Real-Time Competition Tracking & Research

I’ve noticed a few companies that offer a service that will notify you about your competition’s marketing efforts to better understand a marketing strategy for your business.  By scouring local and national newspapers and magazines, they can identify your competing business’s advertisements, document all the details about them, and update you in real-time anytime something is found.  It’s a great way to keep up on what your competition is doing, but how is it possible to keep tabs on every printed media outlet.  Especially for a national brand with thousands of advertisements at any given time.

A few companies I’ve come across will actually search newspapers for ads, scan them to digital files, and report them back to the customer.  I would presume this is done for local advertisers with a smaller scope, but still effective nonetheless.

It’s easy to track anything printed online about your competition, and to keep up on what their doing on the marketing front, but for things like local car dealerships, it’s more difficult to keep track of ever-changing ads always being printed in local newspapers.  By having a staff literally scouring the papers searching, you can keep track of all the changes as they happen.

By incorporating SMS, Email and other notification options into the reporting process, a business owner could keep in constant contact with what his competition is doing at all times, and how he can best formulate a marketing plan that will out-do them all.

Again, I’m sure someone already offers a service like this, so let me know if you’ve heard of one.  I think it’s a great idea and would be highly useful for someone starting and growing a business, especially in the competitive local level.