How inconsistent competitor monitoring hurts product strategy

If you’re already a CompetitiveWatch blog reader, you’ll know that we are strongly interested in competitor monitoring since we are developing a competitor monitoring automation software for product managers! If you know us, skip to the next session, otherwise read on!
CompetitiveWatch concentrates on tackling the competitor monitoring problem because we are persuaded that solving it is critical for Product Managers and SaaS owners to improve the products they run. That is because more often than not, competitor monitoring is overlooked, and therefore getting better at it, more often, is a massive opportunity to make better decisions which will eventually lead to a better product.

We’ve already written about the fact that competitor monitoring can be completely overlooked. In this post, we will look into how existing but inconsistent competitor monitoring is better than nothing, but may end up disappointing at best, and detrimental in some cases.

Good competitor monitoring plays a big role in product strategy

A good ongoing competitor monitoring effort can lead to shaping product decisions to the full extent of the context. In particular, conducting regular competitor monitoring will help identify trends, emerging needs, and technologies, or new features among your competitors faster and more efficiently than when you’re scoping your next big feature and doing a one-off review of your competitors. Importantly, conducting sporadic competitor analysis is better than nothing, but you’re missing out on how competitors have evolved since the last time you performed the analysis. Not to mention the obvious fact that the more you wait, the more work there is to update your competitors' data.

If you want to get better at monitoring competitors, there is no secret: you gotta do it more often!

But that’s not all. If 90% of the time you spend on competitor monitoring is data gathering, this leaves very little to the actual competitor analysis part, and even less for making strategic product decisions based on that learning. A good competitor monitoring practice aims at limiting the heavy lifting, annoying and time-consuming data gathering and compilation aspects to leave more time for the important bit. The bit that cannot and shouldn’t really be automated: your product strategy. That is why good competitor monitoring – effortless, up-to-date, to the point – is key.

Common causes of inconsistent competitor monitoring

But of course, as said earlier, if you’re running a product you’re probably reading similar articles about hundreds of other topics, each highlighting how important they are and how much you should spend more time on them to get better results (e.g., SEO, content marketing, product design, onboarding flow, churn prevention, you name it!). So, what do you choose?

As often, and it’s pretty normal, you’ll prioritize whatever makes the most noise (customer support, that new feature, that outdated system always raising alarms), and that leads to inconsistent competitor monitoring because competitor monitoring is never perceived as an urgent task. It’s really something that you can let drift forever and never feel you’re suffering from not doing it (that is until the moment you’re not understanding why churn is increasing with users going to a competitor).

More often than not, competitor monitoring is limited to when you’re preparing a new feature or updating your pricing or marketing material (website, social media/content marketing). It’s good but not good enough since your primary goal is to get that piece of content out, not to perform a thorough competitive analysis. So usually in this case, competitor monitoring is essentially a sanity check just to make sure what you’re doing registers well enough in the overall competitive landscape (e.g., pricing the feature right, having the right feature set, a name that resonates within your target audience, etc). As a result, you may end up with a few data points updated in your competitor data, but nothing consistent, leaving your competitor data in a heterogeneous state (some data up to date, some old data, and gaps).

Again, that’s better than nothing, but will probably mean that next time you want a thorough pass, everything will have to be checked so that you have an updated and comparable understanding of all your competitors.

Something else that is dangerous is to be too confident in your own product. We believe it’s very important to be more into your product than into your competitors’, there is no question about that, but as a product person, it’s not acceptable to ignore competition entirely just because a product works well or dominates its category. Competitors are a goldmine in terms of insights and ideas and not using the data they produce is simply ludicrous. So, even if you feel your product is amazing, take competitor monitoring seriously as you never know what can come up – in fact, if you are leading the market, chances that you won’t be the one disrupting yourself, and watching competitors become even more important.

To conclude on some of the causes for inconsistent monitoring, it also happens that monitoring is done thoroughly by a person (rather than via a tool) because watching competitors is more top of mind for them. This results in good and up-to-date competitor data being collected and made available to the rest of the business, in often underappreciated ways. So underappreciated and misunderstood that when the person leaves the business or must change their focus (e.g., when being promoted or moved to another team), competitor monitoring will not be done as well, and will slowly enter a state of decay until someone realizes it’s not done right and remediate the situation.

Consequences of inconsistent competitor monitoring

Inconsistent competitor monitoring can lead to:

• Weaker product positioning: given competitors, and new entrants in particular will likely have checked your marketing material, chances are their content will be aligned or better than yours, which in turn can weaken your messaging in the eyes of prospective customers.
• Missed opportunities: you will not miss major market changes by not doing your competitor analysis thoroughly, but you will miss smaller, incremental changes. It’s always best to try to be first, and benefit from that advantage than being always on the back foot.
• Pricing disadvantages: in general, competitors' pricing awareness is high, even if there is no structured competitor monitoring in place
• Growth reduction and customer churn: if competitors are releasing features or positioning themselves better against your target audience, you may miss opportunities to convert leads, or worse, you may lose customers to the competition.

The more you develop an understanding of your competitors and how they position themselves, and the features they offer, the easier it will be to identify trends and gaps for your product to address.

But more importantly, if you don’t monitor competition thoroughly, chances are that some of your competitors are watching you better than you do! By not actively running competitor monitoring, you essentially do not protect against others as much as you should.
Your product leaks important data through product documentation (e.g., help center) or product marketing material on your website, offering competitors a trove of insights about your strategy, your feature set, and even what’s coming next. It would be a shame not to create all this content from the perspective of your customers and users (definitely keep doing it), but make sure to play on a level field when it comes to exploiting this content. Your competitors may do just that to prepare their next product update!

Competitor monitoring automation as the solution

One of the few ways to mitigate this situation is to automate competitive monitoring.
Although automation tools will not give you everything you need, they will help a lot in getting the base data as you sleep (or work on something else!). Another way is to schedule competitive analysis but we all know what that means; It works for a few months, then it’s getting skipped and finally completely forgotten.

Automating competitor monitoring is an obvious way to improve the relevancy of your competitive analysis. By watching your competitors more often, and automatically, you ensure you have data at hand that is always up to date and ready to be leveraged. You also ensure that you know about changes on your competitors' touchpoints as soon as they occur, avoiding getting surprised during a customer call for instance.

In the end, we’ve seen that not monitoring competitors often enough can lead to gaps in your understanding of the competitive landscape. Every other team you compete against is trying to ship often and fine-tune their messaging. It’s pretty much impossible to keep up without some form of automation. Pretty much like you have product analytics plugged into your web or mobile apps to better understand how your customers use your product and be proactive in the solutions you offer them, you want to achieve a similar level of automatic competitive insights. Turns out this is exactly what we are doing, so if you’re interested, try CompetitiveWatch today or just keep reading our blog for more content on the topic.