Competitor control techniques: beyond benchmarking
Miguel Nicolás
14/05/2018
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Information is everything in our marketing strategy. We suggest techniques to control competition beyond benchmarking.
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It is not the first time that on this blog we are talking about techniques to control competition. Indeed, we already wrote a couple of posts about the tools to spy on your online competitors online, posts that can help you complete what you are about to read in this article.On this occasion, we want to go a bit beyond classical benchmarking and find competitive advantages in other aspects.
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What should I focus on to control my rivals?
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You should start by understanding most 100% your business, your product and your competitors. Only if you have clear what your strengths and your weaknesses are then you will be able to have a strategic vision of the reality of the market.Something as simple as a SWOT matrix in which you consider two axes that separate into 4 segments your weaknesses,threats, strengths and opportunities will allow you, if you are objective, to have a starting point for deciding what you want or you want to control.
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If you add another user-centered framework to the SWOT, as the so-called FUD that analyzes fears, uncertainties and doubts of users, you will get insights from crossing both data. These will be even more valuable to establish your strategy on.
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What are competitor control techniques?
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Considering an effective definition, we could say that it is the strategic monitoring of the KPIs of the competition that come into current of future conflict with those of our business.
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#1 – Monitoring price
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Pricing is one of the variables that most condition in terms of competitive purposes. Keeping track of our opponents at this level leads to answer many of the questions that we usually ask ourselves:
- why have sales decreased?
- If this channel was so effective, why has stopped being so?
- Users enter and bounce off, fail to buy, what happens?
Obviously, we know that one of the things that customers are more sensitive to is the price. They perform their own comparative and are able to identify, often faster than companies, the lowest prices.All these situations can be favored by a new competitor or a very aggressive pricing strategy by an old acquaintance.The solution is to monitor their movements and pricing policy closely. As in almost everything that has to do with online marketing, things can be made spending time or money.You can visit your competition page-by page once a month and fill in a spreadsheet. This is the cheapest option in terms of cost per tool, but it is quite tough in terms of human resources.A more efficient alternative is to use one of the so-called scrappers. It is a software that runs through the pages by taking certain information out of their code (in this case the price, but you could monitor other things, for example the stock). -
PRO TIP: A good scrapper with free version of up to 10,000 results per export is Octoparse: it uses its crawler and then allows you to export the results.If your products are at Amazon, there are also some interesting solutions such as extension for Chrome Keepa. It can make a pretty effective follow-up of the evolution and the market price for specific product.>/p>
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And if you have the chance to invest in in some professional tool the point changes quite a bit. Minderest for example, is very powerful. It offers alerts systems, multi-channel inventory management and, of course, competitors tracking. It is expensive, but the truth is that if you can afford it, it is really good.
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#2 - Monitoring comments y ratings
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If we said before that we could not forget the user, we will have to seek their ratings on the competitors.
When criticism is recurring, it is clear that the competitor has a problem and a weakness that can allow us to cause harm. These weaknesses will be helpful to mark our differential strategy. -
EXAMPLE: Imagine that many users complain about delivery times. Perhaps, it would be interesting to carry out an express delivery campaign to try to attract customers.
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As it is rather qualitative than quantitative analysis, automation gets a little more complicated. The analysis must be done very objectively.You can use Octoparse, as well as any other tool of its kind, to download the texts, but then you will have to process and evaluate them manually. Retrieving this information and turn it into a cloud of tags to see which words are most repeated can be of help.For example, try this tool, which cannot be simpler.Amazon can also help you in that sense. If these are products with enough analysis, you can see, through the mobile application, directly on the comments some tags that correspond to the most oft-repeated attributes.
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It is a rather simple way of going straight to what really matters though it is not as deep as scrapper + tag cloud combination.
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#3 - Monitoring communication
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In order to conclude this post, let's talk briefly about advertising and promotion. It is one of the most revealing aspects of a competitor´s strategy, so it is essential as competition control technique.Let´s go back to the same dilemma: make it cheap and manually or paying more to spend less time.To do it manually, a manual tracking of its social networks and PPC ads have to be done for certain keywords and finally document it. The problem is that this is not the most scientific method possible: we are slanting the results very much.In terms of tools, we have already talked about SemRush, that is great for this type of work. It gives us enough information about PPC because it offers us not only a list of competitors by keyword, but also the creativity captures stored it in its database (from Search and Shopping).
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A more specific tool, but at the same time more expensive, is Whatrunswhere.com. It is more expensive, but it could be of big help if your competitors are performing loyalty campaigns.
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These are some of the competitor control techniques and tools that will be useful to you. Which do you use?
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