Managing a business without knowing how well the competition is doing is just like running without the right type of shoes. You might have some relative success, but it doesn’t give you the best performance you know you’re capable of. This is why it is extremely important to monitor your competitors so you know how well you’re doing compared to them. By keeping track of them, you can modify your strategy to help you better reach your target audience.

Here are three simple and effective ways to keep track of your competitors:

1. Monitor their social engagement

A lot of people follow their favourite brands on social media, and since you operate in the same space, it’s best to know how your competitors engage with your shared audience. Doing this allows you to see what they do so you too can change your strategy in hopes of attracting audiences to your side.

If you have a Facebook page, make use of Insights – a built-in analytics tool – to keep tabs on the competition. What you can do is pick five competitors and list them under “Pages to Watch.” By doing this, you’ll get a clear picture of how you’re doing against them in terms of likes, posts and engagement.

On Twitter, you can use the power of lists. You can add competitors to a private list (if you don’t want to follow them, but also don’t want to alert them that you’ve added them to a list) to keep track of how they interact with their audience.

2. Track their paid search activities

A lot of companies used digital advertising to generate leads and sales. It’s also not a secret that sponsored listings on search engines and paid advertising on social media earns a brand more clicks. Bing and Google have been offering paid ads for years, and Facebook and Twitter have rolled out their own versions too.

If you too are allotting budget for paid advertising, it helps to look into how much your competition spends as well. This gives you a good insight into why they might be doing better or worse than you.

One of the best tools you can use is Semrush.com. Using the site, you can see how much they spend on digital advertising.

3. Monitor their media ads and offers

Do you notice your competitors running special offers? You can check with Semrush.com again to see what kind of deal they run. Doing so gives you an idea on which of their products are doing well and how well yours measure against theirs. It gives you a clear insight into the questions that customers ask when deciding which product to buy or which vendor to choose.

Monitoring as a step towards building a winning strategy

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with looking at what your competitor is doing. Keeping a close watch on them is one of the best ways to assess how well you are performing online. By doing so, you can clearly see which areas they are succeeding in and where they are not. Knowing these things gives you the information you need to refine your strategy so that you too can attract a slice of your shared market.