Everybody in this day and age is well-familiar with the power of big data and contemporary machine learning operations, but few business owners and working professionals seem to have a solid grasp on how to use data to monitor the competition. This is unfortunate, as recent digital innovations have made keeping an eye on your competition easier and cheaper than ever before.
Here’s how you can harness the power of data to monitor your competition, and what your company will need to do to guarantee that it maintains a competitive advantage in the market.
Start on social media
There are many ways to use data to monitor your competition, but by far the easiest is to tap into popular social media platforms, which possess reams of lucrative data just waiting to be exploited by savvy companies. You should seriously be asking yourself what kind of social media strategy your competitors are using from the get-go; first and foremost, which platforms are they on, and which do they dedicate the most time and resources towards? Furthermore, you should be asking yourself how the competition is garnering user engagement, which is just as important as garnering more overall views.
Take a deep dive into how you can go about uncovering the social media strategy that your arch-rivals are relying upon, and you’ll be vastly more competitive in no time. You can’t stop there, however; you should also be regularly auditing your own social media performance, and may want to consider bringing on a full-time team member to handle your digital operations and compare their efficacy with that of your rivals. Outside of social media, a number of helpful tools exist that will make keeping tabs on other companies easier.
Some of the most popular tools that companies rely upon to keep track of their competition includes Google Alerts, which is tremendously easy to use and very informative. Keeping a close eye on backlinks, too, is imperative if you really want to remain competitive, as backlinking is by far one of the most important aspects of drawing attention to your operations in the digital era. A business owner who isn’t considering looting their competitor’s backlinks is one that’s allowing their company to get left in the dust.
Mastering the art of monitoring
If your competitors are ranking higher than you in search engine results, you’re losing cash and customers who could be vital towards the longevity of your business. You should thus be prepared to loot your competitors’ backlinks by first identifying your major rivals and insurance groups, finding which domains they rely upon, and uncovering the linking opportunities that they make use of to drive traffic towards their site.
A crucial part of this is finding guest posts that your rivals are putting out onto the web and trying to write for those very same sites. This is one of the secrets of backlink-looting that few business owners know about, but it’s a very easy way to bolster your competitive advantage when it comes to popular search engine rankings, especially on Google.
Outside of these tried-and-true methods, you can also vacuum up data on your competition’s human capital, such as observing what their employees are posting on social media sites like LinkedIn. When a bunch of your rivals are chatting about the same topic, you can use data tools to isolate keywords and potentially figure out what they’re planning for in the near-future. To make proper use of any data to monitor your competition, however, you’ll need a team of tech-savvy experts on hand, so never be afraid to invest properly in your own operations if you’re really interested in gaining a leg up on the competition.
