Why Should You Be Careful About Monitoring Competitors?

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Monitoring your competitors, means staying aware of From ruling the market to the organizations and promising newcomers on the block who could bring an alternate twist to an established item or service.Whether or not you are a C-level executive, advertiser, or product engineer, having a definite competitive monitoring setup that documents how they are performing is significant. This way, you can compete with your opposition who carry the ability to can straightforwardly influence how you sell, market, and work your business and decide your effectiveness. Using the right tools and observing your opponent’s move, from their source of funding and acquisitions to value, this article helps you to : 

  • Utilize that information to examine, revise, and adjust to changes in your industry. 
  • To check your rivals and beat the opposition. 
  • Easily comprehend important competitive inputs to create substantial dominance in your specific industry.

competitive monitoring

Check this out: How to do Competitor SWOT Analysis? 101 Guide

What is Competitive Monitoring?

Competitive monitoring (also called competitive analysis) is the method involved with recognizing and reviewing your rivals’ products, valuing and deals prospecting, and showcasing techniques. Examining and exploring this information can assist you with situating your business to remain ahead.

From marketing initiatives to acquisitions, watching your opposition gives you a critical understanding. It will permit you to settle on more information-driven decisions. Hence you can remain a step ahead of different organizations in your industry.

Checking your opposition can likewise reveal their shortcomings, offering you a chance to utilize any deficiencies for your potential benefit. You can assess how their strategies are acting in the market and adjust yours accordingly to benefit from their missteps or failures. With the correct information and quality examination, you can likewise get significant intel to hint at future expectations.

Competitive monitoring can likewise be a visual window into your industry all in all. While checking out competitors, you can see where the market is moving and filling in the pit holes. This will assist your organization with turning into the most significant player in the market.  It also benefit from market share and growth.

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Here are some pertinent reasons to stay careful about monitoring competitors: 

  • Realize market trends 

By accessing the marketing, pricing, and customer retention strategies of competitors, you can get insights to improve the same. 

Use case: A food chain observes its competitors’ successful strategy by using plant-based alternatives at cheaper prices, it applies the same to gain an idea of consumer preferences and improves its market thereafter. 

  • Search opportunities and identify threats

Tracking competitors’ behavior helps you look for opportunities less explored by other ventures and discover potential existing or novel threats. This way you can utilize your opportunities and fight threats beforehand. 

Use case: As a fitness equipment manufacturer, you may discover niche market segments like people from the age group of 13-18 interested in specialized sports training. Also, you can stay vigilant of when your competitor changes their pricing to outperform you and you cope easily. 

  • Conduct effective marketing and selling 

Knowing marketing trends, you get the data and key aspects of your industry. So you can eventually use them and derive insights to gain a competitive advantage. 

Use case: The marketing team of a smartphone manufacturer observes their competitors spending into enhancing their cameras to attract photography enthusiasts, they shift their strategy to improving their camera features and selling more smartphones than they used to.  

  • Build new products 

As you keep your keen eye on your competitor’s wins and losses in their business, you can create novel products that are successful from your opposition. 

Use case: A software manufacturing company identifies the lack of tools relating to customer management software, launches it, and gains a competitive advantage. 

  • Formulate new developing strategies 

Considering and comparing your and your opponent’s strategies, you can build new strategies that you might be lacking or create innovative ideas.

Use case: To advertise their fitness drink, a company invites a famous sports personality to influence the audience and buy their products, and another competitor employs an athlete and boosts their sales. 

  • Shift customer demand to yourself 

Focusing on competitive monitoring, you get compelled to invest more in your inventory, use high-quality materials, and make your data accessible and explicit helps you to shift the demand to your company. 

Use case: A fashion brand invests in sustainable and high-quality fabrics for its garments and creates a transparent supply chain process, this way they attract aware and environment-conscious customers. 

  • Manage and Improve your reputation

Improving customer service, initiating engagements, transparent communication, philanthropic activities, etc makes you help you manage and improve your reputation by continuing to track your opponents and their activities. 

Use case: A hotel chain faced backlash due to lack of cleanliness, another chain improved and publicized their cleanliness efforts to improve their firm reputation. 

  • Improve customer experience 

Focusing on opponents, and excelling behavior that satisfies consumers helps you to improve your strategies and elevate your reviews as well. 

Use case: A clothing brand improves its customer experience and engagement by updating its loyalty program by giving discounts to its customers observed from competitors. 

  • Expand business

As the management advances by utilizing positive strategies, the business expansion comes as an ultimate result and helps grow the company into multiple industries.

Use case: A delivery service company gets inspired by its competitors to introduce a food delivery option and hence expand its market.

  • Attract more investors 

Reaching out to investors investing their capital into your field through tracking competitors is a great way to lure them by convincing them about your potential domination in the industry investors are interested in. 

Use case: A renewable energy sector giant gets a high number of investors after diverting its power to wind energy, a competitor also solidifies its position in wind energy to attract investors. 

  • Update compliance behavior 

Noticing competitors’ mistakes or improvements through complying with the regulatory directions and guidelines assists you in not committing the same mistakes and inspires you to be updated with the latest reforms. 

Use case: A medicine manufacturer observes its competitor’s compliance breach and does not commit the same to prevent governmental sanctions.

How can you monitor your competitors? 

Here are some of the key steps you can follow to track your competitor’s every action: 

Identification: 

Firstly, you must get an idea of who your competitors are. You can look at industrial reports, customer reviews, search engines at marketing platforms, or by purchasing their service. 

Market Media Research: 

You can also keep track of the competitors and their actions through the media. This is to obtain data on industrial trends, social media engagements, marketing strategies, etc. 

Price Monitoring:

 By comparing your product and your competition’s, price monitoring helps you gain insights on consumer preference and helps in growing your customer base by attracting potential buyers by adjusting prices.

Market presence analysis:

In your specific industry, it is important to track down what is your presence in the market and what tha product perception is. This helps you gain insights on your market presence to avoid committing similar strategies or improve the same. 

Utilize such information: 

Instead of just observing, start creating your strategies to outdo your competitors’ pricing strategy, strengths, and weaknesses. 

Here are some tools available for competitive monitoring:

Tools for Social Media Monitoring

ToolsDescription
Sprout SocialComprehensive social media management tools with competitive reports for FB, X, & Instagram. Offers advanced analytics and advanced listening for deep insights.
PhlanxHas a social media engagement calculator to analyze competitors’ presence.
Social BladeAssesses follower counts and popularity on social media sites. Provides day-to-day updates and live follower count.

Tools for SEO management

Tools for emails, Ads and industries

ToolsDescription
MailchartsAggregates competitor emails, pulls data frequency and compares it to you business.
OwletterAggregates competitor emails into user-friendly dashboards, analyzes changes, frequency and optimizes email strategies.
iSpionageTracks competitor keywords, ad targets, project monthly budgets, and helps in industry comparison.

Basic Competitor Data Points to Track

Here’s a fast rundown of the four most basic competitor data points to track your competitors and change your roadmap:  

Recent Acquisitions and Interest in New Innovation Made by Your Rivals

Try not to miss out on how and where your rivals obtain new technology to discover. This implies new focus regions to direct a business. This way, you observe signs of new capacities, probable item development, leadership, deals, and advertising to utilize procurement and innovation investment data.

Board Members and Financial Backers

Do their financial backers assist organizations with scaling rapidly, or do they put resources with a specific vision? 

board members and financial backers

This data assists you in sorting out what your rivals’ strategies and future plans and arrangements could resemble.

Last Funding Date, Amount, and Type of Funding Round

Watch out for your rival’s financial development. Guarantees awareness of your key competitors and promising newcomers.

Understanding your rivals’ funding stages can signify how your competitors could scale. A Series A round, for instance, could mean an opponent will work out more basic elements. Then again, a Series C round could mean they’ll expand on their abilities to existing features.

News Mentions About the Rival

Watch out for how your rivals are being discussed in the media. Try to keep up with their market positioning, popularity, direction, strategies, and any item changes. This can inform you when you report changes to your items and how you position them.

Basic legal etiquette to follow while monitoring (add ons) 

As you dig deep into your competitors’ daily work, do not breach the opposite party’s privacy or avoid making fraudulent offers to lure investors. It is a basic understanding that competition must be managed to avoid an adverse effect (AAEC) on competition in your market. It is suggested to abide by the thresholds of the regulatory guidelines while adjusting your pricing strategy. Entering into agreement with other companies to fix prices, alter future business practices, exchanging commercially important data and information with the competitors might be some activities which must be avoided to keep the ethical and legal sanctity of your practice.

Pros And Cons Of Using Competitive Monitoring In Business Strategy:

Here is a table to help you determine the advantage and disadvantages of getting into competitive monitoring while attempting to boost your business: 

ProsCons
Helps identify gaps and opportunities for business growth.Increases competition and price wars.
Assists in growing consumer base by attracting potential customers.May result in profit reduction and create difficulty in coping up with the manufacturing costs.
Addressing weaknesses aids in a healthy internal management of the company.Too much data may cause analysis paralysis.
Helps gain an advantage over the other competitors.It is time consuming.

Impact of Competitor Monitoring on Business Growth

competitive monitoring

FAQ

Why is it important to monitor your competitors?

It helps you in gaining advances in understanding market trends, opportunities, threats, and many more to outdo your rivals and get a head in your respective markets.

What is competitive monitoring in digital marketing?

In the marketing and strategy management process of competitive monitoring, every facet of the commercial environment is tracked and assessed. Business rivals and their numerous activities, including events, product innovations, product launches, and pricing changes, are the most significant of these channels.

How do I keep track of my competitors?

Look at their website and consider. Look at their website and consider. Check out the feedback from the public. Rely on search engines. Join their social media channels. Establish a Google Alert. Visit them or make a purchase.

What is a competitor analysis example?

An evaluation of the position of possible rivals is known as competitor analysis. Finding possibilities and hazards connected to initiatives like a new product is a typical market research task that is conducted.

Conclusion

This article helped you understand the basics of competitive monitoring and enabled you to stay a step ahead within your niche market area. To upgrade your overall performance and make a significant presence in a competitor-dominated area, follow these footsteps as discussed by strategically tracing your opponents.  

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