7 sneaky ways to stalk your competitors
“Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face.”
In business, these punches typically come in the form of:
major macro shifts (e.g. the pandemic) or
totally unexpected competitor activity
So the best way to defend yourself?
DON'T give “aggressors” an opportunity to make an attack, ideally by anticipating their moves and/or pre-emptively overwhelming them.
But who has time to stay on top of competitors’ every move (let alone detect emerging threats)!?
Here are 7 relatively easy, relatively cheap, 100% savvy buckets of insight to tap:
1. Public announcements
Press releases
Public statements
Partnerships & strategic alliances
Company newsletters (often including product updates)
“In the news” sections of company websites
Social account monitoring
Top tools to try: Common Crawl, BrandMentions, PR Newswire, Owler
2. Public discussion
Social listening
Review mining
Sentiment analysis tools
Top tools to try: Social Mention, BoardReader, Awario
3. Hiring activity
Company websites
Job trackers
Job description requirements mining
Top tools to try: LinkedIn role alerts, Indeed, Glassdoor
4. Automated activity alerts
Keyword monitoring
Executive activity
Board appointments
New M&A / funding
Endorsements
New marketing campaigns
Recalls or missteps
Top tools to try: Google Trends / Alerts, Mention, Talkwalker Alerts, Feedly
5. Website changes
Traffic analysis (volume & destinations)
New pricing / offer pages
Top-performing content
Top tools to try: Visualping, Versionista, Competitors.app, Sken.io, ChangeTower
6. Public coverage
Analyst / equity research & commentary
Annual reports / 10Ks (annually), 10Qs (quarterly) & S1s (private companies)
Earnings calls
Top tools to try: EDGAR, Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha, Koyfin
7. Other dark horses
Podcast & conference appearances
Trademark, IP, or patent filings
Top tools to try: Podchaser, Listen Notes, USTO, Trademarkia, TMview, Scrapy
And if you’d rather a one-stop shop solution for monitoring all of these at once, let’s chat 😉.
To never being blindsided again!
Victoria
