 Competitive intelligence is essential to an effective internet marketing strategy
Competitive intelligence is the art of staying one step ahead of your competition by gathering information about their operations. It's absolutely critical that you have an
up-to-date, accurate picture of who your closest competitors are and what they're doing. You need to legally and ethically carry out strategic research on your competitors that will help you to succeed.
If you want exposure and traffic on the internet, then the whole idea is to get noticed! you can't get noticed if you are trying to hide from your competition! So rather than burying your head in the sand and hoping that they don't notice you, it makes more sense to proactively research them.
By locating your competition and carefully researching their businesses, you will find yourself in a position to...
- Discover your competitor's angle-- their unique selling proposition--and compare it to your own. Are you both using the same angle? Can you change your position to make your offer more attractive to potential customers?
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Find niche markets whose needs are not being met. You may discover that your competitor's are neglecting a portion of your target market... allowing you to use this information to start capturing the potential sales that are being ignored!
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Avoid being caught off guard and left obsolete By staying alert, you'll know if your competitor is developing a new product or service that could damage your sales... and take immediate action to improve your position.
Your competitive intelligence strategy should include...
1) Internet Monitoring For Mentions Of Your Name
There are both free and paid services that will monitor newsgroups, discussion boards, web sites, search engines, etc for mentions of your name, your business, your URL, or whatever keywords you want?
This is extremely powerful information that you can use to give yourself a competitive edge! Here's how...
- Anytime a competitor tries to "slander your name" in a newsgroup or public forum, or even compares your products/services unfairly, you can be there within hours to set the record straight and ensure that your reputation is not damaged.
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Bad news travels ten times faster than good news! One dissatisfied customer will tell ten other people, while one satisfied customer may tell one or none. All it takes is for a few postings of dissatisfied customers to lose a lot of business.
Can you imagine how powerful it will be when you are right there to publicly take care of any customer service problems and respond to dissatisfied customers who criticise ore complain about your product or company?
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Monitoring services can make promoting your business through newsgroups much less time-intensive. By automatically looking for keywords and notifying you when they appear, these services allow you to easily take advantage of posting opportunities without wasting hours and hours each day sifting through individual newsgroups and discussion boards.
Obviously for this to work, you will need to use very specific keywords and phrases, or you will receive too many results each day to make it worth your time.
Find out other ways ABC4PC's suite of Search Engine Optimization Services helps you stay ahead of the competition. Other ABC4PC services:
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