Super Tracking Your Competition (Recon Thursday/Process)

Hello, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing.  It’s Recon Thursday and before we begin I want to talk a little bit about one of my favorite movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  In one scene, Butch and Sundance blow up a train and suddenly a Super Posse jumps out of another train and starts tracking them across the southwest.  No matter what they do they can’t elude the posse.  They learn that the posse has the very best tracker, in fact they call him Super Tracker.

Today we are going to discuss how you can super track your competition using social media.

We have already discussed how social media inbound marketing is a great tool to develop your brand, seek out business relationships and to generate new business.  It can also be leveraged as a method to identify what your competition is doing.

Through their social media campaigns competitors are sharing strategy and tactics as to target customers, messaging, products and offers.  Tracking your competition through social media will provide a good idea of what they are doing and enable you to develop strategies around that.

There are numerous benefits of tracking your competition’s social media efforts.  First you will learn exactly where they are creating a social media presence.  You will be able to identify their target customer and whether they are utilizing physcographics of peoples’ interests or demographics of peoples’ age, marital status, education, etc.

Read the details of competitors’ content to determine their positioning in the market and brand promises to their customers.  Also take note of specific offers and promotions they are running.

The best attribute of super tracking using social media is that it is in real time.  If you sign up for a competitor’s blog, Facebook site or tweets you will to be instantly informed of the changes your competition is making in the marketplace.

If you take the time to follow the social media efforts of your competition you are going to gain a lot of knowledge that you can use to be smarter in the marketplace.  However, you have probably already guessed that social media is a two edged sword.  Your competitors are able to follow your social media and learn more about your marketing and branding as well.  You just have to be smarter than they are and use the knowledge to a greater advantage.

That concludes Recon Thursday stop by tomorrow for Digital Friday.  To discuss an online or face-to-face service engagement and enhance the marketing and branding for your organization, contact James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com.  I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing and we’ll see you next time.