16. Google Search- News and Image
    See where your competitors are being mentioned and what images do they rank for.
17. Google Trends and Alerts
    See how the search for your competitor has been trending and what people who search for your competitors also search for. Set Google Alerts to get an immediate alert when a competitor is mentioned somewhere.
18. Mobile App Downloads
    Know how well your competitor’s apps are performing in the App and Play stores. read their reviews to identify shortcomings and learn from what they’ve done right.

MAKING COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS EASIER: COMPETITIVE MONITORING TOOLS

Knowing your competition is important but it is absolutely necessary to use methods that save time and have specialised aid for formulating the competitor’s strategies:

There are several tools available in the market to monitor different parameters.
Startupflux aims to collate all data in one single place and enable you to spy on your competitors in minutes rather than hours.

LEARN FROM THE “LEARNED”: THE COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Competitive analysis forms an important part of planning strategic policies for a company. The competitive environment of which we are a part of requires you to have a complete knowledge of the market trends which can be accessed better with monitoring of competitors.

It enables you to identify gaps in the market for products, services or initiatives. Assists you to price your goods and services both competitively and strategically. And above all gives you new technology and methodology that could be applied within your organisation. To gain a broader insight of the market it is important to learn from the lessons our competitors learned.

Competitive analysis could be really useful if we could save time and resources in searching the net and that can be solved by using tools available in the market for pre-designed analysis work engines. That is where StartupFlux comes in.

There is so much more to monitoring competitors than understanding their strategy. In contrast, you can reveal easy ways to the heart of the consumers, learn a few lessons and find marketing opportunities by understanding their customer base, communications, and strategy.