Monitor your competitors’ marketing tactics without devoting a lot of time and money with advice from the Entrepreneur.com article “6 Ways to Track Your Competition’s Marketing Strategy.” Knowing what your competition is doing is vital for developing the right marketing approach for your own business. You’ll gain some valuable knowledge that will benefit your own efforts, and identify marketing and operational facets that you can exploit. Try these approaches:

1. Sign up for Google Alerts. Add the names of all your competitors to your Google Alerts listings to get free daily or weekly notifications of any news, blogs, video or discussion mentioning them. It’s also a good idea to get alerts for general industry topics.
2. Connect with competitors on social media. Liking and following your competition on various social media is another easy and free way to keep up with what they’re doing. Also, following some national brands that may not even be in your area is a good way to find some strategies that your local competition hasn’t thought of yet.
3. Enroll in your competition’s mailings and promotions. Register for their direct mail and email marketing campaigns to see how the competition’s offers compare to yours.
4. Become a secret shopper. To get a better feel of the competition’s actual operations, personally visit their location, or have someone else to do it for you. Note what the retail environment is like, how they approach customer service and sales, and what products and services they’re really pushing.
5. Visit their trade show booths. See what competitors are offering at local bridal shows and other events. And at larger industry events, try to gain a feel for what some of the bigger chains are all about.
6. Monitor your competitors’ websites. Regularly monitor updates to the competition’s websites, looking for content as well as new functionalities that you may want to consider adding.

Click here to read the article from Entrepreneur.com.