Investigating and gaining the
competitive knowledge of others is one of an
essential undertaking that all businesses today must embark on.
Businesses today must arm themselves with the absolute understanding of everything
that encompasses their markets, and especially of their competitors. Everything
that follows will serve to guide you in successfully gathering and analyzing intelligent
information about your competitors so that when used it will put you on top.
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| The Art of Competitor Snooping |
If your
competitors are slyly attracting your customers away from you, there’s probably
a very good reason for that to be happening. It may be simply something you are
not doing. Or, it may be something you are doing that they simply are not
doing. Either way, if you do not know or understand what this is, it will make
things very difficult in getting to the top.
Losing business is never fun, and it
can be very frustrating trying to keep up with your competitors in today’s
market. But, the one thing that you have to do today; is snoop on your
competition. Your future competitive success and future decisions will require
it.
To begin, you will need to put your
best minds to work on this research. The perfect type of individuals suited for
this task will
be those who are clever enough to see through a con artist’s bag of tricks. That is because marketers
are extremely talented, and they possess the gift of word magic. Talent and
ability to analyze a message for language usage; admissions; omissions; meanings; and deception
are some of the highly required attributes. But, I will show you how to gather this
intelligent information and then decipher that information to determine exactly
what your competitors are really saying or not saying. Understanding how your
competitors communicate in their messages will help you understand how you can
adapt and prevail.
Your Competitors:
Let’s begin by making a list of your
top five direct competitors. We are currently in the Social/Mobile media era
today, so everything we need to research will most likely be available on the
internet. Go ahead and list all five competitors on a separate piece of paper.
Start at the top, because we will be filling up each sheet of paper rather
thoroughly. Perform a search engine search of each competitor. Record on the
sheets of paper the HTML page title that is listed directly over their business
website address. Also, record their HTML description tag; it is the short
sentence directly under their business website address. Be sure to record
everything as they have presented it, and as you read it. Accuracy is always an
important aspect of analysis.
Collecting the Data:
Let’s go ahead and analyze your
competitors HTML tags for some pre-practice, and then we can move on to much bigger
things. To start, you will need to count the total number of each word found in
each separate sentence that appears in the HTML page title and the HTML
description tag. Be sure to record all of your findings with proper labels next
to the sentence being tested. Next, we want to count the syllables within each
word and sentence. For example; there are three syllables in the word
leadership, (Lead-er-ship). We count that word as three and continue counting
each syllable in each word until the end of the sentence. We now want to count
each “personal word” found in a sentence. Personal words are the human interest
aspect of a sentence or message. They will appear as names of people, and
personal pronouns like he (him), she
(her), I (me), and you (they), -or- us (we), ours (mine). Count every word that
directly relates to people. Go ahead and record your total number of personal
words at the end of each sentence. After that, we want to research the verb
tense within each sentence. Tense means time
in grammar. The tense of a verb tells you when the action of the verb takes
place. There are six main tenses, and we
are interested in all of them. Understanding the language of the message
related to a time reference can tell us a lot. This will be explained more
thoroughly later on but for now record
each verb tense for each sentence. For example,
A verb expresses the main action or
state of being in a sentence. For a sentence like; I ride my bike every day. Ride; would be the verb tense of the
sentence and listed as “Present Tense.” Rode; would be listed as “Past Tense,’’
will ride as “Future Tense,” have ridden as “Present Perfect Tense,” had ridden
as “Past Perfect Tense,” and will have ridden as “Future Perfect Tense.” Each
tense tells us something different. Determine what tense your sample sentence
has and record it on your paper. For the final data
collection, we will count the confidence words in each sentence. These
words will be strong powerful words such as leading, exact, precise, or top
performing. Let’s go forward now and take a look at how we decipher all of this
valuable information for our benefit.
Syllables per Sentence:
We will start our evaluation by
dividing the total number of syllables found in one sentence by the total
number of words in that sentence. This will give you the average number of syllables
per word. The objective here is to determine readability. The more syllables per
word simply mean the harder it will be to
read. The least amount of syllables in each sentence the better, it will create
a smoother transition from word to word, and will make it much more inviting
for your audience to read.
Personal Words per Sentence:
To determine the average personal
word usage per sentence; divide the total number of personal words found in one
sentence by the total number of words in that sentence. This will determine how
much human interest appeal has been crafted into each sentence. The goal is the
more the better. Human interest is one of the most appealing aspects to include
into any message. So make sure you have a lot, at least more than your
competitors do.
Verb Tense per Sentence:
At this point, we are simply looking to determine the sentence language.
What was the writer really saying? It is important to read carefully and listen
to everything a message is saying. People’s words will often betray them and
identify hidden facts. People normally mean exactly what they say, and they say
exactly what they mean, in a very specific kind of way. Present tense is the
tense that usually will be the only tense to make any real sense. Wow, if that wasn't
a riddle. What that means is this; present tense speaks the truth, it is
happening, it isn’t something that may have happened, or we hope will happen, but,
it simply happened. If you find a past tense sentence, be suspicious of that
statement. For it probably did not happen, or somebody is simply trying to use
some fluff to present the message, but they can’t, because it is stressful being
deceptive. The thing is; is that people normally tell the truth, to do
otherwise would create some level of stress on a person, that stress can be
observed as deception within the sentence tense. If it is believable, then the tense will normally be the element to determine
that.
Confidence words per Sentence:
Here you want to determine the
average usage of powerful confidence words per sentence. Divide the total number
of confidence words found in each sentence by the total number of words per
sentence. Who wants to read weak sentences; weak sentences do not attract
people to them. The goal here is to have as many confidence words as possible
per sentence. Make your sentences exciting, important and strong. Adding product/service
benefits into your sentence as confidence words
will really send your messages soaring.
Remember when I told you that your
prior work was just a pre-practice, well, get ready for it because here comes the real practice. No, I am just joking with you, you have already performed
most of the hard work. Everything that follows will be fun and very
enlightening for you. You have already learned that it is important to remove
as many syllables as possible from your message sentences for easy reading. You
have also learned that adding as many personal words and confidence words to
each sentence; adds incredible value. I
am confident you also understand how sentence language of verb tense can
present some misleading or credible information. So be sure to write your
messages in the present tense. Anything else just leads to misunderstanding.
Final Research, the Website:
For the rest of your research; all
you will need to do is enter each competitor website and perform the same
analysis. But this time; you will select the first paragraph listed at the
beginning of each separate website page. You must sample a consistent number of
sentences from each page and of each website. Example: You analyze the first
four sentences found within the first paragraph of each page and of each
website. It must be the same across the board to receive an accurate analysis. To
continue your analysis, all you need to do is first count each word in each of
the four sentences you are analyzing. Divide the total number of words by the
total number of sentences. This will give you an average sentence word length.
For readability purposes; the shorter the sentence; the better it is for the
reader. Perform the same data checks of
syllables per sentence, personal words per sentence, confidence words per
sentence, and verb tense per sentence. You will be dividing everything by using
your combined four sentence findings by the total number of words from those
four sentences. You can either use the average sentence length of the four sentences or can use the actual count, Just
make sure you use the same variable for
each test. This will give you your averages. Once you have completed a thorough
analysis of your competitors, you should perform the same tests on your
business material. You can also expand this by searching for competitor advertisement
messages on social media sites, or other retail sites, etc…. Any business
message you can find from your competitor will provide added valuable clues.
This competitor analysis method was
developed by Outstory Public Relations Group. The method in its entirety consists
of many other technical variables that we confidentially left out of this
writing, simply because they are proprietary to our research practices. But, have
no doubt; this information provided to you will generate some very valuable
information concerning your competitors. If you adhere to the analysis principles
within your own message crafting, your messages will be very readable,
powerful, and full of human interest. Add to that, the benefits of product/services, confidence words, and the appeal
of making your readers feel important, and you will have created the best of
messages.
For
more information or to develop your personal public relations campaign plans:
Contact:
Outstory
Public Relations Group
A
Modern Public Relations Agency
Solving Problems,
Changing Attitudes, Creating Understanding, and Influencing Behaviors
Outstory
PR Group solves business and public relations problems. We serve organizations
of for-profit, non-profit, governmental authority, and well-known persons. We
develop and manage creative problem-solving campaigns for businesses small and
large, both nationally and globally.
Call
Outstory PR Group Today: 704-904-0682
Website:
http://outstoryprgorup.com
Shawn
Stoffel
Shawn@outstoryprgroup.com
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