5 Ways to Monitor Your Competitors Without Breaking the Bank

Do you want to know the greatest mantra of doing business successfully? Monitor your competition every step of the way.

A recent study by European countries showed that corporate espionage is on the rise, and many European companies have lost close to $20 billion in it. So, read the article to keep an eye on your competition in the most legitimate and cost-effective way!

1. Start with keeping an eye on their blogging and backlinking activities!

Majority of the businesses prefer using digital marketing to make progress in their business’ visibility. This is because the internet has become the greatest medium for advertising, and the reach on the internet is unparalleled. 

You can also collect data on the people you have reached through the internet and other channels of marketing. So, if you want to be one step ahead of your competition, you can monitor their blogging patterns.

With Google Alerts, you can achieve that on a real-time basis. You can also put your competition as a topic and select the frequency of alerts. Google will start notifying you about all the articles, blogs, and topics, where the competition is mentioned in an automated email. You can choose to receive these emails, daily or weekly.

2. Keep a track of their Social Media Marketing Campaigns

The Facebook Ads library is a great way of monitoring your competition’s paid advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Many of the businesses these days use Facebook as a medium to generate brand awareness. When you go to the Ads Library, all you have to do is select the pages of your competition and it will show the ads being run by these pages on a real-time basis.

You can choose to draw inspiration from these advertisement campaigns, and run ads in a similar domain. This way you will not miss out on any of your competitors’ ad campaigns and run similar ads with better content to reach out to their target audience, too.

3. How to keep an eye on the competition’s website?

The web presence of any company plays a pivotal role in building the reputation of the company. This is the primary reason why many businesses spend lots of money on maintaining a website. Well, if you want to check how the website is performing, you can do it the old school way by monitoring the website, daily and taking screenshots of the webpages. However, it is a lengthy and time-consuming process.

To ease this entire practice, you can take help of Website Archiving tools like Stillio. It helps in maintaining screen captures of your competition’s website, in an automated manner.

All you have to do is just have to select the website, and the frequency of Screen Capture and the software application will do the rest for you. Starting from automated screenshots to regular uploads on cloud servers, all will be handled by the software. 

4. Monitor the Google Ads Campaigns of your competition

Google is one more platform, where businesses are heavily spending on ad campaigns. This is one of the reasons why turf wars have started, in this domain. So, if you want your campaigns to actualize, you need to check how your competition is doing.

With Google AdWords, you can easily check the Keywords targeting which your competitors have designed their ad campaign, and you can use that to work on your bidding strategies.

This helps businesses to form ad campaigns, work on the budget, placement of ads as well as what will be the copy for the Ads. Most of the digital marketers prefer using this to create a difference through the ad campaigns, and get better viewership than the competition!

5. How good is your competition’s SEO?

If you really want things to work out for your business, start by monitoring the SEO activities of your competition. For this, you will need help from certain paid tools like Neil Patel’s SEO dashboard, or Ahrefs, and you can start with an audit of the competition’s website.

This will give you an idea of all the meta tags, description, and keywords of the competition. With this knowledge, work on a strategy, that will help you in the furtherance of your business’ website and SEO campaigns.

Over to you…

A recent survey showed that businesses in the USA will spend nearly $110 billion on digital marketing by 2020. This figure is enough to establish the importance of digital marketing and how fast it is growing. So, if you want to keep an eye on the competition, read and apply the practices mentioned in the article!