7 sneaky ways to stalk your competitors

“Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face.”

In business, these punches typically come in the form of:

  1. major macro shifts (e.g. the pandemic) or 

  2. totally unexpected competitor activity

So the best way to defend yourself?

DON'T give “aggressors” an opportunity to make an attack, ideally by anticipating their moves and/or pre-emptively overwhelming them.

But who has time to stay on top of competitors’ every move (let alone detect emerging threats)!?

Here are 7 relatively easy, relatively cheap, 100% savvy buckets of insight to tap:
 

1. Public announcements 

  • Press releases

  • Public statements

  • Partnerships & strategic alliances 

  • Company newsletters (often including product updates)

  • “In the news” sections of company websites

  • Social account monitoring

Top tools to try: Common Crawl, BrandMentions, PR Newswire, Owler

 

2. Public discussion

  • Social listening

  • Review mining

  • Sentiment analysis tools

Top tools to try: Social Mention, BoardReader, Awario
 

3. Hiring activity

  • Company websites

  • Job trackers

  • Job description requirements mining 

Top tools to try: LinkedIn role alerts, Indeed, Glassdoor
 

4. Automated activity alerts

  • Keyword monitoring

  • Executive activity

  • Board appointments

  • New M&A / funding

  • Endorsements 

  • New marketing campaigns

  • Recalls or missteps

Top tools to try: Google Trends / Alerts, Mention, Talkwalker AlertsFeedly
 

5. Website changes

  • Traffic analysis (volume & destinations)

  • New pricing / offer pages

  • Top-performing content

Top tools to try: Visualping, Versionista, Competitors.app, Sken.io, ChangeTower
 

6. Public coverage

  • Analyst / equity research & commentary

  • Annual reports / 10Ks (annually), 10Qs (quarterly) & S1s (private companies)

  • Earnings calls

Top tools to try: EDGAR, Yahoo Finance, Seeking AlphaKoyfin
 

7. Other dark horses

  • Podcast & conference appearances

  • Trademark, IP, or patent filings

Top tools to try: Podchaser, Listen Notes, USTO, Trademarkia, TMview, Scrapy

And if you’d rather a one-stop shop solution for monitoring all of these at once, let’s chat 😉.

To never being blindsided again!
Victoria