How to Keep an Eye on your Competitor

Almost all businesses face some sort of competition. Business Competitors should be viewed, not as a hurdle but as challenges. Your business competition may create a plethora of problems for you, but you can try to remain one step ahead of them, keep an eye on your competitor and focus on improving your business model concerning that of the competition. Observe them, find loopholes in their strategy as well as yours and use this information to place yourself in the market efficiently.

If you don't know who is your competition here's The Five Forces Model to Determine Your Industry Competition.

Here are a few ways by which you can spy on competition ,

Monitor their brand

We live in an age where having a social media presence has become very profitable and can be used in many ways for the good of the company. Similarly, in our era, people share all of their experiences on social media, they give positive or negative reviews about companies. You can use this to your advantage by finding out the shortcomings of your competitors on social media. You can use these failures or shortcomings of your competitors, by highlighting their weaknesses as your strengths. Responding cleverly with well-placed marketing tactics can boost the image of your company in a major way.
You can easily monitor the brands of your competitors by using google alerts. However, google alerts, although users may miss out on a lot of mentions of your competitors. There are many useful tools out there with the help of which you can monitor brands of competitors. These include SEMrush and Brandwatch.

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Follow your competition on Social Media

Although this seems like an obvious point, it is one of the easiest yet most efficient ways to keep track of your competition. Follow your competitors on social media, sign up for their newsletters and read their blogs. Companies constantly update these with their latest innovations, tech, and ideas; This can be a great way to learn about what they are doing and position yourself in the market accordingly.

Also read : Analysing competitor's strategy

Find out the keywords that they buy

The way companies position themselves in the market can largely be figured out by analyzing the keywords they buy. One of the best ways to keep an eye on your competitors is to find out the keywords they use, and figure out what keywords you can buy, which will be cheaper and how you can position yourself in the market effectively. Almost all companies use Google AdWords and it is compelling to find out how the marketing teams of rival companies place their ads.
SEMrush, the tool for brand monitoring is also one of the most useful tools you can use to keep an eye on your competitor’s AdWords. You can get an overview of the top organic keywords, distribution of how these keywords rank, paid keywords and also backlinks. And the best part is that you can get all this for free. More advanced options are to be paid for.
However, it is also important to check their SEO, and figure out what keywords bring organic traffic from search engines to the website. Using this information, you can try and optimize your SEO for similar keywords or position yourself differently in the market.

Also read : successful brand getting competition

Follow their marketing strategies

One of the most effective and popular forms of advertising is creating display ads and placing those efficiently to attract users to your website. By keeping track of the ads your business competitors, you can analyze their strategies, find shortcomings and weaknesses and use these to help you create your strategy and figure out where to place your ads and modify your marketing strategy to bring more high-quality traffic. However, it is beneficial to use tools instead of manually figure out how their display ads are placed or what their marketing strategy is.

Most Ad Search is the biggest search engine for finding out digital ads. You can easily find out about the ads your competition has used in the past and the ads that are still active. You can use this to analyze the type of ads that may have worked well for them and create your marketing strategies accordingly.

These are a few ways you can spy on your competition and remain up to date in the market. But it is important to keep the focus on your own company. Your priority is your own business and although you are trying to stay ahead of your competitors, you should not lose sight of your vision for your startup.