In an increasingly crowded business landscape, setting your business apart from industry peers is critical to achieving success. While some leaders may choose to prioritize looking within, keeping a close eye on your competitors’ operations, products or services can also be a great way to stay up to date on emerging market and customer trends.
As experts, the members of Forbes Business Council have each developed uncomplicated strategies for tracking competitors while also maintaining their own successful businesses. Below, 10 of them each share one simple method for monitoring the competition.
1. Buy Their Product Or Service
There’s no better way to monitor your competition than to simply purchase their product or service. Compare their product or service to yours. Is it better? How? Is your product or service better than theirs? Why? Submit several complaints to find out what their customer service is like. Then purchase your own product or service and submit several complaints to find out how your team handles complaints. It’s the deep-dive approach. – Robert Donaldson, Collaborative Strategies Consulting Inc.
2. Do Regular Market Research
One simple method for monitoring the competition is conducting regular market research to track their operations, services, clients and overall strategies. Analyze industry trends, leverage competitor analysis tools and monitor their online presence through social media monitoring and website analysis. Stay informed to gain a competitive advantage. – Justen Arnold, Flexx Mobility & Performance LLC
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3. Set Up Google Alerts
One simple method is setting up Google Alerts for competitors’ names and key industry terms. This will provide real-time updates on their activities, services and client interactions, helping to keep track of the competition in an efficient way. – Vikrant Shaurya, Authors On Mission
4. Do Benchmarking
Benchmarking has been going on for a long time. It essentially means the wheel cannot be reinvented. Competitive benchmarking involves identifying and evaluating your competitors’ operations, services, clients and other relevant aspects to gain insights and compare them with your own business. Find one aspect where your business does better and leverage it to compete. – Udi Dorner, SetSchedule
5. Follow Competitors’ Updates Online
Subscribe to their newsletters, follow their blogs and join their customer communication channels. This ensures you’re informed about their latest developments, product launches and marketing strategies. Additionally, cultivating relationships with customers, even if they use competing products, allows for valuable insights into what excites or disappoints them. – Amber Brown, Grant Cardone Licensee
6. Consistently Seek Out Customer Feedback
One method for monitoring your competitors is to maintain regular contact with clients to learn about their needs and expectations, as well as receive hints about the offers they receive from other companies. Another method is to attend trade events and leverage networking opportunities with industry peers, which can help you to gauge market trends and strengthen client relationships at the same time. – Luca Rovinalti, Svet Solutions Media
7. Perform A SWOT Analysis
Monitoring competitors products, sales, pricing and marketing strategies often is key in business. Performing a SWOT Analysis to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of competitors is important. Remember that you aren’t monitoring them so that you can copy them, but rather to understand their strategies and find ways to differentiate and improve your own business strategies. – Cris Cawley, Game Changer Publishing
8. Track Changes In Their Pricing Strategy
One strategy that we use to track competitors is monitoring any changes in pricing strategy. If we cannot compete with other players in the business world in terms of pricing, then it suggests that we are not doing something right or the competition has found ways to streamline efficiency in their production that we haven’t. – Erik Pham, Health Canal
9. Read Customer Reviews
Regularly check customer review platforms like Trustpilot, Yelp or even app store reviews. This will help you to understand customer sentiments about your competitors. – Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato, Zama
10. Build A Genuine Relationship With Them
It’s less about viewing peer companies as competition and more about viewing each other as resources. Creating a meaningful product with consumers’ best interests in mind requires a lot of learning and open-mindedness. Focus on building genuine relationships with your peers that allow transparency on what is and isn’t working so you can make a truly great product and a broader positive impact. – Chris Bryson, New School Foods
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