subject: Who's who in your competition. The B2B Influencers and How to Leverage Them [print this page] Who's who in your competitionWho's who in your competition. The B2B Influencers and How to Leverage Them
Often times over the years I have, on numerous occasion, discovered- or rather, just become strikingly aware of the fact that while building and marketing online we usually have little to no info on exactly who we are up against. I mean it's crazy. You'd think that'd be something we'd track but I guess we just became occupied with other things or never really paid it any heed as we forged on with the company and marketing developments. If you are a CEO or VP of digital marketing do you really know how many active competitors you have going up against you in your specific vertical? Do you know who the b2b influencers are?
We had very little info and it was costly to track any more on our competition and when we went out to do fundraisers and generate some cashflow we built a matrix that showed our direct competitors but if we had our heads on straight we should have been tracking them week by week. Competition is what drives success and innovation. Without knowing our competition how could we have been successful and innovative? How can we define our influencer formula. Here are some questions to ask yourself when you are scouting competition and gathering intel. Do you know how many active competitors you have? Who are the major influencers at your competitors and how do they rank? Where do they hunt? What are the war politics- friends and foes of them and us? Where can you effectively spend marketing money online?
To answer these questions usually requires a massive amount of resources. You have to go through blog after blog after website after post and harvest mass quantities of data and then parse that crap and analyze it and man oh man it is quite a big bite.
What I'm trying to say is, you can track all your metrics and try to measure that impact but how can you if you don't know how influential each factor is?
You have to start spending more on researching who are the key components of your marketing online.
