This post was inspired by a post I read on copyblogger.com this morning, Become a Content Marketing Secret Agent with Competitive Intelligence, by Beth Hayden.
My main approach to business is not to worry too much about what your competition is doing. I believe you do better spending your time and energy just making sure you’re delivering the best products and services to your clients and customers, and continually working on improving what it is that you offer.
That being said, I do believe it’s a good idea to keep an eye on what the market is doing, and yes, that includes your competitors. That way it keeps you in touch with current trends and can give you a heads-up on any changes coming up around the corner in your industry.
How to Do Your Research
There are a few different ways you can keep an eye on what the competition is up to on a daily basis. No, this doesn’t include you having to buy a fake beard, dark glasses and a trench coat so you can hang out at the competitors store, discretely taking notes.
Here are a couple ways I’ll take a look and see what’s going on with others in my industry…
Google It
- Do a Google search for keywords that would pull up the top ranking competitors in your industry, and in your area, if that helps.
- Visit these sites and see what their offering
- Take a look at their website and see what seems to be working (or not)
- Take a look at what they’re doing on the social media sites. You can do this by clicking on their follow buttons they’ve probably got scattered throughout their site.
Twitter Search
Don’t forget how useful Twitter is for keeping up with the current conversation on anything! Search.twitter.com is a very powerful tool to jump right in and get the current buzz. Then you can save your searches to be able to easily pull up those topics anytime.
Don’t Forget
Check out the article on copyblogger.com for more interesting ideas. Good stuff!
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