Peeking into your competitors’ tactics and operations provides the direction that businesses need to ensure that they’re not only keeping up with the industry, but also setting themselves apart. Analyzing what your competitors are doing provides ideas for how to improve your own offerings and processes. It also helps identify market positioning and uncover industry trends as they’re emerging.
That doesn’t mean being nefarious or inappropriate. It just means paying attention to the public information available about how your competitors are attracting traffic, nurturing leads, and maintaining customers.
Companies of all sizes invest time and money into competitive research, but big businesses typically have the capacity to do it more frequently and more thoroughly than small businesses. Take a lesson from their playbooks and use these 8 tips to research your competitors: