What Is Competitors Monitoring?

To be successful, you need to understand what your competitors are doing – their strategies, marketing campaigns, new products they launch, as well as their pricing. This is where competitors’ monitoring comes in.

Competitors monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the activities of your competitors. From some perspective, it’s an ongoing SWOT analysis of each of your direct competitors. This information can provide valuable insights and can be used to develop your business strategy to grow your venture.

There are various ways to monitor your competitors, including using software tools to collect reliable data, conducting market research, and gathering customer feedback.

When done correctly, competitors’ monitoring can give you a competitive edge. It can help you identify opportunities and threats, and make better business decisions. Join us as we explore the importance of staying on top of your competition and how to do it effectively – only then can you hope to stay ahead of the curve!

Using Competitive Monitoring to Your Advantage

In a nutshell, competitors monitoring is vital because it can help you make more informed, better business decisions.

The gathered data and insights you gain about your competitors can help you develop business strategies to improve your own products or services, so you can better serve your customers, increase sales, and ultimately grow your business.

However, there are many more ways to use competitive monitoring to your advantage, including:

Understand Business Landscape

When you track your competitors’ activities, you gain a better understanding of your industry as a whole.

You learn what strategies are working well for your competitors and can stay up-to-date with industry trends. This way, you can adapt your own products or services to meet the changing needs of your current and potential customers.

Improve Business Responsiveness

Competitors monitoring can also help you boost business responsiveness – i.e., your organization’s ability to effectively identify and adapt to the ongoing changes in the market and customers’ expectations. This is essential in today’s fast-paced business environment, where change is the only constant.

By tracking your competitors, you can quickly identify and react to changes in their strategies or activities – such as a new product launch or a change in pricing. This, in turn, can help you make the necessary changes to your own products or services to stay ahead of the competition.

Identify Opportunities & Threats

In addition to helping you react to changes in your competitors’ strategies, competitive monitoring can also help you identify new opportunities for your business. For example, if you notice a competitor struggling with a particular aspect of their business, this could be an opportunity for you to capitalize on.

For instance, if you see that a competitor is struggling with a particular issue, you might be able to take advantage of that and position your business as a better alternative. This could involve developing a new product or service to fill the gap in the market or simply offering a better solution than what your competitor is currently offering.

Furthermore, competitors monitoring can help you identify potential threats to your business. For example, if a competitor launches a new product similar to yours, you must be prepared to respond. You might need to adjust your pricing or come up with a new social media strategy to differentiate the competitors’ products from yours.

Develop Unique Selling Proprosition

Your competitors’ monitoring can also help you develop a unique selling proposition (USP) – i.e., a factor or aspect that sets your business apart from your competitors. This could be anything from a unique feature of your product or service to a competitive pricing strategy.

Your USP is an essential part of your marketing strategy, as it’s what will help you stand out from the crowd and attract customers to your business. When you know what your competitors are doing, you can develop a USP that will make your business be distinct even in a highly saturated market.

Build Stronger Customer Relationships

Competitor monitoring also contributes to nurturing relationships with your customers – it can help you understand their needs and pain points better. As a result, you can develop more targeted marketing campaigns and offer more personalized products or services that better meet their needs.

In other words, by understanding your customers better, you can build deeper relationships with them, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and higher customer satisfaction levels.

Improve Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Competitors monitoring can also help you better understand your target market and identify the most effective marketing channels to reach them, thus leading to more thoroughly thought-out marketing strategies.

In turn, this can help you allocate your marketing budget more effectively and ultimately improve your ROI.

Competitive Monitoring vs Competitive Analysis

Competitors monitoring and analysis are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Here’s the difference:

• Competitors’ monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the activities of your competitors. It’s an ongoing process that provides real-time data and insights about your competition. This information can be used to develop your business strategy and make better decisions about your own business.
• Competitive analysis, on the other hand, is a one-time exercise typically done at the beginning of a project or initiative. It’s a more in-depth look at your rivals that looks at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can also use this information to develop strategies, but it often lacks up-t0-date information, making it not as useful for real-time decision-making.

Both competitor monitoring and analysis are important for businesses. However, while competitor analysis is a more comprehensive approach that can provide more insights into your rivals, it becomes less and less relevant without regular updating – something that competitive monitoring provides you with.

What Should You Be Monitoring?

Your monitoring efforts should cover several aspects of your rivals’ businesses, so make sure to include the following:

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing your competitors’ social media accounts. This includes their posts, comments, likes, shares, and anything else they do on social media platforms.

This information can provide valuable insights into your competitor’s marketing strategies, target audience, and overall brand image. It can also help you identify opportunities to engage with your competitor’s customers or followers.

Website Monitoring

Website monitoring includes paying close attention to your competitor’s website traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, and other online performance metrics.

For instance, looking into their SEO efforts – keyword rankings for particular keywords, organic traffic, backlinks – can help you find more relevant keywords for your own strategies.

Pricing Strategies Monitoring

Pricing is one of the most important aspects of any business, so it’s essential to keep an eye on your competitor’s pricing tactics – their list prices, discounts, promotions, loyalty programs, etc.

This way, you’ll be able to price your products or services competitively or offer relevant discounts and promotions to attract customers.

Indirect Competotirs Monitoring

In addition to monitoring your direct competitors, you should also keep an eye on your indirect ones.

Indirect competitors are businesses that offer similar products or services but cater to a different market or target audience. For example, if you sell women’s clothing, your direct competitors would be other women’s clothing stores. But your indirect competitors could be department stores, men’s clothing stores, or even online retailers.

Monitoring your indirect competitors can also give you valuable insights into your own business. For example, if you notice that an indirect competitor is successfully targeting a market segment you’re not currently catering to, this could be an opportunity for you to expand your business.

How to Effectively Monitor Competitors

Now, let’s get to work! As you already know, to monitor your competitors effectively, you need a multi-faceted approach. Here is how you can go about that:

Conduct Market Research

Market research, which typically involves conducting primary and secondary research to gather information about your competition, is one of the most effective ways to track and analyze your competitor’s activities.

Primary research involves conducting your own surveys, interviews, or focus groups. This can be costly and time-consuming, but it can give you detailed insights into your competition.

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves collecting data that’s already been published – such as in annual reports, press releases, financial statements, news mentions, or news articles. This is a quicker and cheaper way to gather information about your competition, but it’s not as detailed.

Some of the best methods to analyze the data you’ve gathered is to conduct:

• SWOT analysis,
• competitor analysis matrix,
• gap analysis.

Gather Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a valuable source of information about your competition. This involves collecting feedback from your customers about your competition – their products, services, prices, etc.

This information can help you identify areas where your competition is doing well and areas where they could improve. It can also help you develop your own strategies to improve your products or services.

Industry Reports and Trade Shows

Industry reports are typically published by research firms or trade associations and provide detailed insights into an industry – such as market size, growth rate, key players, etc. This is essential information if you want to understand your competition more profoundly.

Alternatively, you can attend trade shows where your competitors are exhibiting and observing their activities. This way, you understand their marketing strategies, product offerings, and overall brand image.

Besides, participating in industry events is also an opportunity to engage with new prospects as well as establish your brand as an industry expert.

Use Software Tools

Finally, one of the most actionable methods for monitoring competitors is to use software tools. Various such tools can help you automate your competitive monitoring efforts, so you can spend less time gathering data and more time analyzing it.

At Brandly360, we offer a whole variety of automation tools you might need for monitoring your competitors, including:

• price and availability tracking,
• product reviews and rating monitoring,
• cross-sell monitoring,
• exclusive product monitoring,
• promo & sales monitoring,
• banner ads monitoring & tracking.

Some of the most popular tools for competitive monitoring also include:

• Google Alerts is a free online tool that allows you to track and receive alerts about specific keywords or phrases. For example, you could set up a sign for your competitor’s name, so you would be notified whenever their name is mentioned online.
• Hootsuite, Meltwater, and Talkwalker allow you to track and analyze your competitor’s social media activities and provide insights into your competition’s marketing strategies, target audience, and brand images.
• Google Analytics and Ahrefs can help you track website traffic, conversion rates, and bounce rates to get a better understanding of competitors’ online performance.

Final Thoughts on Monitoring Your Competitors

Competitors monitoring is an essential part of any business. It can help you understand your industry better, stay ahead of the curve, create a unique selling proposition, make better decisions, and save time and money.

There are various ways to monitor your competitors, including using software tools, conducting market research, and collecting customer feedback. When done correctly, competitors’ monitoring can give you a competitive edge. It can help you identify opportunities and threats and thus make better decisions about your own business.