When planning your business and marketing strategies, it's easy to think you know it all. After all, you've been spending a lot of time on getting things right. However, there will be a time when your experience and resources may not be enough.
It's essential to not only know everything about your service or product, but you must understand the market and your competitors as well. Because, if you don't understand the competition and the market, there’s a high chance your agency will collapse before it even takes off.
One of the best ways to understand the market is to keep an eye on your competition. To help you do that, here are a few tips and tools to tell you why and how to spy on the competition.
Why Should You Track Your Competitors?
Helps You Prepare
When you don't track what your competitors are doing, it will be impossible for you to know what is out there and what your target audience likes. As a result, you will not be able to prepare yourself thoroughly. You might think you are market-ready, but you will not know what your competition is up to, which could leave you in a difficult situation.
Learn From Their Mistakes
When you track your competitors, you can analyze their business strategies and see what works and what doesn't. By doing this, you can learn from their mistakes. It helps you avoid committing the same mistakes when coming up with your business strategies. Just like you would learn from their failures, it also enables you to understand their strategy and their key to success.
Come Up With New Ideas
When you constantly keep an eye on the competition and your industry, you know what is going on around you. It makes it easier to come up with new ideas and better strategies to grow your business.
How To Spy On The Competition?
There are several different factors to consider when you spy on your competitors – what are they up to, what are they ranking for?
Tracking your competitors can be an overwhelming task, and that's when marketing tools come into the picture. These are the same tools you use to monitor your performance. The tools will also help you gather information about your competitors.
Here are some of the best tools for spying on your competition:
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a tool for monitoring mentions. It is a very easy-to-use tool that helps keep track of your competitors. So, every time your competitor is mentioned, the tool will send a report to your inbox. Using this tool, you can monitor keyword mentions, get competitor backlinks, and monitor your organization's social mentions.
2. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a great tool to use for keywords. It's the perfect SEO tool that provides competitor SEO analysis, keyword analysis, and SEO data. You can use the tool to find out what keywords and content are doing well for your competitors. With the tool, you can get new content ideas and find the right keywords to target. The tool also helps you find new competitors.
3. Owletter
Are you looking to track the email marketing strategy of your competitor? Owletter is a great tool to do just that. All you need to do is tell Owletter which websites you would like to track, and it gives you access to all the emails your competitor sends.
4. Social Blade
You can use Social Blade to check for real-time competitor stats on social media. It gives you data on the number of followers and uploads. The tool helps you build a better social media marketing strategy.
5. Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks is another tool for keywords. You can use the tool to follow your competitor's backlinks and send them right to your inbox. The tool gives you an analysis of the highest and lowest domains of your competitors. It gives you the perfect picture of links that are a do-follow or a no-follow.
These intelligent monitoring tools will give you everything you need to analyze, track and get insights about your competitors and the market to grow your business.