10 Business Lessons I Learned Studying My Competition Growing a business is a lot of trial and error, but it doesn't have to be all your trial and error.
By John Rampton Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Our competition isn't just there to beat. They can also teach us how to get better at what we are doing so that we can beat them at their own game. I see my competition as a bar set for me to jump over.
In the business world, anything goes. While some people like to think of scoping out and spying on the competition as a bad thing, I love looking at everything they are doing through a spy glass. This gives me insights into what's working and I should focus my time on and what isn't working and I shouldn't waste my time.
Here's what my competition is teaching me about productivity across various aspects of their company that's helping change my business for the better:
1. Content.
While I never copy my competition's content, I read what they have, if they use a call to action, how they approach what is shared and how often they update their content.
Look to see if your competition is using video, infographics or some other type of content that resonates with your shared audience. It's also good to know where they are sharing this content to see if there are any places I'm missing opportunities to add or share information. Reading the competition's content showed me how to say it differently. Had I not looked at the competition, it would have taken me longer to shape my content strategy. I avoided misstepped that would have cost me prospects or customers.
I recently found out that my competitor has a piece of content that ranks well. They attract nearly half their organic traffic to their site each month from one term. I created a much better version of this and push it hard. I don't look at this as bad or negative. I see this as a big opportunity to give users an even better experience.
2. Online marketing.
To see if my marketing strategy would work, I considered what the competition was using as their primary messages in terms of a value proposition and the visuals they used to communicate that. I didn't want to copy it, but I wasn't going to do anything so different that the audience would be confused. I tracked my competition's online campaigns on various sites and paid advertising platforms like Google AdWords to see what they were saying.
Kompyte and Perch are new tools that make it easier to stay on top of what the competition is doing. By using these I speed up how long it takes me to formulate the differentiation position that dictates the messages I select.
Related: How to Compete in a Crowded Marketplace
3. Search.
By looking at their website and overall content platforms, I compiled a list of keywords the competition uses. I took these keywords to search engines to determine if the rankings they received were better than my own. When they were, I compared the keyword terms and added those to my online presence, including website, landing pages, pictures and headers.
Available analytics tools from ComScore and others yield deep insights into the results of what your competition is doing. This has changed how I approach search engine optimization and resulted in a higher ranking for my company.
4. Customer engagement.
I learned what works effectively with my target audience by observing what the competition did on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. Rather than experimenting with the type of social media content, time of day and frequency, I saw how their followers and fans responded. This saved me many trial runs and resources.
In the long run, I approached customers and prospects differently than if I did not consider what the competition was doing. The result was conversations where previously there had been silence.
5. Brand management.
Since I had never developed or managed a brand before, the competition provided a baseline for me to learn how the process works, how to define brand attributes and then how to use this image to craft and manage the reputation process. It also guided what I could do with my own brand to set it apart and provide more value, yet included the attributes that our shared audience wanted.
6. User experience.
Reading the comments and feedback that the competitions' customers provided in social media, blog posts and forums is an invaluable source of intelligence about a shared audience. I even asked a few questions on these posts to get the competitions' customers to explain how they felt about their experience with the competition. This told me what type of user experience they are looking to develop.
Related: Don't Declare War. Respect Competitors, and Capitalize on Your Own Strengths.
7. Product development.
To shape the type of solutions my business offers small business owners and companies, I tried what the competition offered. My product development became more productive when I could see what features were working and what were not. Then, I exploited these differences and added my own spin. Studying the competition triggered new ideas about how to approach development, making it easier to pinpoint where and how changes in my product could propel it farther ahead.
8. Social media.
Studying how the competition used social media saved considerable resources. I started looking at what sites they used and discovered the results of those efforts in terms of fans and followers. I also considered what they were doing on professional sites including LinkedIn to see how they presented themselves professionally. When I tried the social media sites the competition was not using I found they were missing some key platforms, giving me an advantage.
9. Research.
My competition did the heavy lifting for me when it came to target markets and state of the industry. They did not do all the research and hand me a white paper, but using Google Alerts to keep tabs on the competition provides an ongoing stream of information about their strategy, performance and any pivots. This can all be discerned from sales letters, email campaigns, press releases and mission statements. This was certainly more productive than creating my strategy in a vacuum and hoping it would meet the market need and beat the competition.
10. Company culture.
Although I was not privy to the internal workings of the competitions' organizations, I did create a more productive team by studying how they defined their culture and addressed values, motivation, training and retention. Their hiring literature and employee programs provided new insights on best practices designed to get the most from my team. That enabled me to design a culture around what I wanted to achieve and put it into place quickly, with few changes afterward. Additional information about hiring practices, benefits and perks helped me provide a more effective way to onboard talent.
I'm too busy to reinvent the wheel. Everything I observed my competition do shortened my learning curve and sped progress toward what I was trying to achieve.
I learned from their mistakes and from their processes, ignoring what didn't work and benchmarking best practices. Scope out your target audience and the overall external environment, but it's just as important to track the competition.
Related: What You Need to Know About Your Competitors to Beat Them
