Today we no longer have to go to business conference and snatch our competition’s marketing from their display booth when nobody’s looking. The Internet has changed all that. We don’t even need to leave town these days; we just crank up our favorite browser and start digging.
We’re not talking industrial espionage here, but we are talking about understanding where the competition is and where they’re going in the future so we can prepare our strategies to combat their attacks at our marketshare.
The first thing we need to understand is that the companies that we compete against on the street may not be the same ones we battle with on the web. When searching for a product or service in Google or any other search engine it’s page position; where we’re listed in the search results. That’s the all important question. If the competition is listed before us in the results then we need to bring an SEO expert on board and get our website optimized.
If we poke around on LinkedIn we can find out who works for the company, what they do, how long they’ve been employed and what their talents are. We can checkout their company page to see if any new products or services have been announced.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram are also great places to troll for information.
Start a spreadsheet and list all of your services, products and offerings. List every where you have a presence. Then do the same for the competition and see how your business stacks up against the competition.
Do you have a presence everyplace they do? Do they offer products or services you don’t?
It’s a good idea to fresh this information every months to keep an eye on what’s taking place in your market space.
