Long-term competitive monitoring might not be the first priority you consider to improve your brand’s position, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a crucial piece of a differentiation strategy.
Your brand position is anything but static. Markets are becoming more crowded, customers are faced with more options, and loyalty is increasingly difficult to come by. More than 90% of businesses in 2020 reported that their industry became more competitive in the past three years, and on average, companies report a count of 29 competitors vying for their customers’ attention, according to Crayon. Add to this the fact that up to 80% of your customers are vulnerable to competitive offers, and you can see why it’s probably a good idea to keep tabs on others in your market.
Proactively tracking your competitive landscape is the only way to ensure you are mitigating the risk of others catching you off guard. Yet, it’s a daunting task to keep up with so many vendors, data sources, and steady streams of new information. We can relate: in building tracking systems for our clients with our competitive monitoring service, we recognize the effort it takes to keep an eye on all your current competitors every day–let alone respond to what’s taking place in the market.
Luckily, our experience in implementing these systems has led us to create easy and actionable best practices for anyone looking to better understand their competitive position. With our expertise and techniques as your guide, you’ll be ready to advance your competitive knowledge (and advantage) quickly and easily.
First things first: What exactly does competitive monitoring involve?
Competitive monitoring is the process of keeping a close watch on your competitors and other key market trends so you can respond nimbly to opportunities and threats while maintaining your competitive edge. A well configured monitoring system can give you real-time alerts on new developments across your competitors’:
- Branding, Digital Marketing and PR Campaigns
- Corporate Strategies and Financial Performance
- Innovation in Product and R&D
- New Go-to-Market Strategies and Areas of Traction
The benefits of proactively tracking your competitors are expansive.
By developing a proactive approach to understanding your market and competitive context, you’re better positioned to:
- Make strategy decisions with confident knowledge of the competitive landscape. In knowing your competitors’ latest advancements and pursuits, you can better plan your next market move.
- Anticipate new competitive trends and create your own defensive plan of attack.
If a competitor’s executives start discussing a new technology or partnership, they could be preparing to launch a new product or service. Knowing this could provide you with the time you need to prepare a strategy in response. - Capitalize on competitor vulnerabilities in real-time. If you observe competitors’ customers complaining on social media, sales can respond directly to them to offer a solution.
- Quickly develop content to address the latest market trends. If your reaction is quick enough, you can leverage a first-mover’s advantage in gaining clicks, shares, citations, and links that build off the momentum of a new trend in your industry.
- Become aware of and respond to competitors’ efforts to displace you. If you become aware of new positioning in competitors’ website copy, blogs, press releases, or social media posts that targets you, you can develop your own responsive content to take back control of your brand narrative.
- Benchmark your own performance. By observing competitors’ market performance, you can gain an idea of where your own company is excelling or where you could focus more energy.
Who is competitive monitoring suited for?
Competitive brand monitoring is well suited for businesses in highly saturated or commoditized market environments, with marginal market advantages and a ton of market players (think e-commerce, pharma, telco, and manufacturing.) However, taking a proactive approach to understanding your market and competitive context is advantageous regardless of your role or industry.
For time-constrained c-suite leaders and business owners, monitoring can deliver the insight needed to make better, more informed go-to-market decisions. For marketers, PR managers, and sales account execs, monitoring allows you to be the first to break the news of key developments and ensure that your company is capitalizing on every opportunity and mitigating every risk posed by competitors.
OK, so I can benefit from monitoring my competitors. Now what?
It may surprise you that even with the power that competitive monitoring can have for your business, the process of setting up your own tracking can be extremely straightforward.
You can create your own tracking system with three straightforward steps.
Follow these three simple steps, and you’re well on your way to proactive competitive insight.
Step One: Establish your key intelligence topics based on your business priorities.
Your first step for setting up monitoring is determining which competitors and activities are a priority for you to keep tabs on every day. Like we’ve shared in the past, your tracking scope can include both direct and indirect competitors that are vying for your customers’ time and attention.
In your first stage of establishing monitoring, we recommend limiting your set-up to your top 5-8 competitors. You can think about prioritizing competitors based on the extent to which their products or solutions align with yours, how often you find yourself stacked against them in deals, how much mindshare they have with customers in your industry, and the extent to which your customer bases overlap.
Once you nail down the competitors you want to track, you’ll want to think about the topics that you’d like to receive updates on. There’s a ton of academic literature on what key intelligence topics (KITs) are and why they’re important. For our purposes, you can think about KITs as the tracking focuses that help you make better decisions for your business.
To establish your competitive monitoring focus areas, make a list of:
- The most formidable direct and indirect competitors that are vying for your customers’ attention.
- The top areas of market risk that could affect your industry or your business (COVID-19 precautions, government regulations, new technology advancements, new entrants, etc.)
- Upcoming major strategies you’re considering making for your business (new product launch, acquisition, etc.)
- Any additional top priority “players” (partners, customers) that could have a bearing on your company performance.
Once you establish what you want to track, you can begin the next stage of competitive monitoring set-up: keyword input.
Step Two: Tune in to market chatter around competitors with Google Alerts.
In reaching the second step of your competitive monitoring set-up, you’re past the hardest part of your system’s design. Now that you’ve established what you want to monitor, you can begin plugging your topics into free tools that will do the tracking for you.
Google Alerts allows you to set up alerts based on specific search terms and preferences to get real-time updates on your competitors’ movements. For basic reporting, you can create alerts to track mentions of a competitor’s company name. To get more targeted in what’s reported and how you receive the updates, you can:
Add in keywords for specific products/services and types of updates.
A tip that comes in handy when you’re tracking competitors that have expansive portfolios, you can ensure you’re receiving relevant updates by putting quotation marks around your alert keywords.
This concept is also applicable for the types of updates you’re interested in. Maybe you don’t care to receive an update if a competitor is building a new headquarters, but you do want to know when they launch a new product. You can create an alert for this by adding in keywords like “product update” or “announcement.”
Filter your updates by content type.
Select where you’d like your alerts to be sourced, whether it be news outlets, blogs, or video forums. This is useful if you want to focus on customer reviews of competitive products or services (commonly featured on blogs or videos, for example), or if you’re mainly interested in your competitors’ major announcements (found on official websites).
Establish your preferred frequency.
Google Alerts lets you configure daily or weekly alert digests, or you can choose to receive alerts the moment something happens. If you’re tracking a lot of competitors, a summary digest sent at the end of each week can prevent your inbox’s flooding.
Use Google News for retrospective research.
While Google Alerts is a fantastic forward-looking tracking tool, you can also use Google News to gain a backward-looking glance at major competitive developments. Leverage the keyword techniques outlined above with the Google News search bar, and you can gain a sense for top developments that received digital attention in the past.
Step Three: Track your competitors’ strategic moves over time.
While Google Alerts is an essential tool for tracking what others are saying about about your competitors’ brands, you’ll also want to ensure you’re attuned to what your competitors are saying about themselves. This will help you keep tabs on changes to their product/service positioning, go-to-market targets, pricing models, and messaging strategies over time.
Add the following free tools to your competitive monitoring roster, and you’ll be equipped to flag key changes in how they’re promoting themselves:
VisualPing
VisualPing allows you to track competitors’ websites and receive email alerts when a design or content change takes place. This is a great tool for keeping track of how competitors are executing on their content strategies, scheduling new events, or releasing new pricing models, to name a few areas of application.
Feedly
We couldn’t be bigger fans of Feedly, a content aggregator that stores and organizes competitive marketing and PR content as it’s published. You can subscribe to competitors’ press release and blog pages and Feedly will share newly published content from those sources in a personalized newsfeed. You can also save articles for future access. Feedly is a must-have for anyone looking to stay organized and proactive for their competitive tracking.
Owletter
A great tool for marketers, Owletter aggregates competitive emails and organizes them into a simple dashboard for your review. It also offers custom alerts for priority emails.
With their own respective alerts and dashboards, these tools can either augment your Google Alerts emails, or you can use them as an occasional point of reference on competitors, checking back every few weeks for major events.
You’ve officially bootstrapped your own competitive monitoring function.
Though you can do it in three swift steps, the set-up of this system will be transformational in informing you of key competitive developments in real-time.
If you found any aspect of these steps overwhelming with the number of competitors and activities you’d like to track, you’re not alone! We understand that monitoring can get complex quickly–even if the concepts are straightforward. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you might have–we’re happy to help!
