Your competitors can be a surprisingly useful source of marketing intelligence. You don’t need expensive competitive intelligence software to get started either.
A simple monthly check can tell you what competitors are promoting, where they’re investing, and where there may be opportunities they’re missing.
Start with their websites
Choose three to five direct competitors and bookmark their websites.
Once a month, look for changes to:
- Homepage messaging and calls to action
- New service or product pages
- Offers and promotions
- Case studies and testimonials
- Blog topics and resources
Don’t copy what changes. Ask why they might have changed it.
A new industry page, for example, could suggest they’re targeting a new customer segment.
Track what they’re publishing
Check their blog and social channels. You don’t need to record every post.
Look for patterns.
Look for shifts in their content strategy. They might start publishing more around a particular service, revisit the same topics frequently, or begin investing more heavily in video.
Competitor content can also help uncover subjects worth researching yourself. Combine this with the approach in Your Customers Are Giving You Blog Ideas Already to build a much stronger content list.
See what they’re advertising
Google’s Ads Transparency Center and Meta’s Ad Library can give you a window into competitors’ advertising.
Look at their headlines, offers, creative, landing pages, and how long certain campaigns appear to run.
An ad that keeps appearing for months may be worth paying attention to.
Check their search strategy
Search Google for the products and services you sell and note which competitors consistently appear.
Then look at the pages ranking for those searches.
You can use the process from my DIY Keyword Research for Small Businesses guide to investigate the search terms further.
Keep a simple competitor tracker
A spreadsheet is enough.
Record the competitor, date, channel, what changed, and anything worth investigating.
After a few months, you’ll have something far more useful than a collection of screenshots: a timeline of how your competitors’ marketing is evolving.
The goal isn’t to follow your competitors.
It’s to notice changes early, understand what’s happening in your market, and find opportunities before they become obvious.