How to keep track of your competitors?

It is wise to keep an eye on your competitors regularly so that you can make better marketing decisions. Sometimes, it makes sense to go in the same direction as your competitors, at other times, it is better to go in the opposite direction so that you’d differentiate.

But how to review your competitors? Well, inside our signature Powerful Marketer Program, we have created the Competitors Mapping Tool that we encourage to use at least once a year, ideally every quarter.

Let's go over the most important things you should track and also how to do it.

1. Business Results of your competitors - or at least as much as is publicly available. Different national business registries typically include information about revenue and number of employees. Just ‘Google-ing’ can give you lots of insights about new products & services your competitors may have launched or perhaps they’ve ventured to another market. So, just keep your eyes open and occasionally check what’s going on.
2. Website - your competitors' websites give you a lot of valuable information. First of all, through visual observation, you can clearly see what they are focusing on in their marketing & sales activities: what is their main Call-To-Action. Do they have any campaigns? Do they have regular blog posts? Do they have a newsletter sign-up? Do they offer a discount for joining the loyalty program? Do they have a leaving-so-soon pop-up or a chatbot? Or if they have an online shop, do they also use an abandoned cart functionality? Also, with tools such as Similarweb.com you can get an estimate of their website traffic and also the top sources for their traffic. Additionally, you can see what type of tracking codes they use when you click on “View Page Source”, you can see whether they use Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager and so on. 

3. Social media - Check which social media platforms your competitors are using and how often they are posting. What do they typically post about? How many followers do they have and has it increased a lot since you last checked? How much engagement do their posts typically have? This means checking the amount of likes-comments-shares etc to see if their content is highly-engaging or not. With high engagement rates, you can estimate that they get better reach as well. By the way, did you know that on Facebook you can also see the types of ads that your competitors are currently running? When you are on their Facebook page, go to ‘Page transparency’ and you can see all the ads, including the visual & copy - how great is that!
4. PR & Media Presence - Do some research and see if your competitors are doing any mass media advertising or if they’ve received a lot of press lately. Media agencies typically also sell this information - so you can get a clear picture of what type of channels your competitors are using, how much money they spend and what is the seasonality of their media campaigns.