Monitoring Competitors

Monitoring is an important key to analyze the actions of your competitors. You can produce regular analysed reports detailing the activities of your competitors as indicated by both published information, or through our custom research services, unpublished (but public domain) information - with your own experts or with experts abroad. The information you need is not strict but will need a good research plan to find your needs. Some examples are shown as follows:

Some Databanks (e.g. Dialog / NewsEdge / Profound / LexisNexis ) offer a wide variety of information and give you access to thousands of different news sources you can report on:

Press releases
News stories from national, local and trade press
Market analyst reports
Product reviews
Product launches
Recent contracts
Senior Management Information.

In addition to this you can monitor and report on other competitor / market activity:

Changes to share prices
Financial reports
Other financial activity (e.g. interim financial statements, M&A news)
Patent filings indicating R&D activity
Price changes
New appointments

You also can monitor on-line for information:

Changes to a competitor's web pages
Newsgroups and blogs to see what people and pundits are saying
Email discussion lists.
Search engine ranking.
Reciprocal links
Online advertising.
Online recruitment.

Finally, there are many other areas that can be monitored. The examples above focus on those involving secondary research, but you can also conduct primary research and can include customer / supplier and other interviews on a regular basis to continually monitor service levels, competitor morale and other similar aspects.

This gives a sample of the type of information that can be tracked. There are many other areas that can be looked at - planning applications, trademark filings, customer testimonials.... The Reports should be produced weekly, monthly or as regularly as required.