There are several reasons why you should monitor the online activity of the competition.

First, by monitoring the competition you’ll be able to understand their marketing strategy. Where they are present, who is their target audience?

By understanding the competition, you can identify your failures and their failures when it comes to online promotion. It’s essential to be aware of their activities and to grow with them, learn from their mistakes and understand how to be better than them.

It’s important to know what you want to achieve with the information collected and how to implement any changes to your current strategy:

  • You need to know who do you want to monitor, and why;
  • What information you want to get the most;
  • How to use the information acquired to change current strategies.

What information can you get from monitoring the competition?

1. Content marketing strategy

  • what type of content do they publish: articles, e-books, webinars or all together?
  • how frequently do they publish
  • the relevance of their content
  • the quality of their content

2. Email marketing strategy

Email marketing is still an effective marketing strategy. Subscribe to your competition newsletter to follow:

  • the frequency of emails
  • the content of the emails
  • if they are optimized for mobile.

3. Social media

  • the platform they are using
  • how many likes they have on Facebook, how many people are they watching on Twitter/Instagram
  • how often do they post
  • how many likes/share links/comments they received
  • how quickly they respond to comments

4. Analyze the site and make comparisons with your own site

  • how many pages do they have;
  • is easy to navigate, you find all information quickly?
  • integration with social networks;
  • loading time – how fast / slow it’s loading;
  • discounts and vouchers that they have listed;

5. SEO

SEO is relatively easy to analyze because there is a multitude of  software apps that can provide the following information about your competition:

  • which are the keywords that they are promoted
  • what traffic site
  • what position in Google.

And for extra help, I recommend you some tools that can help you obtain all the information you need and improve your marketing strategy:

SpyFu – https://www.spyfu.com/

Research Competitors SEO Keywords
Search for a competitor. Download their SEO keywords. See what they rank on and how many clicks they get.

Spy on Your SEO Competition
Keep track of every website in your SEO niche. Catch changes in rankings and content over time.

Complete Keyword Ranking History
Trace the ranking history of any page or website on a keyword. Discover the algorithm change or site optimization that caused their rise or fall.

Google Keyword Tool Alternative
Generate targeted keyword ideas. Filter by search volume, CPC, SEO difficulty, the number of advertisers, click-through rate, more.

Adwords Keyword Advice for Your Campaign
Type in a keyword, see the most profitable keywords in that niche. It’s that simple. Everything we know about competitor-driven AdWords research in one click.

SimplyMeasured – https://simplymeasured.com/

Quickly and easily measure daily social engagement with a unified cross-channel view, and go deeper when you need to. Filter by channel, media type, text, and hashtags for your profiles. Click into activity spikes to determine what, when, and where you should post for increased engagement.

Create custom profile groupings across channels to conduct competitive analysis. Compare your entire social footprint against competitors to bring context to your own performance. At the same time, uncover and leverage winning competitor strategies.

Apply custom tags to posts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, so you can analyze engagement on a given set of posts by a campaign, event, product, and more. Analyze and report on campaign performance, identify which optimizations need to be made to reach campaign goals.

So if you know who your competitors are and what they offer, it can help improve your site and brand, it can broaden your range of products offered and improve your online advertising strategy. You can improve performance by analyzing the weaknesses of the competition.

This knowledge will help you to be realistic when it comes to the possibility of your success.