How to Review the Competition

Keeping track of your competitor’s activities can be challenging, but knowing about new activities and events is critical to your own success. If you’re in an industry with very similar products and services, you can learn a lot from the competition and even strategize how to make your company take the lead with a competitive edge.

First Steps

The first step in reviewing the competition is simply identification. You need to know who they are, how big they are, and what type of market share they have. After that, it’s important to start monitoring activity in as many ways as possible. If you’re running a magazine, keeping track of ad rates and packages is a simple way to make sure your pricing is aligned with the market. If you’re running an online store or boutique, finding at least 5-10 other retail outlets on the web can help you track trends, site popularity, and web statistics with online tools such as Alexa and Google Trends.

Important Questions

You can learn a lot about a company with basic market research, and this might take the form of playing the customer. Mystery shoppers do this type of research all the time, but if you can’t afford the services, you can easily handle the task on your own or turn to your administrative team for help. Creating a checklist of questions before picking up the phone or making a visit will help you get exactly the information you need.

Critical areas to review the competition include:

• Special offers and discounts offered throughout the year
• Upcoming product promotions or company news
• Testimonials: are they positive or negative?
• Return policy information
• Ad rates and related media information
• Pricing models and range of prices each season
• Any online store information, blogs, and media/press info
• Flyers, brochures, and tangible marketing materials

It can be helpful to create a company profile of each competitor and keep it on file for easy access. Developing a simple electronic version is another way to access the data and research when you need it, and makes it much easier to consider your options when you’re trying to calculate pricing models or working on product development.

What are some other ways to keep track of your competitors? What works in your company or organization?

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