What do you gain from tracking competitors?

So, having information on competitors is important, but what to do with the collected data? Let's take a look at what you can accomplish by tracking competitors:

1. Research the market

There are two options for market research:

The first one is that at the initial stage. Here you evaluate the market as a whole and look for development prospects. You become familiar with the space in which you will work. It is important to do your research early on, even if you are confident in your market expertise. Sometimes the numbers show completely different results from what you might have predicted.

The second research option is regular monitoring of changes in the market. Markets are undergoing constant transformation depending on many indicators, ranging from the statements of opinion leaders to weather conditions. Therefore, regular research provides a clear-cut vision of the market with its trends, prospects, changes in leadership, and other data essential for understanding where you work.

2. Avoid competitors’ mistakes

Mistakes provide you with valuable insights. Competitors' miscalculations constitute useful and free experience. Market research allows you to identify these mistakes and analyze the process of their making.

It is also a way to test out your ideas. Perhaps competitors have already tried to implement the same concept, but it has failed.

3. Improve your product

Monitoring demonstrates not only mistakes but also strong points and drawbacks. This way, you can assess your products’ features and correct them if necessary.

4. Create a product with the unique value

Market analysis can prove to be especially valuable when entering the market or launching a new product. You can discover niches already filled by competitors as well as vacant ones. The collected data helps to understand what other companies focus on and to find a better and more innovative solution for your product. Thus, researching the already existing market will let you stand out from the crowd by finding what will impress the clients, offer a new solution to their problem, or provide special advantages. As a result, it will serve as an incentive for them to choose your product.

5. Form the price

Assessment of competitors, their strengths, weaknesses, and budgets increase your understanding of the value of the product from the customer's point of view. You should not be entering the market without this knowledge. To change prices right away is to lose the customer’s trust at the very beginning. You have to be able to justify your price to yourself, investors, and customers.

As a result of insufficient research, you can also underestimate your product, thinking it is common on the market. However, after analyzing competitors, you may see that you are offering unique opportunities. By communicating this value to your customers, you can reasonably raise the price of the product.

6. Track communication channels

Your competitors have already done and continue to do a lot of work for you. However, this does not mean that you should give up on testing and implementing something new. By tracking the communication channels of other players, you can discover where there is still an opportunity to make an impact.

Analytics gives you an understanding of your audience: how it reacts to various brand manifestations, where it is concentrated, and what it wants. Moreover, dynamic analytics shows all the activities of your competitors within a certain period: for example, the increase in the brand’s media presence before the release of a new product.

7. Discover potential competitors

Media monitoring shows the activities of not only current market leaders but also potential ones. You could be making a mistake by ignoring these new companies. You could also miss out on a long-forgotten brand implementing innovation to regain its share of the market. Market research provides an objective assessment of one's position relative to competitors.

8. Track global competitors

Ukrainian businesses began to integrate into foreign markets. However, in order to start working in a new country, you first need to conduct detailed research of its market, which should include your future competitors. Potential customers in other countries have different habits, attitudes, product selection criteria, and focus on different product advantages. Researching local companies will help you discover these peculiarities.

What metrics can you track?

You can track many metrics, so you have to decide what metrics you need to track. To do this, you should first envision what you want to find out. By understanding your objectives, monitoring specialists will tell you which indicators will help you accomplish them. Let's take a look at some of the most popular metrics.

Number of mentions

This simple yet valuable metric shows the number of materials that have come out with mentions of the brand. It is especially convenient when, for example, you send a press release to dozens of media and then monitor in real time the publication of materials with your brand mentions and how many mentions you manage to get overall. This data is also available on your competitors.

LOOQME Hub dashboards allow you to track mentions in real time with links to materials and all clickable indicators. In addition, dashboards are available in the form of ready-made reports that you can download or send via a link.

LOOQME dashboard opportunities

Share of Voice

It represents the number of brand mentions relative to the total number of mentions in the media field of the market. Share of voice shows the share of the information space your brand occupies. The value of this metric lies in allowing you to see the share of attention you receive from your audience compared to your competitors.

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Tracking this indicator can help explain the drop in sales: you continue to do your work as usual while your competitors increase their effort so that, compared to them, you simply disappear from the information space.

It is also important to look at this indicator in dynamics. You can see an increase in the share of voice among your competitors and increase your activity.

Sentiment

This metric assesses the emotional component of the text to classify mentions of a company, brand, or product as positive, negative, or neutral. The sentiment metric is often used to evaluate the performance of PR specialists and communications managers. Moreover, sentiment is one of the key parameters in the reputation audit of the company and media analysis of competitors.

Through sentiment, you can track the negativity of your market counterparts and thus see their mistakes and audience reactions. With the help of dynamic analytics provided by LOOQME, it is also possible to monitor the development of crises in competitors, react in time to the first appearance of negative mentions, and improve your product based on the negative mentions of your market counterparts.

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In turn, sentiment affects the reputation of the brand. Clearly, it is important to monitor your reputation, but you also need to compare it to the accomplishments of your competitors.

Reach

This metric shows which brand generates the most interest from the audience and gives you insights into how it manages to do so. With LOOQME Hub you not only see your overall reach but also track what contributes to it. The platform collects and analyzes mentions of brands and, with the help of clickable links, lets you access the materials and see their reach.

With the reach metric, you can track the resources your competitors use and the number of people who see their materials. You receive information regarding your audience and the media with which your market counterparts cooperate.

These and other indicators are collected and measured by special analytical tools. They use a media and social networks database to discover and process the necessary mentions. One such tool is the LOOQME Hub platform. Before working with this or any other tool, you should set clear objectives regarding what you want to learn. This will help you obtain a faster and better result.