When you run a business it’s probably a good idea to monitor your competitors.  Direct competitors are out take market share from you and knowing what they are doing is important to stay competitive or take a competitive advantage.  If you’re not monitoring your competition you can bet your competitors are monitoring you.

What brings me to this post is a recent newsletter that we sent out for Detailed Image to push our gift certificate promotion we ran since November. The gift certificate promotion was that you get a 20% bonus gift certificate in January when you buy a gift certificate through Christmas.  As our final holiday season push we sent the newsletter exclusively promoting gift certificates on December 21, 2008.  I’m subscribed to a number of our competitor’s newsletters and the next day I received a newsletter from one of our top competitors, which I will leave unnamed, with a strikingly similar promotion.  Given that gift certificates are probably the last thing you promote for Christmas as an ecommerce store, it was the bonus gift certificate that they were offering with gift certificate purchases that made me think they ran the promotion because of us.

As far as I know the promotion our competitor ran was a new one they started the day after we sent our gift certificate newsletter. The similarities in the two promotions were uncanny.  The first similarity that I noticed was the newsletter title.  Our main title was “The Perfect Last Minute Gift” compared to “It’s not too late for the perfect gift!”.  Next I noticed the “Free Bonus Certificate for you!” in their newsletter compared to us calling it the “Bonus Gift Certificate”.  It could very well be that these promotions were just a coincident and that we just sent ours out a day earlier, but because we’ve had this promotion running since November makes me think not.

Part of running a business is knowing what you’re competitors are doing so you can take the necessary actions to stay competitive. There are times you must react to what your competitors are doing so not to fall behind. What our competitor did could very well be a reaction to what we did and that’s pretty cool that our 4 person company is being noticed by a leader in the industry.

This gives me confidence we’re moving in the right direction as Detailed Image has made leaps and bounds in progress in selling detailing products in just a few years and our competitors know we’re coming on strong.

Once again if you’re not monitoring your competition, they’re probably monitoring you.  Here are just a few ways that we monitor our competitors:

• Subscribing to competitors newsletters and RSS feeds
• Google Alerts
• Visiting our competitors site
• Staying active in forum communities

Of course our techniques are geared towards internet businesses but for the most part almost all businesses are probably online one way or another. The interent has made monitoring your competition relatively simple with  numerous portals to get your information.

They’re watching you.  Are you watching them?

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