As a marketing agency, we don’t only stay on top of the latest general marketing trends, new social media platforms, and algorithm changes, we also track our clients’ competitors. Some are direct competitors, some are the big boys with unlimited financial resources, and some are not direct competitors but closely related to the field of our client.

I’m sure you can imagine, this takes a lot time and effort. We closely study every aspect of their marketing, including their print and digital advertising, promotions, social and website activity. After studying what the competition is doing, then it needs to be analyzed and applied to your marketing. Even if you can’t focus as much energy and time on studying the advertising of bigger brands, we do believe you should keep an eye on the marketing efforts and campaigns being put out by these companies.

To get you started, we suggest using the following sources for tracking the competition: Use Google Alerts to receive new and relevant information about your competition directly to your inbox. This is free and easy to set up. You can also adjust the settings for notifications to provide the information you’re most interested in and how often you want to receive the information.

Think of yourself as a customer and engage with the brand on all platforms. This means you should sign up to their emails, like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and any other social media they engage in. Pay close attention to how they get customers to engage. Monitor the websites of the big corporations. You may not be able to keep up with them, but you can certainly make mental notes of what has the most impact on user-experience, and can be added to your website during your next website upgrade.

We never said keeping up with the competition was easy, this is why we recommend that you use a marketing company that specializes in a particular field when possible. At Keenability, we have a strong focus on the service-related industry, including law firms and real estate. This allows us to stay ahead of the curve in these industries and maximize our clients’ budgets.

When vetting a marketing company to take over your marketing efforts, we suggest you ask them what kind of research they perform in order to be sure that your marketing program is on par or better than the competition. How frequently do they do this research? Is it ongoing or only when they first take you on as client?

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