If you are in any kind of business, chances are you have competition. Basically in business what that means is that you are trying to get your customer to buy from you instead of your rival. Although collaboration over competition is an ideal motto to live by, it is not always a possible solution to dealing with competition. The best thing you can do with competition is to learn from it.

10 THINGS TO LEARN ABOUT YOUR COMPETITION

There’s a bunch of stuff that you can learn from your competition that can be very useful for your business.  The perfect place to start is doing a basic Google search and a visit to your competitors website.  You can probably score great info on them there like hours, products, and reviews. There’s also some free tools that can help you get information of their online stats like SpyFu and Alexa.

These sites give you information regarding your competitors hottest keywords and links that send them the most traffic.  These are great when looking to build your own backlinks that will give your website a boost in SEO. As it turns out, the more backlinks a website has the better the indicator of its popularity with search engines such as Google or Bing.

Setting up a Google Alert is also a good idea.  It automatically sends you the latest google results on you competition directly to your email.  While you’re at it, set up a Google alert for your business as well, that way whenever something new comes out on google regarding your business, you will get an email alerting you on what’s new.

When you’re done checking out the backend of your competitors site, try some old school methods like the following to find further useful info on your competitors.

ONLINE

• Check competitors social media – Go ahead and follow them for a while, check out who they chat with and how they work.  What do they do for marketing?
• Check their reviews.  What do people love & hate?
• Follow their blog.  How active are they online?

STORE FRONT

• If your competitors have a store front, go ahead and pay them a visit or send someone in to pick up information for you.
• You can also ask your suppliers about information on your competition.  You can find out information like quantity of work and quality of products.
• Check with and possibly hire their employees.  No one has more details on them like current employees do.
• Buy their products and check the quality.

By now, you have a pretty decent amount of info on your competitor.  So, what can you learn from it all?

1.Strengths

The strengths of your competition can help you see where you might be lacking focus.  Make sure that when you are observing their strengths you are not undermining your own.  You want to learn from them.  If they are hosting successful giveaways, that indicates that you might be successful at holding your own.  Remember don’t be a copycat, get ideas and be innovative.

2. Weaknesses

There are so many things that you can get out of researching your rivals weaknesses.  You can learn how to improve your own business.  You can learn what not to do.  You can learn about their mistakes and stay away from them.

3. Reviews

The most humbling of searches, reviews tell us the most about a business.  Weaknesses, strengths, frustrations, they can all be found in reviews. If they have a product, analyze what people say about it good or bad when creating your own. Be obsessive with the quality of your products.

Quality speaks louder than anything else.

4. Products & Services

What kind of services and products does your competition provide?  What do you have to offer?  What are you not offering?  Why are they not offering certain products?

5. Prices

Are your prices higher?  Lower? Why is that so?

6. Customer loyalty

What makes their customers loyal to them?  Marketing, quality, branding, personality?

7.Online & Offline presence

How is their demeanor? What policies do they have?  How do they run business? Do they network?  Do they have community events?  Do they help the community?

 8. Marketing

What kind of marketing strategies do they have?  How often are they sending out branding information to their customers?  What are they sending?  Where are you lacking?

9. Tools

What kind of tools do they use?  Whether it’s the quality of the products or the marketing materials that are used, learning the competitors products will help you see where you are at.

10. Connect with your competitors

Sound weird?  Remember earlier I stated that collaboration over the competition is ideal, well this is where it comes into play.  Now that you have researched your competition, you can see if a collaboration would be beneficial to you both.

Sometimes when you work with your competition you have the ability to grow so much larger because you have the same audience, you can actually cover more ground.  That does not mean to give away your work or customers but to provide something that both businesses can benefit from.  This would also mean that your competition’s outcome would have to be a little different then yours like not selling the exact same item.

In reality,  it turns out a little competition is a good thing:

– It gets your creative juices flowing
– It keeps you on your toes
– It makes you realize if you are putting in enough effort
– It makes it a priority to become better or do it better

What you shouldn’t do with information gathered from your competition

While I believe you shouldn’t disregard knowing what your competition is up to, I think most businesses get too caught up focusing on what other are doing than brainstorming on new ideas and being innovative.  If you want to be a leader in your industry, you have to do stuff no one else is doing.  When you are too busy doing what others are doing, you don’t have enough time to create unique products and end up being a copycat, which nobody likes.

The most important detail on competition is to learn from your competition but not get too caught up on comparison… comparison is the thief of joy after all!

To make researching your competition even easier, I’ve created a free worksheet to help you out. It will walk you through each step, from researching, comparing, and planning.  Click on the image below to get it!

What do you think about competition?  

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