Keep your Friends Close and Your Competition Closer this Holiday.
This holiday I hope you are gathered with family and friends. I suggest keeping your friends close, but your competition even closer from this week on.
That doesn’t mean you’ll be passing the cranberry sauce across the table or splitting a wishbone with your business rivals. But you should be actively monitoring your competition’s marketing.
It’s simple to do and you can even delegate it to an associate or intern. Follow these easy steps:
- Sign up to receive emails from all your competitors. Use a personal, not a business address.
- Follow their social media profiles.
- Visit their site at least every day over the holiday weekend.
- Do a search on Google and Bing for a top product you have in common.
- Make note of what you see. You can do it quickly by taking screenshots and saving emails and screenshots to a folder. Don’t spend time analyzing it yet.
Should you be reactionary and change your holiday marketing that’s going out this week in response? No. 90% of the time the answer is no. Just capture the marketing. Save it. File it away.
We’ll revisit it in early 2018.
I’ll share a post with you then on revisiting and evaluating last year’s results. That’s when we’ll pull out the competitor’s campaigns and take a look and have a good discussion about what it means for your 2018 marketing. Until then…Happy Holidays!