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09.15.09
Keep A Close Eye On Your Competition
 By Patrick Hare
Every year companies spend millions of dollars on market research, focus groups, surveys, and special studies to find out how to better serve their customers and gain increased market share. If you're working in the online sector, and are in a David vs. Goliath position, you can use your competitor's formidable research skills to your own advantage.
The internet is a vast source of publicly available information, and several sources aggregate valuable data from various places, and make it available to you for free or at a low cost. Since much of this information applies to your competition, you can effectively run a sophisticated intelligence operation on your adversaries without resorting to expensive or dangerous cloak-and-dagger tactics.
Piggybacking on your competition's work isn't exactly new. One of the best known stories in marketing involves Burger King's strategy for finding customers, which usually involved opening a store up right next to a McDonald's franchise. McDonald's spent a lot of time and money figuring out how much traffic was in an area, checking out various locations, and paying people to do all kinds of research which would decide if a certain spot was good for a store. Burger King apparently trusted the McDonald's approach as well, and succeeded in drawing away business as a result. Another well known success story involves Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's PC architecture, which opened the door for the proliferation of cheap "IBM Compatible" personal computers (now just called PCs) and the success of Microsoft.
Whether you're operating out of a garage or your own office building downtown, you can still glean a lot of actionable intelligence from online sources. Some of this information can be obtained for free, while other data may be available through a subscription that costs a few hundred dollars per year.
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To find out how much traffic your website is getting compared to that of your competitors, Compete.com is a great source of information. The free version lets you compare your site traffic over time to data for 2 competitors, but you can open this up to 5 with a paid subscription. The advantage of Compete.com is that you can see if your competition is more popular (or spending more money) in one season versus another. For example, Godaddy.com spikes in February because it buys Super Bowl commercials at this time. Another online tool, Spyfu.com, lets you measure sampled Pay-Per-Click (PPC) spending by your competitors, and even allows you to export a list of the keywords that your competition is being found for. If you know your enemy's most important keywords, you can get a pretty good glimpse into their current marketing strategy. This allows you to either add these terms into your own campaign, or carve out a niche where you aren't going to be outbid by someone with deeper pockets.
One of the easiest ways of getting market intelligence on another website is to closely look at the site itself. Many of the top sites online have gone out of their way to make the shopping process as easy as possible, and get people to the checkout page with the smallest amount of trouble. If you look at a few dozen websites and take notes about what you like, you've probably reaped the benefits of several thousand hours of research and testing. You can improve your own site further by learning from sites like MarketingExperiments.com, which regularly runs case studies and webinars that test actual conversion results from different site types. You can then study the different tactics used by your adversaries to see which ones are the most popular for your field of business.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group.
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