Having a clear idea of what your competition is up to is important to any small business owner, if only to compare your own marketing and customer service.
Depending on your industry, your competition may not have a big online presence — there are many small businesses that still don’t even have websites — but it’s still important to check what information is available online on a regular basis. After all, customers can post information about a business online just as easily as that business’ owner.
- Subscribe to their blogs and newsletters: If one of your competitors is offering free information to his clients, it’s just good sense to make sure you get a copy of it. At the very least, you can get a clear idea of how your competitor is handling online promotions.
- Check out their social media accounts: The growing number of businesses with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts makes it necessary to check out what your competition is doing on such sites. Not all companies are making use of social media yet, but a surprising number are moving in that direction. It may not feel comfortable friending or following your competition on these sites, but even just bookmarking these pages and coming back later is a good idea.
- Set up Google Alerts for their names: Just as you might set up alerts with a tool like Google Alerts for your company’s name, it makes sense to see what other people are saying about your competitors. You may just find an opportunity — a dissatisfied customer that you can talk into switching over to your services or products.
- Track their reviews: There are thousands of sites dedicated to reviews, from Yelp with its reviews of local businesses and service providers to CNET with its product reviews. Make sure you know what customers are saying about you competition’s products and services. At the very least, you’ll probably find some things you shouldn’t be doing.
- Check out your competition’s team: Depending on the size of your competition’s company, there may be just an owner, a few employees or a whole bunch of people working for the company. You can find quite a bit of information about these people online, through their own social networking profiles, any sites they might have and just a couple of searches in Google. A LinkedIn profile, in particular, can provide you quite a bit of information about a competitor’s employee — perhaps even giving you an idea of future strategies when a competitor hires someone new with a specific skill set.
It’s worthwhile to make a list of those companies that you consider competitors and work down this list every so often. Don’t forget that whether or not a company is online can change overnight — and keeping tabs on what your competition is up to makes good sense.
Image by Flickr user Leo Reynolds