Businesses don’t operate in a vacuum. Customers, competitors and other forces will impact your growth. If your business operates in a crowded market, meaning you have multiple competitors who offer the same or very similar products and services as you, you need to understand what your competitors are doing. Even if you dominate a market, competitive research will help you continue to stand out and differentiate your business from any new competitors. You can build your understanding of your competitors by doing customer research and competitive research.
When you do competitive research, you want to find out as much as possible about your competitors. You’ll mainly be looking into their business and business model, their customers and their marketing. You want to get a very clear idea of what your competitor is doing and a sense of what they might do in the future. Of course, it’s impossible to get a complete understanding from the outside, but there are ways to effectively gather as much information as you can.
When you start your research, start a document to stay organized and keep track of everything you learn. We tend to favor spreadsheets for this purpose, but you can use any note taking app. As we gather research, we use the same document so that all of our information is in one easy-to-find place.
We start our document by listing out basic information like:
You can add context to this information by noting down details like how active (or not!) they appear to be on social media and whether or not they collect emails for a newsletter. If you’ve interacted with your competitors, this is a great place to keep track of those interactions, too.
An important part of keeping this information organized is noting the date every time you learn something new about your competitors or want to add something to your document. Dates are helpful to keep track of what competitors are doing over time and how they change. It can also be helpful to reference later, when you’re trying to figure out how long it’s been since you did competitive research.
Once you’ve collected and organized this information, you can keep learning about your competitors through proactive and passive research tactics. These are exactly as they sound - proactive research tactics are things you do to go out and gather information, passive research tactics are made up of tips and tricks we’ve learned over the years to make the research come to us.
Start your proactive research by doing an online search about your competitor and seeing what comes up. If they have a website, is that site the top result or are there other results that come up? Does your business come up when you search for a competitor and vice versa? Imagine you’re a customer and note how easy it is to find your competitors.
You should also take a look at their marketing. What marketing channels are they using? Do they have a blog, host webinars, have an email newsletter, or use social media or other sites to promote themselves? Are there channels that they are using that you aren’t, or vice versa?
Most business’ marketing can tell you a lot about how they operate. For example, if a company has a community section on their website (eg. community.companyname.com), encourages customers to use a specific hashtag for their business or something similar, you can guess that they are probably focused on growing a small but loyal customer base around their business. From this, you can also infer that they are very focused on retaining and growing their existing customers. Or, let’s say you see an offer for a free ebook on their website, in exchange for signing up for their email newsletter. You can probably guess that your competitor is trying to grow their email subscriber list by offering a freebie to customers up front.
When you’re looking at a competitor’s marketing, you should also take a look at what words they are using to describe themselves and their business or product. Consider if this messaging is similar or different from yours. Do you like what they’re doing with their messaging? Taking notes on this will help you decide what you like, see what resonates with customers and formulate a stronger brand for your business.
Finally, just as you would check on what customers are saying about your business, you want to do the same for competitors. Chances are customers are comparing or recommending your business or theirs in Facebook groups, on review sites like Yelp or on forums like Reddit.
Proactive research tactics can take a few hours of time, but once you get used to gathering this information, you will get faster! When you revisit competitive research in a few months or even a year, you want to make note of anything that has changed since the last time you went through this process. Tracking these changes will help you identify what may have worked or not worked for your competitor (assuming your competitor stopped anything that wasn’t working for them and started trying new tactics to grow their business!).
There are also passive research tactics you can use to make the research come to you.
The easiest to start with is setting up a Google Alert (here’s an article on how to create and edit an alert) for your competitors. These alerts will send you an email every time your competitor is mentioned online, and you can adjust the frequency of these alerts, too. If you find that your alert is giving you results for websites that aren’t related to your competitor, you may want to refine it by making it more specific. (While you’re at it - don’t forget to set up Google Alerts for your own business.)
If you checked your competitors website and saw that they have an email newsletter, sign up for it! This way, any marketing they send out will automatically get delivered to you, too. As a newsletter subscriber, you’ll be able to figure out how often they send emails and what the content of their emails are. You might even get some ideas for your own emails.
Similarly, you’ll want to follow them on their social media accounts and follow any other online profiles they have. Following them will ensure that you get notifications and see their updates in your feed, without having to go and track them down separately.
If you don’t want your competitor to know that you’re on their email list or following them on social media, you can use your personal account or a secondary account. Of course, don’t use these accounts maliciously or try to antagonize your competitor.
After you’ve gathered all of this information, you’ll want to spend an hour or two taking a look at all of your research and analyzing it. You’ll want to identify patterns and trends, and from that, you can decide if there are any tactics your competitor is using that you want to try, or maybe improve for your own business.
We know competitive research can be time-consuming, but it’s well worth the effort. A combination of active and passive research tactics should help you gather enough information to always stay one step ahead. You might even find some inspiration from your competitors, too.
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Ada Chen
Ada Chen
